dance music
joe.muggs
If you want the distilled sound of global hypercapitalism, David Guetta is your man. A genial, workaholic Frenchman, he has created the sound of superclubs from Miami to Dubai to Kuala Lumpur – the sort of clubs where the VIP section is bigger than the main dance floor, with Guetta's own “F*ck Me I'm Famous” parties in Ibiza as the ideal model – and, thanks to the trickle-down effect, the sound of every shopping mall and taxi from here to eternity. His sound is the cheesiest of Nineties commercial dance music given a turbo boost with every possible megastar from the worlds of rap and R&B Read more ...
joe.muggs
At the start of September, the fourth Outlook Festival takes place in a 19th-century fort on the Croatian coast. Already this festival has become a vital point in the calendar for those involved with dubstep, grime and other UK underground scenes – not only a jolly in the sun (“dubstep's Ibiza”), but the one time in the year when everyone involved takes a break from international touring and comes together in the same place, a time to compare notes and take stock of the progress. Its British organisers make even bigger claims for it, though: they see it as drawing together decades' worth of “ Read more ...
howard.male
The title in part refers to the container ships that as well as bringing food stuffs etc, to many of the world’s ports, also bring people and their music. But this album is far from just another melting-pot fusion of all the usual styles - Balkan, reggae, ska, funk – all the usual suspects. The focus is just on the taranta (the other half of the title) - a collective term for a number of up-tempo Italian folk dances originating from the heel of Italy.Proceedings open with just the rippling muscular sound of an accordion and a lone acoustic guitar, suggesting tasteful restraint. But then after Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Little Rock, the state capital of Arkansas, usually comes to mind in association with hometown boy Bill Clinton. Soul and funk fans, however, aren’t fussed with the sax-playing former governor and president and fixate on the city’s True Soul label, the home of a raft of rare and sought-after sides. Two volumes compiling the imprint have just been issued and include previously unissued tracks. The harmony-driven soul, Southern grooves and tight funk make a case for True Soul being an essential component of soul USA.Musically, Bill C’s sax was in keeping with Little Rock’s limited musical Read more ...
howard.male
Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. So it’s something to both celebrate and ruminate upon, that on Tuesday night I was reviewing a gig at which the guitar was undisputed king, whereas last night I was standing before an 11-piece band that didn’t include a single guitar. But the Romanian big band Mahala Rai Banda produce such a brassily dense sound that it’s hard to imagine even the most cranked-up Strat being able to get a chord in edgeways.But first up we were treated to homegrown Balkan boogie merchants The Trans-Siberian March Band. You wouldn’t think that a band that raided the Read more ...
david.cheal
This is pretty weird stuff. Or at least, that’s the way it seems at first. If all you know, as I did to begin with, is that DJ Diamond is a 24-year-old DJ from the West Side of Chicago whose real name is Karlis Griffin, and that Flight Muzik is his debut album, then this will seem like music from another planet – one where notions such as melody, structure and listenability have little meaning; it’s music, but not as most of us know it.The rhythms are complex and multilayered – often there’s more than one going on at the same time: a hummingbird-fast heartbeat as the backdrop, with Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Anticon label is a deepy peculiar animal. Around the turn of the millennium, its core members – going by names like Boom Bip, Doseone, cLOUDdEAD, Jel and So-Called Artists – took a nerdy yet intensely psychedelic approach to hip hop, and ended up creating a woozy and out-there sound that prefigured a huge amount of currently hip music. Now that the appallingly named new shifts in stoner music - “glo-fi” and “chillwave” - are opening up the territory between indie and hip hop/dance again, Anticon seems hugely prescient, but with new artists like Son Lux, it seems the label is once again Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Few bands maintain their early fanbase for 20 years by barely changing their sound, their dress sense, haircuts even, and yet manage to mature like Gouda cheese, gaining depth of flavour and punch over time. But Portishead have. The crowd in Alexandra Palace in north London was largely made up of people who would have bought Dummy, Portishead’s Mercury Prize-winning debut, when it came out in the mid-Nineties. I even spotted three people wearing combat jeans.This cusp-of-vintage style was perfect for the sticky floor and blackout-fabric-draped interior of the people’s palace, where even the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Between 1996 and the earliest years of the 21st century, the Manchester-based duo Lamb defined a moody, ambient, dance-influenced pop – the trip-hop/chill-out nexus. "Górecki", their 1997 chart single, will always be their most well-known moment. Lamb played what was announced back then as their final live show in 2004. But Andy Barlow and Lou Rhodes reunited for a slew of festival dates in 2009. Both had been working solo, and 5 is the first recorded evidence of their second life.Rhodes’s voice is smokier than before, fuller, more rounded and less likely to dance around the melody line. A Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's always interesting to see how revolutions in music get folded back into the fabric of the culture that fomented them. Dubstep, which changed club culture so dramatically in the mid-2000s, is now an intrinsic part of that culture from mainstream to margins, and the forms it takes as it beds into these various parts of the ecosystem are manifold. And Jazzsteppa – two Israelis named Gal and their trombones – turn their hands to a fair few of those forms.Watch video for "Investment Decision"
Hyper Nomads is on a label run by dance/dub veteran and ex-KLF producer Tony Thorpe. It is a Read more ...
joe.muggs
“It's like an advert for American Apparel,” said my companion a song into the set – and she had a point. The elegantly poised electropop of Little Dragon is so sharp, so cool, so impeccably internationalist in its outlook and presentation that, taken in small doses, it would be perfect for any brand targeted at affluent hipsters. But while their antics on stage, and especially those of singer Yukimi Nagano were admittedly a brand manager's dream at any given moment, over time they proved to be something much more interesting.'Pleasingly for a crowd so dressed up, they appeared extremely Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Motown label will forever be identified with its Detroit birthplace, even though it had a Los Angeles office in the Sixties. The shift west was completed in 1972 when founder Berry Gordy Jr moved the whole concern to California. Before that though, in 1971, Gordy had launched subsidiary imprint Mowest to ostensibly showcase Los Angeles acts and as a test run for the California move. This gold-chip compilation shows Mowest is worth remembering. Motown's Mowest Story 1971-1973: Our Lives are Shaped by What we Love is the first comp to dig into this all but lost imprint. It’s terrific.Mowest Read more ...