New music
joe.muggs
Trip-hop is much maligned as a genre, and understandably so. One of the worst names for a style this side of “folktronica”, it rapidly came to mean anything downtempo that wasn't a standard indie rock format – including plenty of the blandest music ever made. As the late Nineties drew on, it and other experimental electronica faded together into the even vaguer audio Prozac of the “chillout” section, all holiday show sound-beds and CDs on supermarket checkout displays for stressed shoppers to impulse-buy as their children pestered them for sweets.Think back, though, to the glories of Massive Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
For almost 20 years, Drive-By Truckers have been one of Americana's most consistent and enduring voices – and, since 2001’s breakthrough double album Southern Rock Opera, probably the quintessential southern roots rockers too. Formed in Athens, Georgia in 1996 by Alabama natives Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, the five piece specialises in catchy melodies with more than a hint of the southern gothic, vivid characters and wickedly witty lyrics.The band are perhaps best known for a trio of concept albums: Southern Rock Opera, 2003’s Decoration Day and The Dirty South, released in 2004. Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In a fairly dry climate for original new music Wild Beasts have for the past six years been an oasis of fascination. With this, the Kendal schoolmates’ fourth album, their impeccable indie credentials, including an eclectic musical palette, gnomically allusive lyrics, an authentic quirky northernness, and Pulpishly progressive social attitudes, have drawn such an audience that a mainstream breakthrough threatens. The songs’ subject matter, including wrestling and dogs, is endearingly left-field. Any indie band worth the name has to have an odd-sounding singer, but Wild Beasts have two. Hayden Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“Good things come to those who wait” sings Neneh Cherry on “Everything”, from her new album, and the 17 years since her last solo album certainly has been a long wait. She’s right though - Blank Project has good things in abundance.RocketNumberNine provide industrial beats and a backing that is sparse and frequently conveys paranoia and feelings of pressure and claustrophobia. This has been shaped further by producer Kieran Hebden, of Four Tet fame, into sounds that often suggest Massive Attack or ambient dubstepper Burial. At times Blank Project also recalls the arrangements of Neneh’s 2012 Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Howie B’s new album, Down with the Dawn, is his first solo record since 2010’s Good Morning Scalene but it sounds as if it could have been put out by him at any time since the release of his debut album, Music for Babies, in 1996. This is primarily because nothing meaningful has changed or developed in his sound since he first made his name as the producer of the musical accompaniment to many an after-club spliff session in the early nineties.In a normal world that would be the full story and the full review of Down with the Dawn. However, in 1997, he was fortunate enough to be co-opted by U2 Read more ...
joe.muggs
And so after a long hiatus, The Arts Desk Radio Show is back on a new platform, the fabulous MEATTransMISSION radio station out of Hoxton, and a new regular monthly slot, but the same blend of wildly internationalist music and musings from Peter Culshaw and Joe Muggs. For the debut of the new format, they cover Scottish salsa, Pakistani Beatles, Parisian Arabic acid house, Detroit electro-soul, German ambient blues, Anglo-Indian party jazz, Brazilian trap beats, Kathy Burke and a whole lot more. This show is downloadable as a single two-hour special, then from the next month onwards we'll be Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Other than for die-hard fans, expectations for this Limp Bizkit tour have been, well, pretty limp. Nu-metal has been on the wane for years, and Limp Bizkit have aged the worst. Small wonder: surely even hardened metal fans must raise their eyebrows at a 43-year-old in a red baseball cap telling us to go fuck ourselves, whilst he takes our bitches (as Fred Durst does on the new single). So, if Limp Bizkit are a spent force, who goes to their concerts these days; and what exactly goes on?As I arrive, first appearances indicate the band now actually attracts a more conventional metal audience. Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's hard to countenance sometimes that there was an era where Marc Almond could have been a bona fide, chart-smashing pop star. His ability to parlay the archest of high camp and the most grotesque of low life into something digestible by genuine mass culture was, from the very beginning, quite uncanny.There was always a sulphurous whiff of something downright Luciferian about him, yet enough fragility to make the act seem all too real – an infinitely more convincing and intriguing character than more recent more self-conscious attempts at “transgressive” pop like the gallumphing vaudeville Read more ...
Matthew Wright
With their self-conscious blend of flamenco, Latin and pop creating the improbable-sounding Catalonian rumba, the Gipsy Kings, who played to an ecstatic Royal Albert Hall last night, are one of the pioneers of the world music genre. Their contribution has just been recognised by the Grammys, where they shared this year’s World Music prize (with Ladysmith Black Mambazo) for their new album Savor Flamenco.Formed from two groups of brothers, the Reyes and the Baliardos, who celebrate 25 years together this year, they now live in Provence, but both families are originally from Spain. The Reyes’ Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ever since becoming a parent – given that it's my job to look at how music connects to its audience – thoughts about what gets children engaged with it have rarely been far from my mind. It brings home a lot of questions about how much of our reactions to music are learned and how much instinctive, about the functions it serves in our lives, about whether old platitudes about music bringing people together carry any weight and so on. And occasionally it makes me listen with fresh ears too.In particular it's been fascinating to see how the visceral appeal of certain types of grassroots music Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Perhaps the most effective way to sum up St Vincent - the self-titled fourth album from the one-woman avant garde powerhouse known to her friends as Annie Clark - is that it’s the closest she has come on record to the visceral, engrossing experience that is seeing her live. Clark’s albums before 2012’s collaboration with David Byrne were beautifully crafted things, in turns both gorgeous and surreal, but with a certain under-glass quality. St Vincent, by contrast, is an album that revels in its strangeness, interspersing some of its more curious stories with cobweb-blasting bursts of sheer Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Drenge certainly pull in a diverse crowd to their shows these days. Prior to the band coming on stage for this sell-out gig, there was a group of 40-somethings in fairly new-looking leather jackets to my left, talking about Tom Watson MP (who famously recommended the band to Ed Miliband in a resignation letter), and to my right a group of teenagers, sniffing from a bottle of amyl nitrate and trying not to puke.By the end of opening song, “People in Love Make Me Feel Yuck”, these two groups had very definitely moved apart. The teenagers had gravitated towards the stage and were throwing Read more ...