New music
Katie Colombus
I am an official Sia wanker. If you tell me you love "Titanium", I’ll be all like “Yeah, I prefer her early work with Zero 7”, and if you tell me about a major Coachella gig you saw recently, I’ll tell you about when I was basically the only one in the audience at a set where she was shoved into the back corner of a dark tent at an obscure UK festival in the noughties.I got this T-shirt before any of you, and thus she is officially my favourite and the best and therefore, my Album of the Year. This Is Acting is full of songs that were written for a whole gang of pop stars including Rihanna, Read more ...
howard.male
A year on, what can be said about Blackstar that hasn’t been said already? The answer is: what I have to say about it. That’s not to claim any special insights, it’s simply because the artist designed it that way. Even though Bowie said not a word during the decade leading up to his death, the messages explicit, implicit and fancifully imagined were all there for the taking. One such message was the little blank notebook included with all the other paraphernalia in The Next Day Special Edition. Its blankness clearly said; there is no cohesive meaning to this record other than the one you Read more ...
Guy Oddy
2016 was the year that US underground titan Michael Gira began to wind down the current “iteration” of long-standing musical mavericks Swans and their final album, The Glowing Man, proved to be no whimpering exit. Intense and challenging sounds that still manage to convey a magnificent, if disturbed, beauty characterise the band’s swan song and it’s one that doesn’t let the quality dip for over two hours – despite several tracks of over 20 minutes.Lyrics often remain half-heard over a sonic palette that moves from dreamy but dark psychedelia to menacing Gothic country blues and beyond. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
French Pictures in London was a bolt from the blue. Issued in June, four decades after being recorded, it was a previously unknown, unreleased album better than most mid-Seventies rock offerings. It was also better than about 99 percent of albums retrospectively hailed as classics. However, it had escaped attention and its maker was barely heard of.It wasn’t meant to be this way. In 1975, A&M Records paid for the sessions and the album’s master tape was passed to pop star and Bensick’s fellow Ohio native Eric Carmen, who was meant to get it to music industry bigwig Clive Davis, the then Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Being the Jewish Elvis has never diminished Neil Diamond's Yuletide enthusiasm. His first seasonal offering was 1992's Christmas Album, featuring vocals as cosy as a log fire. Then came the sequel The Christmas Album II. Both have both been subsequently re-issued and repackaged. Now, however, Diamond is in more of a stripped-down-and-gravelly phase of his career. And he's inviting us around for an Acoustic Christmas.This time round things are a little less traditional. Certainly anyone looking for that rich baritone served up with all the trimmings may be disappointed. But nor is the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
2016 has been a big year for Tel Aviv’s burgeoning underground scene. Acts including Red Axes, Moscoman and Naduve have produced endlessly inventive music at an impressive pace and on a range of labels. Of these, Disco Halal, run by Chen Mosco and based at the Berlin record shop Oye, has been absurdly consistent in its releases, notably a series of re-edits that blend exotic Middle Eastern melodies with dancefloor beats and, in doing so, provide a groove for both head and heart.In May this year, they broke with their MO and released a mini-LP by Nadav Spiegel, better known as Autarkic. Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The future direction of jazz has been the subject of anxious discussion for at least 50 years, and the last few have seen particular fervent speculation, usually provoked by another tedious “death of jazz” article. Fortunately, such pieces almost always foreshadow a renaissance, and the recent prominence of jazz-sourced breakthrough artists such as Gregory Porter, Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper and Snarky Puppy has at least ensured the death-of-jazz polemicists have had to put down their poison pens. So far, so reassuring. Also American. As Shabaka Hutchings himself argued in an Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's a cliché to say that interesting times make for interesting music – and frankly not much of a consolation. Good tunes don't really make the march of extremist, violent and delusional politics any more palatable – but 2016 really has been quite extraordinary, at least in the world of club and electronic music. Not that there were any huge definable genre geneses, in the sense that, say, drum'n'bass or grime once were.Rather, there was endless international fluidity between and within the existing genres, and a further blurring over what was for the club and what was for home listening, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Attempts to steer a straightforward path through the music of Sun Ra have always been hampered by the volume of records issued, their limited availability and trying to work out whether they represent something he had a hand in releasing. Just because an album is in the shops does not necessarily mean it was part of the artist’s own vision of who they are or were.Last time theartsdesk encountered a Sun Ra collection, it generated the comments that he “had issued around 117 albums, about 46 of which were live sets. Trying to pin down exact numbers with Sun Ra is unrealistic. Some albums Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When, back in October, Donald Trump sulked that his political opponent was being a “nasty woman”, little did he realise the cultural impact it would have.Those two words – a fit of pique that was impressive even amidst an ever-lengthening line of cry baby incidents from the man who went on to become president-elect of the United States of America – have become a rallying cry of sorts for those of us unprepared to take the 12-month garbage fire that was 2016 lying down. Of course, you can get Nasty Woman mugs, T-shirts and baseball caps. The name has lent itself to essays and anthologies. But Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Five new albums released over the year have dominated 2016: Marissa Nadler’s Strangers (May), Mikko Joensuu’s Amen 1 (June), Jessica Sligter’s A Sense of Growth (July), Arc Iris’s Moon Saloon (August) and Wolf People’s Ruins (November). Next year, it’s likely Foxygen’s Hang (out in January) will be amongst those doing the same.But Amen 1 is the one casting the darkest, longest and most inescapable shadow. One defined by an overarching sense that this is an unfiltered expression of emotion. What’s heard is what was felt. Marrying this to a classic melodic sensibility in the Jimmy Webb Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Like the sex life of a long-married couple, it’s not every night that a band who’ve been around for over three decades will catch the unfettered frisson of their wildest moments. For the first half of their set, despite frontman Bobby Gillespie assuring us the just-rendered version of recent single “100% Or Nothing” was “maybe the best ever”, the gig didn’t take off. It was another decent roll in the sack, a band on tour searching for the sweet spot, another rock’n’roll night. Then, well over halfway through, with the caustic, siren-enhanced assault of 1999’s “Swastika Eyes”, they found what Read more ...