electronica
Thomas H. Green
If popular music is dead and done and there’s nowhere left to go, rising duo 100 gecs, from St Louis, Missouri, are here to prove there’s still deranged fun to be had cannibalising the corpse. The second album from the pair, both in their late twenties and with a background in electronic production, is a post-modern assault, garish and unapologetic, part satire (possibly), part avant-punk noisiness, and part wilfully infantile and ridiculous. While not aiming to be "pleasant" listening, the sheer don’t-give-a-fuck-ness is invigorating.Dylan Brady and Laura Les clearly have a thing about what Read more ...
Tom Carr
It’s easy to forget in the age of TikTok and trending that “virality” doesn’t always cement a lasting mainstream awareness. This can be said of M83, the cinematic music project started in 2001 by French musician Anthony Gonzales.A symphonic blending of pop and electronica with smatterings of dance and indie rock, Gonzales brought M83 into the popular music conscience with its third album in 2011, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. It was heralded with the irresistibly dancey lead single “Midnight City” that was unavoidable for a time, being used in countless trailers and tv shows.But in the years Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
According to the press release for Karin Dreijer’s third album as Fever Ray, its completion was preceded by many hours of therapy with the result new things are known. Amongst them that Dreijer “can be struck by despair but also by the big feeling of love and awe”. Dreijer declares “I know what love is and I want to show you”. Radical Romantics is the result of these realisations.However, despite the seeming openness getting to Dreijer is difficult, not least as the person is hidden behind so total a stylisation it could be anyone beneath the make-up, cloaked by the artifice. Nothing under Read more ...
Joe Muggs
One of the greatest things a musical artist can achieve is world building. That is, creating a distinctive type of environment, language and coordinates for everything they do such that the listener is forced to come into the musical world, and to engage with it on its own terms rather than by comparison. It’s something that musicians as diverse as Prince, Kate Bush and Wu-Tang Clan achieve have achieved, likewise plenty of more underground creators too.Belgian polymath Marc Hollander has achieved this in particularly special way. Over more than 45 years, he’s built his sonic world not only Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis knocked it out of the park with the vibrant, eclectic global pop of debut Isolation, one of the best albums of 2018.Since then, she's gained career traction via guest appearances with Gorillaz, Little Dragon, Mac Miller, and others, and consolidated things with a new, determinedly downtempo direction on the Spanish-language album Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios), and its breakout tune, “Telepatía” (nigh-on-800 million streams on Spotify). Her third album continues the trajectory, but mostly in English, a stoned bedroom affair of warm, squidgy, modern Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the first theartsdesk on Vinyl of 2023 and it’s another whopper, over 8000 words and a range of musical styles that defies genre or categorization, from the most cutting edge sounds to boxsets of golden vintage pop. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHJimmy Edgar Liquids Heaven (Innovative Leisure)Detroit technoid art maverick Jimmy Edgar’s latest indulges in pure, welcome electronic ear-fritzing, a place where R&B has it out with Aphex Twin or Sam Gellaitry’s most twisted constructions, and, most entertainingly, more than half an ear on pop. Edgar's latest album is mostly a series of Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Ageing boppers may bristle at the idea of a dance album where the average track length is three minutes. Yet this, Sonny “Skrillex” Moore’s first solo album since his debut nine years ago, is the most groove-based thing he’s done. It’s certainly a long way from its predecessor, 2014’s Recess, which came as the EDM and commercial dubstep waves were really cresting in the States and – while its tracks were actually slightly longer – really pushed the high-spectacle, instant gratification hyperactivity of those styles to the limit, together with noisiness fitting with his previous life as a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Orbital, one of the great electronic dance acts, had a run of albums during the 1990s that encapsulate that decade in the UK (at least, for those willing to ignore the historical revisionism around tired, retro-tastic Britpop by the same media "arbiters of taste" who invented it).Those five albums remain gorgeous. The run came to an end with the flabby The Altogether album in 2001, featuring a vocal by David Gray among other unlovable things. Their latest album, though, is their first to feature a welter of guest vocalists. It could have been a disaster, but it’s not.The 21st century has seen Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In this context, what’s named “diamond road” is a metaphor for staying on course rather than, as the lyrics of the song “Diamond Road” put it, letting yourself go or sprawling all over the floor. Follow this route and life won’t be a mess.Barefoot On Diamond Road is the third album from the Netherlands’s Amber Arcades, the recording persona of Annelotte de Graaf. Away from music, her work as a lawyer has brought a role in the international war crimes tribunal. Previously, her music was a form of Eighties-ish indie with touches of shoegazing. Beyond her glass-like voice, guitar was a main Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s the sound of the sun. Panda Bear – born Noah Lennox – is singing in a voice with the purity and warmth of Brian Wilson. Beside him, Sonic Boom – Pete Kember – has more of a growl, a timbre which might make announcements in a railway station. The contrast works well. Sweet and slightly sour.And, in another way, it is the sound of the sun. Kember and Lennox both live in balmy Portugal and here they are in Aalborg, at the top end of Denmark at the Northern Winter Beat festival. It’s freezing out, with the Jutland wind coming off the Limfjord a few streets away bringing it down to a level Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Waeve is the debut album from life partners Rose Elinor Dougall (long ago in The Pipettes) and Graham Coxon (of Blur), working with James Ford (of Simian Mobile Disco), who co-produces and provides occasional bits of instrumentation. Their album is a woozy thing, underpinned with analogue synths and elegant Krautrockin’ rhythms, emanating a mystic melancholia. The sound is luscious but the whole could maybe do with a little more oomph.Perhaps that’s not the point. Perhaps this listener’s opinion has been skewed by expectations based on the garage sneer of their great debut single, last Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Let me start by being pretentious and self-referential, spending ages doing that rather than reviewing the album. My theory is that most male music journalists aged between 45-65, like me, don’t PROPERLY love the music of 21st century female pop stars – Gaga, Dua Lipa, Beyoncé, Britney, MØ, Kesha, whoever – for reasons that are idiomatic. In fact, possibly most males of that age, full stop (and a good few women too).They cannot get beyond the form, beyond timbre, beyond cultural notions of authenticity or lack of it connected to the innate sound, rather than the song. If the same song Read more ...