New music
Sam Fender, St James' Park, Newcastle review - Geordie Springsteen scores with celebratory homecomingMonday, 16 June 2025
Had a passer-by from outwith Newcastle been asked to guess what was taking place at St James' Park, football would have been the likely answer. It felt like nearly every person walking to see Sam Fender was clad in a replica top, bearing the name of... Read more... |
Album: Yaya Bey - do it afraidMonday, 16 June 2025
One of the great untold stories of the past decade is just how potent a cultural force R&B has been. It might not have had the wild musical innovation it did in the 2000s when the likes of Neptunes, Missy Elliot, Timbaland and Rodney Jerkins... Read more... |
Album: The Young Gods - Appear DisappearSaturday, 14 June 2025
Swiss electro-rockers, Young Gods have been around for 40 years, but this in no way should suggest that they’ve gone soft in their old age. These days, vocalist Franz Treichler looks like the psychopathic Bob from David Lynch’s original Twin Peaks... Read more... |
Album: HAIM - I QuitThursday, 19 June 2025
Haim’s profile just grows and grows. Since their last album, youngest sibling Alana’s starring role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s whimsical Seventies L.A. nostalgia-fest, Licorice Pizza, has done them no harm. I Quit is, the band says, thus titled... Read more... |
Bonnie Raitt, Brighton Dome review - a top night with a characterful, very American blues rock queenWednesday, 18 June 2025
If you walked into a bar in the US, say in one of the southern states, and Bonnie Raitt and her band were playing, you’d have the best night of your life. They are the kind of purely American rhythm’n’blues experience, tempered with FM radio... Read more... |
Hidden Door Festival 2025 review - the transformative Edinburgh event's most site-specific festival yetWednesday, 18 June 2025
"When I was your age, I worked in a corrugated cardboard factory!" is a phrase my father was fond of telling me as a teenager, presumably in an attempt to extol the virtues of a good Presbyterian work ethic.I wonder what he’d have made of his first... Read more... |
Pulp, O2 Arena review - common people like usMonday, 16 June 2025
Jarvis Cocker is proudly holding the No 1 trophy handed to him on the day Pulp topped the album chart for the first time in 27 years with More, their first album in almost as long. “It’s nice they’ve got something to do when they’re getting on a bit... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Pilot - The Singles CollectionSunday, 15 June 2025
"It was really strange. Really quite conflicting, the sort of thing most bands didn't have to deal with. At the front, we'd have the kids who'd come along to scream and at the back were the people who'd come along to hear the music. We didn't know... Read more... |
Album: Sam Binga - Sam Binga Presents Club OrthodonticsFriday, 13 June 2025
When I was writing the introduction to my book, Bass, Mids, Tops: An Oral History of Soundsystem Culture, I came up with a phrase, which I ended up putting on promotional badges: “BASS CULTURE IS FOLK CULTURE”. It referred to the way riffs, refrains... Read more... |
Album: Neil Young & the Chrome Hearts - Talkin' to the TreesThursday, 12 June 2025
When Neil Young releases a new album, you can be reasonably sure that you’ll get either a disc of melancholy singer-songwriter fare or a set of blistering rock’n’roll. His debut album with the Chrome Hearts, however, gives a bit of both – and it... Read more... |
Album: Mary Halvorson - About GhostsWednesday, 11 June 2025
Although Mary Halvorson leads the sextet Amaryllis on About Ghosts, instrumentally, she does not place her guitar to the fore. The first time her playing really leaps out on her new album is during second cut “Carved Form,” where it weaves through... Read more... |
Album: Marina - Princess of PowerTuesday, 10 June 2025
Marina Diamandis is a proper pop star, brilliantly full-on, off on her own thing. The Welsh singer is primarily known for success 10-15 years ago as Marina and the Diamonds, but she’s retained global heft as an album artist, including in the US,... Read more... |
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