psychedelia
Thomas H. Green
With December upon us theartsdesk on Vinyl has been kept busy with sacks full of fantastic plastic, so much so that we’re saving the poppier stuff for a pre-Christmas blow-out in a week’s time, so watch out for that. In the meantime, here’s a wild cross-section of music that takes in Norwegian avant-garde death metal, Cuban reggae and frantic Syrian techno-folk bangin', along with an enormous amount else. There aren’t many who can say that, but we can, so dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHMargo Price All American Made (Thirdman)Rising Nashville country star Margo Price plays country’n’western and has Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Nick Mulvey (b.1984) is a singer-songwriter who draws from a refreshing and unexpected palette of global roots music, modernist classical and electronica. His second album, Wake Up Now, was released earlier this year, and showcases a man on a quest, an artist who regards music as a direct expression of spirit. Along its course, it contains some of 2017’s finest, most intriguing music.Mulvey grew up in Cambridge, studied music in Cuba, and became part of pop-jazz experimental group Portico Quartet while studying ethnomusicology at London’s School of African and Oriental Studies. He played the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★ The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary thingsArcade Fire: Everything Now ★★★★★ A joyous pop album that depicts a world in tragic freefallAutarkic: I Love You, Go Away ★★★★★ Tel Aviv producer Nadav Spiegel's latest collection is a triumph of head and heartBrian Eno: Reflection ★★★★★ Slow-motion cascades Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In early 1965, Birmingham’s The Moody Blues topped the British charts with a forceful reinterpretation of Bessie Banks’ R&B ballad “Go Now”. In early 1968, after some line-up changes and a radical musical rethink, they hit 19 with “Nights in White Satin”. Although as moody as “Go Now”, this was a different Moody Blues.“Nights in White Satin” is a staple of oldies radio and, as such, has been robbed of much of its power to astonish. Nonetheless, it was bold. As was its parent album Days of Future Passed. At one stroke, The Moody Blues invented orchestral pop and pointed the way to Read more ...
joe.muggs
It seems to be the season for light entertainers to show us their musical chops, with Nick Knowles, Bardley Walsh and Jason Manford all doing their level best to prove that they are All Round Entertainters. Matt Berry, however, provides a rather different twist on the comedian-troubadour trope. Though he's best known for his appearances in the likes of The Mighty Boosh, House of Fools, Toast of London and so forth, he's already several albums deep in a musical career on a variety of extremely credible labels, touching on various flavours of psychedelia. The real surprise, given Berry's Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The autumnal release deluge is upon us. Vinyl’s thriving and writhing. Raise a glass to it. Do it. However, records that, in another month, would have been reviewed here, music that would have been in the ALSO WORTHY OF MENTION section, has been unfairly passed over. Thus theartsdesk on Vinyl didn’t have space for the likes of Sixties-flavoured popsters The Dials, lone Nine Inch Nail Alessando Cortini, “space mermaid” Johanna Glaza, Dutch-Belgian jazz trio De Beren Gieren, London electro noiseniks Fever Dream, Spanish rhythm’n’blues maestro Julián Maeso, retro soul revivalists D’troit Soul Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
These days Peter Perrett doesn’t rely on the songs of his late Seventies/early Eighties band, The Only Ones, to hold his audience’s attention. At 65, looking and sounding healthier than he has done in years, he’s on a vital late-career creative roll. At the start of his first encore he even plays a new, unreleased song, “War Plan Red”, giving vent to fiery infuriation with global politicking, his band shadowed in ominous scarlet lighting. He may be renowned, primarily, for songs of romance and dissolution, but with lyrics such as “The so-called free world stands for evil incarnate” he clearly Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Possibly named after a variety of magic mushroom, left-field Glaswegian six-piece Golden Teacher have been turning out their very strange idea of party music since 2013. Initially they did so for local freak-fostering collective Optimo but have since appeared via various outlets, finally ending up on their own eponymous label. Their sound is electronic but also organic, with percussion that rolls and sometimes has a touch of the more polyrhythmic, advanced drum circle about it. Don’t let the words “drum circle” put you off for Golden Teacher are an invigorating proposition.Heavily stewed in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dave Porter has a question. He wants to know where clouds go. “After they pass by, are they just like people, that go on and then die?” The figurative bit between his teeth, he wonders if small clouds “are lonely, like you and I? Do they just go to rain, or is that a tear from their eye? Sometimes I feel like a small cloud passing by, never knowing where I’m going and never knowing why.”Porter delivers his existential, melancholy contemplation in a voice brimming with defeat. He sounds as if he is about to lay down and surrender to the void; to an eternal abyss from whence he will never Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Luciferian Towers, the third album since Canadian oddballs Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s 2011 reunion, is an instrumental psychedelic masterpiece that reflects our times without resorting to political bluster. Indeed, with two of its four tracks almost touching a quarter of an hour long, it’s also an album to sink into and absorb rather than a likely source of any radio hits.Godspeed You! Black Emperor are true sonic explorers, albeit with relatively traditional instruments, and in Luciferian Towers they take jazz, classical and electronica influences and wrap them in a post-rock blanket Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Representing the best of the current psych revival’s many faces, the scuzziness of The Moonlandingz and overwhelming groove of Goat all seem initially out of place amongst the mock-Greek décor of the O2 Academy Brixton. With an audience that doesn’t stop bopping through both the bands and stellar DJ sets in between, however, the night feels far more transcendental than awkward.There is a third act on the bill that also deserves mention. The futuristic pop of British alt-folk perennial Jane Weaver is nothing short of immense. The unearthly soundscapes of her most recent album, Modern Kosmology Read more ...
joe.muggs
For over 30 years, Melvins have been flagbearers for a kind of foundational American underground rock. Monstrously psychedelic, heavy as lead, mischievous and angry, they are part of a lineage that connects to squarepeg counterculture forefathers like Beefheart and The Fugs, share swathes of DNA with heavy metal and particularly Black Sabbath, and are particularly impervious to outside cultural shifts. Though they were fleetingly affiliated by the media with grunge, thanks to founder Buzz Osborne's musical and personal relationship to Kurt Cobain, they were something else. And along with Read more ...