New music
joe.muggs
The journey of Ross “Hudson Mohawke” Birchard has been truly one of the most extraordinary in modern music. From teenage scratch DJ champion and happy hardcore raver in some of Glasgow’s more feral club environments, in the late Noughties he quickly moved through making rhythmically fractured hip hop.Just as quickly he leapt into huge trap beats that made him a trailblazer in the explosion of the arena-packing US EDM scene, and from there to being studio collaborator of choice for Kanye West, making significant contributions to 2013’s Yeezus and 2016’s Life of Pablo. Now LA based, he is Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The last time Danger Mouse (Brian Burton to his mum) dropped a hip hop album, it was 2005’s The Mouse & The Mask, a witty, beaty, big and bouncy collaboration with the late, great MF DOOM. That was 17 years ago. In fairness, he’s been busy with worldwide No. 1 smash hits, and production gigs for pop royalty including Adele, U2, Gorillaz and Michael Kiwanuka.For his latest project, Cheat Codes, he's teamed up with rapper Black Thought (Tariq Trotter). A founding member of The Roots, Philadelphia hip hop legends and in-house band for US talk show host Jimmy Fallon, Trotter is considered by Read more ...
mark.kidel
Boris are an eclectic Japanese band, with over 20 albums to their name. Following their creative instincts and often recording live with no overdubs, they are never less than brave, making music that takes no prisoners. They are masters of sounds that are intense, and range widely, from dreamy ambient to furious metal, meditative stillness to a relentless high-speed assault on the senses.Their recent album W, a warp and weft of dream pop and drone, offered a warm embrace of appealing sound. Hot on the heels of music whose strength felt as if it came from gently treading water, Heavy Rocks Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After a burst of gun-shot drumming, “Hot Coffee” instantly hits its groove. Simple but insistent guitar, a rubbery bass line and electric organ all fall into line. For the instrumental’s two-and-half minutes, it is unstoppable.“Gig Soul Party” is as tight but more ornate as the organ playing incorporates flourishes. There’s a spindly solo guitar line and some funky-drummer drumming too. But it’s as effective. Dance floors would have been crowded.Then there’s “Soul Crazy,” another instrumental with the same emphasis on a rigid rhythmic foundation and forward motion. A guitar solo is minimal Read more ...
Tom Carr
With a title like The Alchemist’s Euphoria, Kasabian set senses tingling; anticipating something trippy with this seventh album, their first in five years. But the context behind it is all the more real and raw.In 2020 former frontman Tom Meighan was charged with assault by his domestic partner. As quickly as questions arose of whether the band’s legacy was now tainted, the issue was resolved by Meighan’s departure. But in the time since it has looked understandably uncertain, posing many hard questions to the remaining members.It was a big knot to untangle for Serge Pizzorno, the band’s long Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This month’s reviews take in everything from New York new wave pop to apocalyptic electro to kitsch exotica. There are no genre boundaries at theartsdesk on Vinyl, just a constant desire to play music loud, whether new or reissues, then share what it felt like. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHCongotronics International Where’s the One (Crammed Discs)Crammed Discs is a label that understands how music can connect different cultures and sounds. They put their money where their mouth is when they conjoined crossover African percussion-led outfits Konono No.1 and Kasai Allstars with exploratory indie Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Raf Vilar grew up in Rio De Janeiro he has been based in London for over a decade, where his second album Clichê was recorded. It appears on a label operating from Malmö, Sweden. In keeping with this internationalism, what’s emerged isn’t wholly identifiable as a Brazilian album. His 2011 first was unequivocally titled Studies In Bossa. Now, the designation is more inscrutable.Clichê ends with its title track. Jazzy, with a Bossa Nova lilt, it is intimate, quiet and restrained. The lyrics are in Portuguese, so immediate understanding is difficult – but clichê does translate as cliché Read more ...
theartsdesk
Without doubt, the WOMAD Festival is a major international music institution and an annual landmark in the UK summer festival season. It has also been the major catalyst in the popularisation of non-western music in the UK and further afield from the 1980s onwards.2022 marked the 40th anniversary of the WOMAD Festival and so theartsdesk sent Peter Culshaw, a veteran writer about the scene and an attendee at the first WOMAD, and Guy Oddy, a regular festival visitor but WOMAD newbie to join 40,000 punters and check out this major music event.Prologue – Peter CulshawIt was the 40th anniversary Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s about 30 years since the ever-influential Spacemen 3 called it a day amid a storm of backbiting and recriminations. Yet in 2022, within a couple of months of each other, the band’s twin powerhouses have both released albums of their own. However, while Jason Pierce’s Spiritualized let rip an opus of space rock sounds on Everything Was Beautiful, Sonic Boom has linked up with fellow adopted Portuguese and Animal Collective-ist, Panda Bear for something considerably more breezy and poppy, if no less trippy and head-spinning.Apparently influenced by listening to Sonic Boom’s collection of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
On the last weekend of July, as they have every year since 1965, when an enlightened city council decided that Cambridge – like Newport, Rhode Island – would have a folk festival, thousands of people trekked to Cherry Hinton to enjoy what is now Britain’s premier folk event. One of the biggest in Europe and celebrated throughout the world, Cambridge is a calendar fixture and its return after the inevitable Covid absence was clearly very welcome.Some 1,400 people came to that first festival, which featured the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, Shirley Collins, Bob Davenport, Peggy Seeger, Hedy Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Violinist and composer Ruby Colley combines elements of folk, contemporary classical and jazz with explorations and evocations of the natural world.Her debut release, 2010’s Murmurations, was a minimalist, paired-down evocation of nature and natural forms, and since then, she has written music for films, collaborated on a range of theatre and dance projects, and played with the likes of Sinead O’Connor, The Unthanks and Cosmo Sheldrake.Some of the music from Overheard, her first album in 12 years, stems from collaborations with the arts-and-tech AltPitch festival, and a film of the album’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s polarising discourse and there’s polarising discourse, and then there’s Beyoncé discourse. On the one hand, there’s “the Bey Hive”: the very model of a furious modern fandom who will boost her and monster her critics at a microsecond’s notice. There are the commentators for whom everything she does is by definition profound, moral and important, regardless of any hypercapitalist excesses and hanging out with dicators’ offspring. And they're all buoyed up by a press so desperate for “access” that every profile is done with HELLO! magazine levels of management-vetted swooning. Read more ...