New music
caspar.gomez
Not every Glastonbury can be blazing summer. 2016 was hard work, with real world gloom permeating the already damp party bubble. But, as your teachers used to say, you only get out what you put in. The only way to take things was to go hard or go home, no quarter given and pay later.Thus, this report comes way after the rest. The contemporary media is focused on putting content online as fast as possible. A response after the event is commercial suicide, no longer an option. But how can you smear yourself in Glastonbury’s madness if you spend half your time in the Media Tent, a dead zone of Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Eighties revival in dance music started in earnest with the Electroclash subculture, the first records emerging around 1996. That is to say, the Eighties revival has now lasted twice as long as the actual Eighties itself. And if you think that the heyday of electropop – which is what we generally mean by Eighties sounds – really lasted from about 1978 to 1984, we're talking about a very long revival for a very short “decade”.The thing about dance music, though, is that its riffs and schticks seem particularly durable. Because they were aimed at a relatively unchanging physical environment Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The first I heard of Beyond the Wizards Sleeve was eight whole years ago. It was a tune called “Winter in June” and was a Lemon Jelly-meets-The Orb-style cosmic noodle with the added, and memorable, benefit of long-deceased BBC gardener Percy Thrower rambling over the top. It was exquisitely rustic English electronic weirdness. From their Viz-on-LSD name onwards, BTWS seemed to be just a passing fancy for Erol Alkan and Richard Norris, a couple of thoroughly imaginative DJ-producers with their fingers in multifarious musical pies, and it seemed unlikely they’d do much more with it.And so it Read more ...
Katie Colombus
I’m going to be honest, Metronomy isn’t really my bag. Perhaps I’m not hipster or highbrow enough, but I just don’t get their jam. I feel a bit like Jon at the beginning of Lenny Abrahamsson’s Frank – slightly bewildered by the depths of the intellectual pop he’s witnessing, recognising the genius in there somewhere, but somehow on the outside of the super-cool in-crowd.To me, Metronomy are basically saying “huh, yeah, it is all a big joke, like the lyrics are so simple but they’re funny and witty, but the fact that you’re laughing at them makes you the joke, unless you’re laughing Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Before playing a version of “Out of Time”, the lead single from Blur’s 2003 album Think Tank, Damon Albarn explains that “at Glastonbury, it really was out of time: there was a problem with our monitors and we were about a bar a half out.” Last night’s rendition at Royal Festival Hall was not perfect, but the Syrian National Orchestra’s backing was enough to earn a fist pump from Albarn, who skipped off the stage theatrically as if to underline his pleasure.The night’s imperfections – a rare frog in Albarn’s throat for The Beatles’ “Blackbird”, a couple of technical hitches, the odd bit Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It begins with “Never Never Let Me Down” by Formulars Dance Band. “You’re the only good thing I’ve got,” declares the singer of a garage-band answer to The Impressions over a rough-and-ready backing where a shuffling mid-tempo groove is driven along by wheezy organ and scratchy lead guitar. When the band unites to sing harmonies, the massed vocal is distorted: a sure sign of an overloaded microphone. If this were America, “Never Never Let Me Down” would have been an obscure independent soul release issued around 1966. But this was Nigeria and Formulars Dance Band – whose personnel are unknown Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Around the Summer Solstice seems a fitting time for Dylan Carlson’s latest solo album to appear under his Drcarlsonalbion guise. For Falling With a Thousand Stars & Other Wonders From the House of Albion is a collection of old folk ballads from pagan and rustic England and Scotland that deal with relations between humans and faeries and other supernatural creatures.It’s not an album that is likely to sit comfortably with the traditionalist folkie crowd though, as Carlson’s approach is to reinterpret tunes like “She moved thro’ the faire” and “Tamlane” as instrumentals played slowly as a Read more ...
joe.muggs
Around the turn of the millennium, two producers – the Californian Otis Jackson Jr aka Madlib, and the late James Yancey aka J Dilla from Detroit – started a revolution in hip hop: knocking beat patterns off the musical grid, searching further and wider than before for obscure and psychedelic sample sources, and generally making things weird and wonky.This abstracted approach is only now really making its mark on the mainstream thanks to Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar, but it has also created a well-established underground known simply as “the beat scene”, where producers from LA to Saint Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The EU referendum isn’t the only thing causing polarised opinion over European issues. The question of what constitutes Balearic Beat looms large over the music community. For some, it’s a fixed point, namely celebrated DJ Alfredo’s record box in the mid-80s. For others it’s built on more shifting sands, a sentiment DJ and author Bill Brewster summarises with trademark élan: “Balearic Beat today is the same as it was in 2011, 1999 and 1984. It’s shit pop records and brilliant EBM records. It’s everything and nothing.”International Feel record label boss and producer Mark Barrott’s take is Read more ...
joe.muggs
A few beers down, in the middle of a crowd listening to music you love, you tend not to think of the latest news story as your highest priority. But Britain's relationship to Europe weighs heavy on the mind these days, and when the news of the violent attack on Jo Cox started filtering through as we danced under the Catalan sun on Thursday afternoon, it threw the nature of Sónar festival into relief.Unlike a lot of international music events, which can often be little more than monocultural awaydays for Brits and/or Germans seeking hedonism in the sun, Sónar is both proudly reflective of its Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Completed from scratch in seven days, The Magic features 15 songs veering from spindly, fidgety No Wave excursions to tuneful yet harsh pop-New Wave nuggets and headache-inducing bangers. In short, Deerhoof’s 13th album proper encapsulates everything they have done to date from 1997’s debut album The Man, The King, The Girl.The prescriptive approach is nothing new. Its predecessor La Isla Bonita was similarly speedily tracked live in a basement, and the album before that, 2013’s Breakup Song, was collated from digital files each band member had made separately. Seemingly, Deerhoof are Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For new, independent artists, access to putting music on vinyl can seem daunting, especially to those who’ve grown up in the era of virtual music. There are schemes out there to counter this, notably the VF Selects programme, wherein the self-explanatory Vinyl Factory, together with FACT online magazine and the crowd-funding site Born.com, offer an opportunity. Between these organizations, the weight of funding, production and promotion is carried. Music is vetted, partly, by considering what chance it might have of selling, but, then, that’s been the way of all art forever, so it’s surely Read more ...