dubstep
theartsdesk
This round-up of the freshest new music and most well-ripened classics we could find in November features everything from Miles Davis to Kraftwerk, Norah Jones to the actual Pope, via Toms Petty and Waits, Dubstep and related bass-driven electronica from Portugal, Angola, Denmark and Tanzania, and the soundtrack to Life On Earth. Our reviewers this month are Robert Sandall, Peter Culshaw, Adam Sweeting, Joe Muggs, Thomas H Green, Howard Male and Marcus O'Dair.
CD of the Month
Tom Waits, Glitter and Doom Live (Anti)
by Robert Sandall
When I saw Tom Waits at the Hammersmith Odeon (now Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Rihanna, Russian Roulette (Mercury)
I strongly suggest anyone who believes the sound of US mainstream pop is somehow homogenised and safe take another look at the current charts. Standing over them like android colossi are Lady Gaga and Rihanna - who not only look exactly as pop stars were always going to look "in the future", but sound apocalyptically insane. This song is in the standard melodramatic modern power-ballad style of writer/producer Ne-Yo, but the combination of Rihanna's piercing voice and the lyrics that circle in the non-specific manner of nightmares around death, obsession, Read more ...
joe.muggs
There are occasional days when the Royal Festival Hall really feels like the people's palace it was always meant to be – and yesterday, with its free concert of live improvisation mixed with dubstep and electronica in the RFH bar, was absolutely one of them. Rave kids, pensioners, parents with babes in arms and some particularly energetic school-age children all proved that given the right context music the border between “challenging” music and entertainment is more porous than some might like to believe.
And it was rather impressive how challenging the curators of the event were willing Read more ...
joe.muggs
Browsing through various past reviews of The xx, two adjectives which occur time and again are “fragile” and “tentative”. These are wrong – but understandable. Certainly the young south-west London band (the members have all turned 20 in recent months), habitually clad entirely in black and quietly spoken if they speak at all, give the superficial impression of diffidence – and the construction of their music is skeletal to say the least, never more so than last night playing as a three-piece with keyboard/guitar player Baria Qureshi absent (whether temporarily or permanently was not made Read more ...
joe.muggs
For some people, dubstep has an identity problem. Its suburban origins and recent global spread, its propensity for hybridity, the relatively genial nature of the scene, and perhaps worst of all its popularity with – whisper it – students lead some commentators to regard it with suspicion. A common attack is to compare it unfavourably with either its antecedent jungle (the wild polyrhythmic early-mid 1990s precursor to drum & bass), or its first cousin grime (the fearsomely jagged, lyrically ultra-violent sound of London's pirate radio stations in the first part of this decade): next to Read more ...
joe.muggs
Glasgow-born, south London resident Steve Goodman – better known to discerning lovers of modern music as Kode 9 – has a unique and privileged position in relation to the ever-shifting UK dance music underground. In the mid 90s he formed part of the slightly cultish Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) founded by Sadie Plant and Nick Land at the University of Warwick, where he gained a PhD in philosophy.The CCRU cooked up a rich gumbo of postmodern theory, situationism, science fiction and HP Lovecraft, occultism, rave music (particularly jungle / drum & bass) and high-tech Read more ...