dubstep
Matthew Wright
Polar Bear have been re-shaping the musical landscape (the experimental jazz end of it, at least), since 2004, and after a few years’ hibernation after 2010, the creature is back in rude health, this year’s album hot on the heels of last year’s Mercury-nominated In Each And Every One. Identifying the group’s generic mix feels increasingly daunting, as new elements are constantly layered onto the existing work. Leafcutter John’s electronica have always been an important part of the mix; here, their role is a more subdued, but crucial ambient underpinning, as rattly dub beats do more of the Read more ...
joe.muggs
The past year or two have seen a staggering return to popularity of house and techno music in the UK. For the first time since the mid-1990s, records which have grown steadily through club play over many months are breaking through into the charts on a regular basis – but just as exciting and significant are those records that remain resolutely underground. Because it's there that you start to see the real reason for the longevity of these sounds – both well over a quarter of a century old.Take Livity Sound, for example, a trio of young Bristol-based producers – Pev, Kowton and Asusu – with Read more ...
joe.muggs
The thought of attending a dance music conference in Amsterdam frankly gave me the creeping horrors. I'd never been to Amsterdam Dance Event before, and the combination of DJ egos, business hustling and relentless partying through hundreds of club venues in a renownedly liberal city presented so many opportunities for both boredom and complete catastrophe, it just seemed like a fool's errand. But this, of course, wasn't fair. The dance music business is far more interesting than rumour and memories of the ego-bloated nineties superclub era would have it, and Amsterdam is a delightful place to Read more ...
joe.muggs
When drum'n'bass emerged from hardcore rave's interactions with London's pirate radio culture, 20-odd years ago, it created some of the most radical grassroots music ever to come out of the British Isles. It came in such a white heat explosion of underground, transforming repeatedly and rapidly through different iterations its first few years, that nobody could have predicted that it would reach a commercial high-point two decades on. Yet here we are with the likes of DJ Fresh creating chart toppers, d'n'b's top rank of DJs still touring the world to arena crowds, and a whole range of new Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
AlunaGeorge deserve to be lauded as one of this year’s great singles bands solely on the strength of “Attracting Flies” and “White Noise”, their collaboration with electro outfit Disclosure. The London duo - featuring the purring vocals of Aluna Francis and George Reid’s sassy production - have been gaining attention in all the right places over the past 12 months, which gives their delayed debut a lot to live up to.That the big, distorted hook and kiss-off chorus of "...Flies", so perfect in its subtlety, are the catchiest things on Body Music is a little misleading. It means that the first Read more ...
joe.muggs
“Formulaic” is all too frequently used pejoratively in reviews – but from minuets to minimalism, Bo Diddley to drum'n'bass, finding a formula that works and sticking to it has produced some of the finest music in human history. Liverpool-born producer E.m.m.a. might not yet be in the history-changing category, but she's certainly found a simple and distinctive recipe and her explorations of its possibilities are currently extremely fruitful.In essence, E.m.m.a. takes the rugged grooves of UK pirate radio, and adds an extra layer of melody and harmony which connects them back into the much Read more ...
joe.muggs
Drawing connections between the far margins and the relative mainstream always leaves you in a difficult position, as it invites judgement from different groups with very different criteria. And the duo of Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power put themselves in that position more than most.For all the outré edginess of their name, their occult imagery, their presentation of their music as 10-minute noise-drone epics and their claims to be “aggressive, malevolent, apocalyptic,” it was not as great a surprise as it might seem that they were selected by Danny Boyle and Underworld to soundtrack Read more ...
joe.muggs
The part-Japanese Brit Maya Jane Coles displays elaborate asymmetric hair, interesting piercings and enormous tattoos in her moody photoshoots, makes sounds that are uniformly smooth and high-gloss, and has a sonic palette that takes in populist trance, chillout and straight-up pop music as well as more nerd-cred underground sounds. And in an era of techno that's been dominated by Berlin-centric cosmopolitanisms – by sophisticated internationalist crowds with creative haircuts and intricately-knotted scarves as well as sometimes tediously tasteful musical minimalism – it'd be very easy to Read more ...
James Williams
The Meltdown Festival has always been a fascinating proposition, getting a living legend in their field to curate their own personal festival line-up, and present all of their idiosyncratic choices to London in the refined and retro-futuristic surroundings of the Royal Festival Hall. It throws up some fascinating curation, and while Yoko Ono has clearly had a hand in presenting some of the more agit-pop and esoteric acts on the bill this year (think Peaches, the ferocious Bo Ningen and a newly reformed Cibo Matto) it is clearly her son Sean Lennon who has taken it upon himself to populate the Read more ...
James Williams
It was a carnival-like atmosphere and a packed house for the transatlantic trendsetters Major Lazer in Camden. Recent show reports suggested a more maximal and bombastic vibe from Diplo and his current sidekicks Jillionaire and Walshy Fire, but while the addition of these two stalwarts of the Caribbean music scene would suggest that the show was to be a faithful homage to the vibes of a Kingston dancehall or Trinidadian J’ouvert, this was sadly not the case.Support came from hometown hero Ms Dynamite, whose set was high on both energy and great songs. Crowd favourite "Wile Out" set the tone Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Benga is at a crossroads. Like many who arose from the dubstep scene, the 26-year-old is finding the term an albatross that’s hard to throw off. Sure, he was one of the Croydon originators of a sound that now dominates Transatlantic pop, a sound which is the basis for his national radio show and his band, Magnetic Man, but the term has become restrictive, too often tired shorthand for a lack of imagination among his lesser peers. The new album, then, is called Chapter II, although it’s his third, presumably to emphasize that we’re witnessing a rapid and drastic evolution.The truth is it’s no Read more ...
joe.muggs
Alison Moyet is not just one of the great voices in pop, she's one of the most likeable figures. A brilliantly no-nonsense character, she consistently skewers music industry pomposity, laughs in the face of the expectations the world has of female artists, and generally does precisely what she wants while retaining an abnormally acute sense of the absurdness of it all.All of which seems to have fed into the minutes, which is a fabulously immature album – in the sense that this is clearly a singer-songwriter having nothing but fun in the studio, like a kid in a candy shop. With production Read more ...