indie
Thomas H. Green
Jack White’s last couple of albums, Boarding House Reach from 2018 and Fear of the Dawn from April this year, were both driven by experimentalism, dipping into electronics, hip hop, noise and more. They were both, to differing degrees, admirable in intent, coming from an artist perceived as zealously retro, but they were also only partially successful.Entering Heaven Alive is a less wilful beast and, in terms of enjoyably straightforward songwriting, the better for it. It will, naturally, and as is undoubtedly intended, be viewed of-a-piece with Fear of the Dawn, since the latter only came Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Many of her fans initially came across Filipino-born, London-raised singer Bea Laus – Beabadoobee – via the massive TikTok sensation “Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)” by Canadian producer Powfu, which was centred on the extremely catchy chorus to her song “Coffee”.But Laus, now 22, has been releasing music since she was 17, and her debut album Fake It Flowers, hit the UK Top 10 in 2020. Beatopia moves things forward sonically. Its sound is more interesting, hazy and stoned, but the songs don’t always match its ambitions.Where Fake It Flowers trod a path somewhere between Avril Lavigne pop- Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Martin Jenkins, AKA The Head Technician, AKA Pye Corner Audio, is all about layers. From the stacked pseudonyms, to the dense, sound-steeped strata of his music, there’s lots going on.His Black Mill Tapes series, released over the last 12 years or so, blends elements of contemporary dance music, epic electronic soundtracks, music concrète and dense, brooding atmospherics. The sound of dark soot dust descending on a remote hillside, it’s simultaneously comforting and claustrophobic. 2021’s Entangled Roots, meanwhile, was inspired by the underground conversational pathways of plants, taking Read more ...
Tom Carr
Despite not matching the success of their fellow New York post-punk colleagues, The Strokes, Interpol have nonetheless carved out a respectable path for themselves since their 2002 debut Turn on the Bright Lights. Occupying the darker edges of indie rock, they are the shadier counterpoint to the eccentricities of Julian Casablancas and co, their albums consistently making the UK Top 10 for the past two decades.Returning after four years with their latest effort, The Other Side of Make-Believe, its origins have a familiar-sounding tale to many recent albums: recording began in 2020, each of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The third album from Stockholm rowdies Viagra Boys doesn’t muck about with what they do, but it’s more persistently punkin’ than their last. There’s more than a snifter of Iggy and the Stooges in both the vocal style and the raucous over-amped riffage, but Viagra Boys spice their sound with electronics and, where early-Seventies Ig was always about untrammelled “Raw Power”, this lot are as happy to offer wry lyrical critiques among the all-out stompers.Thus, goofin’ rock’n’roll trashiness such as “Troglodyte”, which comes on like The Cramps discovering Krautrock, sits easily alongside songs Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The last minute of Found Light’s third track “Seaside Haiku” is defined by the repetition of a single phrase: “give but don’t give too much of yourself away.” Before this is the line “I’ve learned a lot from pain.”Working out whether an album’s lyrics are a form of personal reportage or if they’re about imagined scenarios is always tricky. In this case Laura Veirs has said her 12th album is about what comes after divorce, so it feels safe to assume that “Seaside Haiku” is born from past events and describes an outlook generated by what’s been experienced.Elsewhere on Found Light, other lyrics Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Last days of June 2022, I sit in my writing hut. My liver is radioactive jelly, my nose reinforced concrete, my leg muscles marathon-cramped, and poisoned perspiration rolls down my forehead, stinging my eyeballs.You’ll already have seen a trillion Twittering threepenny-bit reports on Glastonbury, but you haven’t taken this trip, I promise. So stroll in, fall over, pick yourself back up, take it all in, sniff it all up, drink it all down. Let’s do this.THURSDAY 23rd JUNEFinetime, my regular Glastonbury partner and photographer, is very proud of the tent he’s bought me from Lidl. My own tent Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The historic, the prehistoric, the natural, architectural, geological, ornithological, or on the side of its folklore, Christian or heathen – the place teems with subject matter that is as curious as it is interesting.” So the Gothic Revival architect John Dando Sedding wrote of Cornwall in 1887.Now, the county’s riches are supplemented by the third album from the Wales-born Gwenno Saunders, on which all but two tracks are sung in Cornish: one is in Welsh, another is an instrumental. Sedding’s inventory applies to Tresor – which translates as "Treasure" – as much as it does to Victorian Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
American singer-songwriter Damien Jurado is both prolific and enigmatic. His latest album follows too many to count (OK, not really, I think this is his 20th). On his own label, it's as opaque as anything he’s done, and that’s saying something.There are 12 songs, at least half of them around the two-minute mark, all opaque and mysterious, but also often fascinating. “What is he singing about?” the listener asks themselves, a sense of what’s going on elusive but also, tantalisingly, almost within reach.A concept album, then? Kind of. There’s a very loose thematic of films sets. Possibly. Or Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Figuratively, “Tselane” is Blk Jks’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Both songs begin quietly and move through passages of turbulence suggesting an impending tempest. Each has a command of dynamics which pulls the listener in, generating anticipation for what comes next. On stage, “Tselane” is introduced as a “lullaby.”Musically – beyond them being a form of rock – little obviously connects “Tselane” and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” but the association is there: it’s about the contrasts, the subtle union of drama and tranquillity.“Tselane” was first heard as the closing track of Blk Jks – said Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Summer has arrived outside and sunny sounds are blasting from the speakers at theartsdesk on Vinyl. But not just sunny sounds, to be truthful, also sounds that cover most of the human emotional range, all from plastic discs in varying colours. Check in below for over 8000 words on music, from Afro-electro to Cornish rock to tango to genres beyond naming. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHShelf Lives Yes, Offence (Sorry Mom)Juddering, sweary, punkin’, sneering electro-rock is the game of London-based duo Shelf Lives, fronted by single-monikered Canadian frontwoman Sabrina and Brit producer-guitarist Read more ...
Tom Carr
For the Oxford alt-rock mainstays Foals, the past two years brought an anti-climactic pause to a triumphant 2019: their meteoric trajectory had kept pace with their duo of albums, Everything Not Saved Will be Lost Part 1 and 2. The sister albums had given the group their first UK album #1 with Part 2, and their live reputation was glowing brighter still.And then it all stopped.Now, as the bleak lockdown years silhouette their new album Life Is Yours, it’s no surprise they return with a sound steeped in summertime vibes. Moving away from the cinematically framed Part 1 and Part 2, Life Is Read more ...