New music
Sebastian Scotney
Tony Bennett has just turned 95, so it is no small miracle that this album has happened at all. Apparently he rang up Lady Gaga shortly before his 92nd birthday and said “let’s get this record done before I run out of birthdays.”The good thing about the new album Love for Sale (Streamline) is that it has a unifying theme. All ten tracks on the album – there are 12 on the “de luxe version” – are by Cole Porter. True, Bennett recorded less Cole Porter than Sinatra, but he is such an appealing character, and he can give such wonderful empathy to a lyric, that is perhaps the Read more ...
Alfred Quantrill
Here comes the bride. True to Kero Kero Bonito’s unique musical and visual style, a chaotic but masterfully executed fusion of Japanese kawaii culture, kaleiodoscopic synth and indie rock, the audience at Heaven were greeted by lead singer Sarah Midori Perry entering in a wedding dress complete with bridesmaid, while instrumentalists Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled both played the part of disaffected ushers behind their synth decks. Perry’s veil was lifted to the backdrop of the band’s new logo in the Aztec font of their latest, psychedelically inflected album, Civilisation.The album’s opening Read more ...
mark.kidel
Catherine Graindorge is a Belgian violinist and composer. Her second album explores the collateral damage of Covid: the dark sounds she produces have a strange beauty but barely surface from a grimness as dense as the mists in fin de siècle paintings of Bruges, the dark "Venice of the North".She was has written for films and the theatre, and it shows: these are soundscapes that evoke moods and images, avoiding the linear forms of narrative. There are drones. There is noise. Her violin, when it is allowed to be heard above the atmospheric din, is played without virtuosic flourishes, but Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Looking for answers to what qualifies an album for a makeover and its attendant return to record shop racks can cause heads to spin. Multiple variables are at play but, still, it merits pondering. Market factors come into consideration, including the prices fetched by original pressings, even if the album isn’t obscure.Take Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space, originally released in June 1997. The band’s third album was then issued in a collector-friendly range of formats and packages. The double-album version currently sells for around £260. The CD edition – with Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s a strand of music that a friend of mine once referred to as “Caveman Electronics”, which snakes through the decades, never quite becoming a genre. It’s surfaced in scenes and moments like postpunk and electroclash, you can hear it in bands like Add N to (X) and maverick house/techno producers like Jamal Moss and Funkineven. You can trace it back through Cabaret Voltaire’s breakthrough and Suicide back to “Popcorn”, and even Joe Meek’s productions. It’s not about “lo-fi”, more “differently fi”: a relish in the fine details of distortion, the beautiful geometries of the most rigid Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Amon Tobin is hard to pin down. His music has mutated over the years. He initially fitted in with Ninja Tune’s late-Nineties/early-Noughties roster of post-hip hop stoner breaks, heavily jazzed. But in more recent years, he’s wandered into an area where glitchy soundscaping and avant-classical experiments are laced with warped sampling. Then there’s his industrially heavy Two Fingers crunch-step project. And that’s not even mentioning his extensive video game and film work. Now this. A head-battering, unhinged outing that’s uncategorisable, surprising, highly original, often also gorgeous. Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Neo Jessica Joshua, better known as Nao, has been consistently putting out good – often excellent – music since 2014. Back then she was making off-kilter, funky R&B that felt both retro and futuristic. Since then she’s grown as an artist on both 2016’s For All We Know and 2018’s Saturn. And Then Life Was Beautiful is her third album and the emotional accumulation of the past few years. After burning out and struggling with writer's block, an eye-opening trip to South Africa and becoming a mother were catalysts for a renewed creativity. As a result, these songs feel Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lindsey Buckingham was last in and first out of Fleetwood Mac’s classic line-up (quitting in 1987, and forced out by long ago ex- Steve Nicks in 2018). He was a would-be Brian Wilson in their midst, an unlooked for, maverick auteur whose first hit “Go Your Own Way” helped conquer the world, and confounding follow-up Tusk demanded much more.This is his seventh solo album, and they all exist in the Mac saga’s interstices, even as he strives for a purer, separate art, muddied by the band’s cocaine-clouded excess and soap opera along the way.Lindsey Buckingham was recorded after typical turmoil Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Ben Howard is a man of very few words, unless of course, there’s a guitar accompanying them.These are his first shows since the start of lockdown but all he says about that is “thanks for coming out this evening”. Hobbling onto the stage with his foot in a cast, he gets straight into it, opening with “Follies Fixture” – the title track of his most recent studio album. Singing from a comfy looking velvet armchair, lamps flicker around the stage and incense burns atop amps while glitchy projections of Howard's face, sketches and wildflowers fill the back screen.The set rushes through Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As the summer folds away on itself, theartsdesk on Vinyl returns. Beset by backlogs at pressing plants and delayed by COVID, it's finally here, jammed to the gunwales with commentary on a grand cross section of the finest music on plastic. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHGod Damn Raw Coward (One Little Independent)Let’s start with some NOISE! With their fourth album Wolverhampton band God Damn continue the reinvigoration that began with their eponymous 2020 Album. There’s metal in there somewhere but mostly it’s a roaring rage of punk rock, with singer Thomas Edwards howling his indignancy at, well Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Public Service Broadcasting’s latest addition in their on-going string of concept albums could reasonably be described as an impressionistic musical portrait of Weimar-era Berlin, even if it steers well clear of anything resembling the decadent jazzy sounds of the time.That said, there’s considerably more to Willgoose and Wrigglesworth’s exploration of mainland Europe’s premier capital city than a history lesson of its inter-war years. For, even if some of the influences on Bright Magic transparently include the films of Walter Ruttmann and Viking Eggeling, the presence of Marlene Dietrich Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Reaffirmation” is the sound of a San Francisco ballroom in 1968. The 12-minute long track opens mysteriously with what might be a Mellotron on the flute setting. A bubbling bass guitar arrives, along with jazzy piano. At 02.50, the tempo picks up and the guitar, which until then has delicately picked its way through the arrangement, begins to soar. There’s a vaguely funky section and, just over half-way in, a dive into an almost free-form spiralling section. This is top-notch psychedelia. Dungen have passed through similar territory.Other parallels include the first-album Steve Miller Band Read more ...