New music
Matthew Wright
It’s an extraordinary story about a ordinary-seeming guy. No one can accuse the industry of promoting pretty blond teens this time. Rory Graham, the emerging blues-tinged soul star from the deep south – Sussex, of course, or the Uck Delta, perhaps – has built his reputation from the ground up, working as a carer, initially, as he developed the Rag’n’Bone Man persona.He’s now 32, but even before Rag’n’Bone Man, he learned music by doing it: rapping, MCing in jungle clubs, and singing at blues festivals his dad (who has a big collection of Muddy Waters and BB King) took him to. With a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
So where’s Devlin been? Last heard of four years ago, he was hot property on the back of two critically acclaimed, commercially successful albums. He was Dagenham’s own Eminem, the only white guy in the grime crossover A-league, yet it’s peers such as Skepta, Wiley, and Wretch 32 who are now the big names. So what happened?“I’ve been away for a while,” he spits on the opening title track, “’Cause shit weren’t sweet like Tate & Lyle, I held it together with a faker’s smile.” He parted ways with “men that I thought were tight” (the new album’s not on Island, like the last two), and ended up Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Elbow fans will remember how 2014's The Take Off and Landing of Everything took the band's existing sound and twisted it a fraction. The result was a piece of work that, above all, felt powerfully uneasy. Not simply because of the personal heartache it expressed but also the impression of an entire world out of kilter. How interesting then that, now half the world feels unsettled, Elbow return with an uplifting album full of heart.Little Fictions was written around the time of Guy Garvey's marriage, and it's this sense of personal contentment that dominates the album. "You Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Henrik Björnsson has been laying down nihilistic and scuzzy rock’n’roll sounds with Singapore Sling since 2000, and with Kill Kill Kill (Songs About Nothing) there is a sense that he has long given up chasing radio-friendly commercial success. However, while song titles like “Fuck Everything” and “Surrounded by Cunts” may predominate, the tunes are nothing like the toy-throwing tantrums that they imply. Fuzzy and echo-drenched psychedelia powers this set of 10 haunting and claustrophobic tunes that bring to mind prime time Jesus and Mary Chain, and it’s one fine ride.The subterranean gothic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the last week of September 1973, Guy Darrell peaked at number 12 on the British single’s chart with the catchy blue-eyed soul pounder “I’ve Been Hurt” and performed on Top of the Pops. His was a grassroots-driven success. “I’ve Been Hurt” was popular on the northern soul scene and initial sales were to fans hearing the song in clubs as it packed dance floors rather than on the radio.Despite then-hot popsters David Essex, Sweet and Wizzard being lodged in the Top Ten when Darrell’s single was selling at its fastest, this was not a week when pop was looking forward. A reissue of David Bowie’ Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The heartbreak of poor, rural America has an urgent topicality for the first time in decades. Wisely, country singer Courtney Marie Andrews has left her views on the Mexican wall unspoken, but on the other staples of folkloric woe she proves to be unexpectedly eloquent. Still only in her mid-twenties, this is technically Andrews’ sixth album, though her first in the limelight. It’s a gem.Musically, the sound is conventional, perhaps self-consciously so, with giddy portions of pedal steel, glistening close-harmony backing vocals, and Andrews' own bubblegum drawl. The album’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The name Mexrrissey may be unfamiliar, but the concept of a Mexican band playing mariachi-style versions of songs by Morrissey and The Smiths has brought out a decent-sized audience on a freezing January night. Their set is uneven and musically sloppy upon occasion, but at its peak, delivers an irresistible joyfulness, a curious development, given the source material’s notorious moping.For instance, Mexrrissey’s euphoric ska-tinted take on The Smiths’ 1986 single “Bigmouth Strikes Again”, boosted by the swooping fiesta trumpet of Alex Escobar, is wonderful. Jay De La Cuerva, who looks like Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If there's one thing I've learned from Nashville the TV show it's that the best musical collaborations can birth the most beautiful love stories.Johnnyswim is the real life version of boy (Abner Ramirez) meets girl (Amanda Sudano) in Nashville Tennessee, who got together to collaborate back in 2005. They made beautiful music together, and ended up in love.Their heady mix of American folk-pop, with soul and blues influences, comes together to make a sound that Callie Khouri would be proud of. They sing of summertime romances, being each other's lighthouse, getting it right on the first try, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Recorded more or less live at those venerable studios with a great big sound, Rockfield and Real World, Eliza Carthy’s Big Machine is a monster of an album, big, brassy, and bendy. She has a monster of a group with her too, the 12-piece Wayward band, among them Sam Sweeney, Lucy Farrell, Saul Rose, Beth Porter, and Barnaby Stradling. There are big choruses, big songs and plenty of freewheeling brass, spiky guitars, strings and sharp contrasts in these bold settings of Broadside Ballads from Manchester’s Chetham Library, songs such as “Devil in the Woman”, about domestic violence, the album Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
New year, new vinyl. The tidal wave is growing. But not everyone wants to play their vinyl. Included below are a couple of picture discs which seem to be primarily for owning and looking at, mementoes, while a couple of the box-sets reviewed are similarly aimed more at the memorabilia market than the musical one. That’s all fine. Vinyl releases as objet d’art hurts no-one and, in the end, gives music a prestige place in the home. Of course theartsdesk on Vinyl’s main focus is not this area but, as always and forever, the music. San Diego stoner band Slightly Stoopid may have recently claimed Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brit singer Rose Elinor Dougall is best known for her various associations with Mark Ronson and her time in the polka-dotted girl band The Pipettes. Ten years into her solo career she’s well-liked by much indie-centric music media but has yet to carve herself out a recognisable larger profile. Her second album, co-created with London producer Oli Bayston – AKA Boxed In – is sweet-natured, an electro-poppy extension of her 2010 debut, but, unfortunately, lacks real impact.Stellular has the trappings; it’s lushly produced, roves around a variety of 1980s musical tics, and is riven with Read more ...
mark.kidel
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s soundtrack for the National Geographic drama documentary about an imagined manned space mission to Mars in 2033 feels at times as if it were a sketch for the sonic ambience that made Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' much-acclaimed 2016 album Skeleton Tree so intensely atmospheric. Which came first isn’t clear, but suffice it to say, that both inhabit the same dark-hued and super-charged sonic atmosphere.Cave’s music has always been highly cinematic, not least when featuring the imaginative work of his regular cohort Warren Ellis. Here, as in Skeleton Tree, they have Read more ...