New music
Guy Oddy
Taking the electronics-heavy instrumental pieces from David Bowie’s, late seventies albums, Low and “Heroes” and arranging them in a hard-bop jazz style might seem a bit audacious. After all, electronic experimentation was largely the point of this music – primarily as an attempt to escape from the usual expectations of pre-punk seventies’ rock music. Nevertheless, these tunes soon proved to be significant game-changers in modern music themselves, conveying a feeling of alienation through proto-ambient soundscapes which were a huge influence on Aphex Twin, Black Dog and many others of the Read more ...
theartsdesk
We are very happy to present a stream of Chris & Cosey's live set recorded on the 12th June on the Red Bull Music Academy SónarDome stage at the Sónar festival in Barcelona.As the duo explained in their Q&A with theartsdesk, this set represents the drawing to an end of the series of shows that they've done re-imagining their Chris & Cosey songs of the 1980s and 1990s in the tougher electronic style of their more recent Carter Tutti guise - while also providing a look forward to a Carter Tutti Play Chris & Cosey studio album which will be their next release before moving Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Flaming Lips are one of the most annoying bands on the planet. They're fawned over in a pseudo-spiritual fashion by people who should know better for their arena show stunts which supposedly create a vibe of togetherness and community but really seem every bit as messianically egotistical on the part of band leader Wayne Coyne as any of the antics of, say, Bono or Chris Martin. They are essentially a new generation prog-rock band with all the self-involved and portentous stoner goofing that entails.However... a little frustratingly, they're also capable of making good records, and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It seems a little ambitious to be thinking of those omnipresent end-of-year album best-of lists when it is barely summer, but there’s something about How To Dress Well’s “What Is This Heart?” that puts me in that frame of mind. Not because I can see it topping any such list of my own but rather because I can see this album - this sumptuous, melodic, intricate, claustrophobic third full-length from the electro-R&B project of one Tom Krell - topping everybody else’s. It’s another way in which Krell’s music is similar to that of Frank Ocean, whose similarly falsetto-laden work of laudable Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Ed Sheeran is a young lad with an acoustic guitar, an armful of tattoos and a head of unruly red hair. He is also the most unlikely of global superstars in the age of Autotune and X-Factor. However, an unthreatening guy with a bagful of heart-felt love songs can always come good, given the right push. Ed saw his chance in 2011, with his “A-Team” single, a ballad dripping in teenage sentimentality, and hasn’t put a commercial foot wrong since.X sees Ed playing to his strengths with plenty of songs of love and loss that will keep his core fanbase more than happy. “One”, “Photograph” and “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: NME C86, The Motown 7s Box – Rare and Unreleased Vinyl Volume 2With music – or anything really – few things develop or evolve neatly, and British grassroots music from the mid-1980s is a case in point. When, in 1986, the NME issued a cassette tape of 22 current and (hopefully) up-and-coming bands the stylistic jumps it presented were jarring. Beefheart-style herk-jerk sat side-by-side with Sixties-derived jangle pop. Dance-music polemicists battled it out with bands saturated in far too much of The Fall.The C86 cassette caught the rag-bag nature of what infested pub Read more ...
joe.muggs
Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti are a living lesson in the rejuvenating power of remaining experimental in art. Their music holds its own alongside the young guns of electronica, who indeed frequently idolise them, and in person they frequently seem as excited about possibilities and open to new ideas as artists just starting out.The set they played at Sónar festival in Barcelona last weekend was based on the Chris & Cosey songs they wrote throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but deliberately done in the more abstracted electronic style they took on as Carter Tutti from 2000 onwards – Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Traditionally, reviewers of Mastodon albums employ the language of the avant-garde to describe the sophistication behind all that ear-splitting noise. Recently, however, their sound has changed. The riffs are less industrial and the vocals more melodious. Unsurprisingly the purists complain – but does this evolution really make their music any less accomplished? Less worthy of describing them in high-falutin’ terms? The band certainly seems to think not. Their press release for “Once More ’Round the Sun” talks of the “intense polyrhythmic guitar groove” of the lead single “High Road”. Read more ...
peter.quinn
Impressively old sea shanties with stacked up vocal harmonies and sing-along choruses. Check. Captivating explorations of desire, drink and death. Check. Luxuriant, high spec arrangements presenting an ear-catching crazy quilt of influences. Check. Newly signed to Island Records, in this fifth studio album the award-winning 11-piece folk band sprinkle their usual magic over a bracingly fresh and brilliantly constructed collection of songs.While some albums drift benignly into your consciousness, others begin with a figurative grabbing of your lapel. Revival falls very much into the latter Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Klaxons are a great band. They’re also a brutal example of how a great band can make the wrong decisions and scupper themselves. Their Mercury-winning debut album Myths of the Near Future not only captures a moment when dance, rock and pop collided to offer colourful reinvigoration for all parties, it’s also a stand-alone classic. After it they went off the rails and made a drug-addled psychedelic experiment. That is what great bands do, right? Instead of realising this, and releasing the results to intrigued bemusement – the key word being “intrigued” – they dumped it and, instead, recorded Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s statement of intent to open your first British headlining show with a 15-minute version of an album track which lasts a minute and three-quarters – from an album which itself lasts barely more than 30 minutes. And then to riff on it, incorporating elements from a debut album which barely anyone beyond your native country has heard. In taking her current album No Deal’s “I Feel You” and merging it with A Stomach Is Burning’s “A Stomach”, Belgium’s Melanie De Biasio could have alienated an audience who had never seen her before. Instead, the sold-out Purcell Room gave her standing ovation. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
You’d have to go back to 1996’s Spirit to name a Willie Nelson album with more than one or two original new songs, so the nine for Band of Brothers is something like headline news. Produced by Buddy Cannon – their previous collaboration, To All the Girls, took Willie back into the Top 10 for the first time since the 1980s – it features a deft band of guitar, steel, piano, bass and drums, with Mickey Raphael’s harmonica roaming around Nelson’s wandering way with a vocal and his totemic guitar, Trigger. This isn’t music that goes over the top; it gets under the skin. There’s no melodrama or Read more ...