indie
theartsdesk
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why. Baxter Dury, Etienne de Crécy and Delilah Holliday - B.E.D. ★★★★★ A small but perfectly sleazy work of sweary, cynical brillianceBob Dylan - More Blood, More Tracks ★★★★★ The fourteenth volume in the Bootleg Series is a keeperBrad Mehldau Trio - Seymour Reads the Constitution! ★★★★★ Prolific improvising pianist creates the apotheosis of the piano trioThe Breeders - All Nerve ★★★★★ Kim and Kelly Deal - plus Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Think of Cocteau Twins. Their label 4AD will inevitably be high on the list of markers coming to mind. Whatever they were like as people, mysterious, oblique, shadowy and other similar adjectives were conjured for the band – and label alike. Despite interpretations of them as something other, their 1990 album 4AD Heaven or Las Vegas went Top Ten in the UK, entered the American Top 100 and sold quarter of a million copies.Yet Cocteau Twins’ final two albums came out on Fontana, an adjunct of the major label Phonogram which, in time, was absorbed into the multi-national conglomerate Universal. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Certain artists’ success lies in a direct ability to pastiche the past into something new and bumptious. Oasis, The Scissor Sisters and The Vaccines all had this in spades and, at their best, created music whose pizzazz and punch eventually rendered their retro allusions irrelevant. The musical back-references are still there but the albums in question long ago outgrew what was so obvious on first listening. The second album from bigger-in-America Derby rockers The Struts falls joyfully into such territory with a couldn’t-give-a-damn insouciance.The Struts look the part, adopting a dandy-ish Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s been a tough few years for Sŵn Festival. Once a genuine rival to fellow urban festivals Great Escape and Sound City, recent events have fluctuated between one-dayers and a string of ticketed gigs. 2018 marked the biggest change yet, but also a return to the multi-day, multi-venue format. Founders Huw Stephens and John Rostron announced they were handing over the reigns to Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff’s leading music venue. This fresh injection of enthusiasm and experience was just what the festival needed. This year, Sŵn was spread over four days: large single gigs on Wednesday and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Out of Touch hinges on the yearning “Conceptual Mediterranean (Part 1)”, the seventh of its ten tracks. At this point, over two-thirds of the way into the album the yacht rock via early Eighties, late-night blue-eyed soul amalgam has bedded in to such a degree it’s become possible to home in on the song rather than its conceptual foundations. Way back, decades ago, the track could have passed for a Hall & Oates demo but here in the early 21st century it’s a triumph of putting theory into practice.Finland’s Jaakko Eino Kalevi certainly knows what he’s doing and Out of Touch is an assured Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The songs of They Might Be Giants have an irresistible way of combining the playful, the childlike and the absurd. The band’s major label debut album, Flood from 1990, which was most people’s entry point into their music, is full of quick-witted humour. Songs from it such as “Birdhouse in Your Soul” and “Istanbul Not Constantinople” (a cover of the 1953 song from The Four Lads, and clearly in a lineage from “Puttin’ on the Ritz”) brought happy cheers of recognition from a willing audience in a packed Barbican last night.The most madcap sequence of last night’s show consisted of the macabre Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Releasing albums of re-recordings of an artist’s work is not a new concept, and it’s one that has been done to great effect in the past. Live albums, remix albums, new versions of poorly recorded songs and even stylistic re-imaginings have all been done very well. From the Only Ones’ BBC recordings, Darkness and Light to Massive Attack v Mad Professor’s No Protection and Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Live at the Lyceum, there have been plenty of successful artistic retreads. Echo and the Bunnymen’s The Stars, The Oceans & The Moon, however, is a completely different kettle of fish.Taking Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bananas is Malcolm Middleton’s first solo album to be built around guitar, bass, drums and all that stuff since 2009’s gorgeous Waxing Gibbous. Like any great artist, he soon became bored with pursuing the classic formulation that made his name (post-Arab Strap). He’s spent the last few years trying new ideas instead. His last album, Summer of ’13, was his take on electropop, there’s his Human Don’t Be Angry experimental albums and a collaboration with the artist David Shrigley. On Bananas, however, those who’ve been pining for his classic sound are rewarded.Middleton is a wordsmith, striking Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The terrace beside the restaurant in Cologne’s Stadtgarten – the city park – is heaving. Agreeably so. A bar and a food counter facing onto it are fringed by rows of long tables. Overhanging trees unite in a canopy suggesting this might be forest clearing. And despite the amount of people of all ages and despite the amount of the local Kölsch beer and the Riesling you’d expect in Rhine-straddling city flying around, the atmosphere is relaxed.On the terrace’s bandstand, Tigger-ish Berlin band Champyons bounce through a mix of electro-inclined pop and guitar-focused songs suggesting a punked-up Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Finland’s Teksti-TV 666 set their musical stall with 2016’s 1,2,3 album, which collected the tracks from their three EPs to date. Now, with their first album proper Aidattu Tulevaisuus, the nature of what they are comes into even sharper focus. In essence, they merge the attack of My Bloody Valentine and “Death Valley 69” Sonic Youth with a punk rock urgency and Krautrock motorik drive. However, any bald description of the raw ingredients sells Teksti-TV 666 short.Aidattu Tulevaisuus (roughly translating to “Trust in the Future”) is 31 minutes long and includes five tracks. A six-piece (“ Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album starts on a slightly odd footing, thanks to the opener “As a Man” having phrases that sound by turns a lot like Propellorheads and Shirley Bassey's “History Repeating” and Grace Jones's cover of Flash And The Pan's “Walking in the Rain”. Not that those are bad records – both are still highly playable – and it certainly sets a tone of arch assurance and cabaret sass. But being reminded so early of such entirely distinctive and out-on-their-own tracks makes it a little hard to triangulate where Calvi is coming from here.As on previous records, there's a great degree of classicism Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Over their past five albums, Interpol have crafted a strong sound that rests on the heavily reverbed, emotive vocals of singer Paul Banks, the subtly discordant guitars, and drums that pound along underneath it all. Although these can still be found on Marauder, the album holds some of the poppiest songs Interpol have ever done – something which doesn’t always work in their favour.This is evident from the very first song, “If You Really Love Nothing”, which couples typically cryptic and morose lyrics with galloping drums and a happy chord sequence that appears to nod to Noughties indie-pop Read more ...