New music
joe.muggs
There comes a point in any experimental music festival when you have to accept the silliness and go with it. And at Borealis, that point comes very early. Only a couple of hours off the plane in Bergen and we're in a pedestrian tunnel under the bus station, where a crowd surrounds Slovakian musician Jonáš Gruska who is sitting cross-legged on the floor with a laptop, directing the whirs, rumbles and cascades of bleeps that are emanating from different sections of the tunnel wall and ceiling. Through all of this, Bergen's Friday evening commuters bustle, variously perplexed and amused, many of Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Conor Oberst's 2016 LP, Ruminations, was seen by many as both a triumph and milestone. A triumph because of the acclaim it attracted; and a milestone because it finally packed the emotional punch the singer-songwriter had been promising for years. The album was recorded in Nebraska during a particularly dark period in the artist's life - the combination of a brain cyst and a false accusation of rape. Armed with just a piano and a guitar, he compressed his emotions into a state of almost exquisite angst. Now, he's recorded the songs all over again.Salutations is, apparently, how Oberst Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Lula Pena is a Portuguese singer who takes fado (or "phado" as she calls it) into new directions and musical horizons. She is one of the most intense performers you are likely to hear and, with only three albums in the last 20 years, keeps a lowish profile. She inspires fierce cult-like loyalty among fans, and had sold out the adventurous Café Oto, located in hipster central, Dalston.She calls herself an “existential musician” and talks of “wandering borderless and intuitively through different languages and sounds” as she drifts through snatches of blues, flamenco and chanson in a seeming Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Albums are not meant to be heard this way. Collecting a band's output in one package inevitably obscures that what’s being heard might have been recorded and released over years. The listening time may be five or six hours, but eighteen months could have separated albums when they were originally released. Messing with time messes with reality.For Kitchens of Distinction, the new, six-disc box set Watch Our Planet Circle includes their four albums for the One Little Indian label across each of discs one to four. Disc five rounds up B-sides and other non-album material (a contemporaneous EP is Read more ...
joe.muggs
OK, the title could be offputting, suggesting as it does the crassest of adversarial politics. But this record is something far deeper, far subtler and far more enjoyable than that. Yes, the Russia-born, Israel-raised, Berlin-based singer-songwriter Mariya aka Mary Ocher things to say about authoritarianism, xenophobia, and gender and sexual politics – but there is so much more to her expression.This record is produced by Hans Joachim Irmler of Krautrock and international psychedelic scene mainstays Faust, and features a variety of other German legends including long-standing electro- Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales’ first collaborative album is a song-cycle centred around the piano in the titular room of the Château Marmont in West Hollywood – a hotel with a reputation as something of a den of iniquity during the Roaring Twenties. Featuring cameo appearances from the likes of Jean Harlow, Howard Hughes and Clara Bow, Room 29 comes across like a stripped-down riff on Lou Reed’s classically grubby Berlin album with splashes of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill and even Noel Coward to tell the tale of the ghosts of times past in “a comfortable venue for a nervous breakdown”. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Musically, Interplanetary Class Classics breaks no new ground. Opening cut “Vessels” could be by the KLF and kicks off with Glitter Band drums, a Chicory Tip stomp and has robot-like declamatory vocals: what critically favoured Nineties band Earl Brutus perfected. It’s followed by “Sweet Saturn Mine”, a swirling confection with Broadcast synths, motorik percussion and more of those mannered vocals. Next up is “Black Hanz”, a herky-jerk Krautrock/Black Angels construct with a – them again – KLF-type narration section. After this, “I.D.S.”, which could pass for a Sigue Sigue Sputnik outtake. Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Fin Greenall’s career is developing as a reverse mirror image of musical history. Originally a DJ and electronic music pioneer working on the edge of contemporary performance, for the past decade he has been on a journey into the acoustic and American past. His last release, 2014’s Hard Believer, had tinges of blues alongside some resonant Americana. Sunday Night Blues Club is billed as the real thing – his first “purely blues” album – but is it?Like Hard Believer, this contains some very evocative soundscapes, executed with seeming authenticity and style. Obviously, the argument about Read more ...
mark.kidel
Tamikrest’s fourth album is well-presented, good enough, but a little hamstrung by what have become the clichés of the modern Touareg genre: the lilting rhythms of a camel cruising slowly across the dunes, intertwined guitars that smoothly swirl bewteen old Tamashek melodies and gentle riffs that might have come from the Deep South. The lyrics touch on the politics of the Southern Sahara, and the Touaregs’ tragic position at the mercy of conflicting interests – political, economic and religious.Music that bewitches around a campfire, under the vast canopy of the Milky Way doesn’t have the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Miraculous Mule summon up that great feeling when you walk into an anonymous festival marquee and are caught up in a storm of music by someone you’ve never heard of. Two Tonne Testimony has a looseness, where songs matter less than hefty grooves, a feeling that its stew of swamp rock, psychedelia and grungey biker riffs is merely the jumping-off point for a wild live show. It’s also punctuated by a very contemporary paranoia that time is running out.Miraculous Mule is a three-piece fronted by Michael J Sheehy, alongside his brother and a childhood friend. Born of north London's council Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By the time Buzzcocks recorded the 12 tracks heard on Time’s Up, they had played with Sex Pistols twice. They had also shared bills with The Clash, The Damned, Eater, Slaughter & The Dogs, Stinky Toys and The Vibrators. After singer Howard Devoto (then known as Howard Trafford) read about Sex Pistols in the 21 February 1976 NME he and his friend Pete Shelley (Peter McNeish) saw them on the 20th – the weekly paper was available in their home-town Manchester from Thursdays rather than the date of the issue – and the 21st in High Wycombe and Welwyn Garden City. They recorded the latter show Read more ...
Katie Colombus
It's part and parcel of Ed Sheeran's success that both your nan and your teenage kid can bond over his music. His newest album, Divide, pushes that generalisation even further, with its easy-to-compartmentalise songs underpinned by a distinctively down to earth sound."Shape of You" is the one that everyone already knows, currently melting the airwaves and double-repeating on the dance floor, with its clipped, quick lyrics, base-y hum and dance beat. There are familiar soppy ballads full of youthful promises of eternity that will delight those of prom age, like "Perfect" or "How Would You Feel Read more ...