New music
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHEd O’Brien Blue Morpho (Transgressive)
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The last thing theartsdesk on Vinyl thought it needed was a solo album from Radiohead’s guitarist but Blue Morpho, Ed O’Brien’s second album, spikes expectations. The opening “Incantations” is fab, a low-rolling, bongo-tastic thing hazed in mysticism, like a particularly stoned offcut from Plant & Page’s No Quarter project. The album was, apparently, a healing exercise for O’Brien, who was having brain doldrums. It feels that way, lightness touched with sadness, like that Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Sweating in my lair, there’s no trip to the mecca this year. If the festival was on, I'd be there right now, but it’s a fallow year and Glastonbury Festival is keeping its head down. The Glastophilic chat rooms bubble with antsy longing. My house is prowled by ghosts of yesteryear. Finetime’s camera is dormant. The cows on the farm chew their cud in peace.Instead of taking it to the wire in the fields of dreams, scribbled later with the urgency of one possessed, sleepless and obsessed, I can only offer ruminations. Snapshots and snippets. Aided by a large box of mementos from the attic, I Read more ...
Tim Cumming
“Guys, don’t grow old gracefully… it wouldn’t suit you,” The Who’s Pete Townshend told the Rolling Stones at their induction to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. They listened. Fast-forward some four decades to 2026, and the surviving Stones have eschewed any state of grace for a raucous, almost confrontational new album in Foreign Tongues that bubbles over with energy and purpose. It picks up where their studio comeback Hackney Diamonds left off and turns it all up a few notches.However, a word of warning: if the “loudness wars” of modern-day production get you down, you’ll need to Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Butthole Surfers were once a major force in underground rock music. Due to a combination of bad luck and bad decisions, poor management and selling far fewer records than the likes of Nirvana, however, they have unjustly found themselves relegated to a scanty footnote in music’s history books. One of the pieces of bad luck that led to this story state was their record company, Capitol burying and refusing to release their 1997 album After the Astronaut – claiming it as “unsellable”.In fact, the album was eventually heavily remixed, with some new tracks added and others removed for the 2001 Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Judging from her second album, young country singer Willow Avalon has kissed her fair share of frogs. She doesn’t let them off the hook. Rather, she stamps all over them with a vivacious ferocity that makes for entertaining songs. “You’re so full of shit that your britches don’t fit, and your mama is the only one that likes you,” she allows on “Work to Do”. And there’s plenty more where that came from.Avalon’s father is the offbeat country singer Jim White, perhaps best-known to connoisseurs of Deep South arcana for the excellent documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. Maybe she Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Keys to Your Heart,” the only single by Joe Strummer’s pre-Clash band The 101’ers, was released on 27 June 1976 – 50 years ago this week.Fantastic and still vital, “Keys to Your Heart” is a driving pop-rocker with a Sixties feel. It edges towards powerpop. But the urgency of delivery and its raggedness mark it out as broadly telegraphing what was around the corner with British punk rock. And its mid section, with Strummer's testifying, presages a fundamental element of the make-up of The Clash. An important single.The anniversary is neat prompt to consider the band’s musical legacy: what Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Muse are one of the best advertisements in the world for silliness. When the Devon trio came along in the late Nineties, they found a niche for people who wished Radiohead had kept writing big rock songs instead of tinkering with avant electronics – but they really found their feet with 2006’s Black Holes and Revelations when they started cutting loose with glam rock stomp, laser-zapping electronics, huge choruses and wild sci-fi imagery. Ever since, they’ve always been at their best when they drop any earnestness (not always possible, given singer Matt Bellamy’s penchant for doomy conspiracy Read more ...
Cathi Unsworth
I got my contract to write Season of The Witch: The Book of Goth just as the first Covid lockdown began in March 2020. During that time of plague and alienation, I time-travelled back to the era I had pinpointed as the beginning of this suitably dark and prophetic musical subculture: the 1978-9 Winter of Discontent. I planned to chart the course of Goth's rise from the ashes of punk and the economic crisis that paved the way for Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government to take power on 4 May 1979. Then follow its course through the coming decade of Cold War, Miners' Strike, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Shadows opens with “The Lone West,” a short, desolate instrumental featuring a simple keyboard refrain with a flute-like quality and what may be an early Seventies drum machine. There’s a bit of Young Marble Giants in there. The Brian Eno of Another Green World, too. The Ghost Box label’s characteristic nebulousness is also apparent.The next track features a vocal. Sailing over a similar musical bedding, Cate Kennan’s voice on “Shadows” is distant, etiolated, devoid of colour. A twangy guitar plays single notes. There is some Santo and Johnny-esque lap steel and sparingly used castanets. The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Between June 1964 and September 1966, London-area R&B band Downliners Sect issued ten singles, one EP and three albums on EMI’s Columbia imprint. A lot of records. Especially so for a band which barely charted. Only one of the singles, their Columbia debut, a dash through Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What’s Wrong” got anywhere – 29 on the New Musical Express Top 30.Despite its meagre hit parade status, the single sounds irresistible – an unfettered headlong rush. But it, and subsequent releases, did not achieve the traction needed to take Downliners Sect to the level of their similarly minded Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Beginning with “The Ground Above” and closing with “Otherside”, there’s an ambient, otherwordly, disembodied feel to Beth Orton’s new album on Partisan Records, a follow-up to 2022’s self-produced Weather Alive, which had its own spectral, dreamlike airs. “The Ground Above” is voiced by one of those unsettled spirits that rise out of one the hoary old Murder Ballads, but here, Orton is disembodied “among the choirs of the gods”, “ecstatic as a mother’s love” and lusty too: “And you kissed me and I knew what I was for, And it wiped me out like chalk off of a board.”Her voice is worn and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
La Sécurité are a Montreal supergroup… kind of; in that all members are involved in other projects which have had local success. In the case of bassist Félix Bélisle’s outfit Choses Sauvages and guitarist Laurence-Anne Charest Gagné’s solo career, cult success has spread further afield. “Cult” is the word, though, for La Sécurité’s tasty punk-funk stew is more-ish but likely too gnarly for mainstream success. Their second album is a smash’n’grab raid rife with pogo-party energy.At ten songs in around half an hour, it’s a set that makes its case with vim, then exits. The lyrics cover territory Read more ...