New music
Tom Carr
Queens of the Stone Age. The Dead Weather. The Raconteurs. For those who know these bands intimately, Dean Fertita is no stranger. But to those less familiar he might need a little introducing.Fertita has long been a prominent, yet, background figure in the American rock and hard rock scenes. An invaluable member of both QOTSA and The Dead Weather, he has also worked with Iggy Pop, The Kills, Beck amongst many others.Until now he has been content to avoid the spotlight. But the pandemic gave him time to turn his attention to the demos he had built up over the years. The result is Tropical Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s a song by Kevin Ayers called “The Lady Rachel”. It was on his 1969 debut solo LP Joy Of A Toy. Play it alongside “This Still Life”, the second track on the second album from Ireland’s Aoife Nessa Frances and the aesthetic kinship is clear. The differing genders of the singer-composers aside, one could swap with the other and snugly fit onto either release.It’s not that the Kerry-recorded Protector sounds like it seeks to recreate the past, but that Frances has a sensibility – whether innate and instinctive or intentional – tapping into a seam of archetypal yet idiosyncratic Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Taylor Swift’s transitions have become imperious, from the woody hush of her collaborations with The National’s Aaron Dessner, Folklore and Evermore, to the remade reclamations of her early work. Working at pace, she has assembled an impregnable coalition of critical acceptance and creative range.Her contemporary country roots remain in her focus on relatable personal stories, pushed now into a hyper-realm of total fame and universally pored-over relationships, dropped like paper trails in her lyrics. She confesses with wry assertion, a female star taking everything in her messy stride. Like Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s now six years since Goat last released an album of new songs and, despite a live disc and one of B-sides and other odds and sods that have appeared in the meantime, its Requiem title suggested that it might have been their last call to arms. However, do not fear, our favourite pagan psychedelicists are back in the ring and on top form with a lively soundtrack that is more than enough to drag even the most dancefloor phobic up on their feet to shake a leg.Yet again, these mysterious mask-wearing Scandinavians defy any easy classification though, taking in 70s funk grooves, Afrobeat Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the third week of April 1967, Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s “Somethin’ Stupid” topped the UK’s single’s chart. Sandie Shaw’s “Puppet on a String” was number two, and The Monkees’ “A Little Bit me a Little Bit You” snapped at her heels. Englebert Humperdinck’s recent number one “Release me” was at number five. All very pop, very mainstream.The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Purple Haze” was in running too then, as were Pink Floyd’s “Arnold Layne” and The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” / “Strawberry Fields Forever”. But other chart entries like Whistling Jack Smith’s “I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman”, The Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s the second night of a four-night run at the London Palladium of the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Tour – no other Dylan jaunt has taken an album for its title – and it begins with a blast of symphonic violence from the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. The house lights fade to black, the symphony segues into a modal tune-up on stage, Dylan and his four-piece – second guitarist Bob Britt is not here tonight – barely visible in silhouette.And then it begins in a flurry of piano keys and guitar, the stage becoming eerily lit from below, and Dylan leans in to a song from the early 1970s, “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
At the start of the song “Two Ribbons” Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth of Let’s Eat Grandma do a brief schoolyard pat-a-cake hand-game. The song is a guileless ode to female friendship, love even, a paean to their own bond, which was strained at one point by the travails of a music career.Of course, it’s a piece of theatre, but the pair also emanate a very real sense of young women enjoying each other’s company, revelling in the sheer creative fun they have together. It’s a big part of their appeal. Kate Bush would be proud of them.Three albums into their career, the Norfolk duo are still Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Ten minutes before The Orb got on stage at the Hare & Hounds, Alex Paterson was standing in the building’s courtyard with a big old spliff in his hand “clearing his head” and getting ready for action. So, it was good to know that some things don’t change.The audience of this sold-out 30th anniversary celebration of the ambient house trailblazers’ second album, UF Orb, similarly largely looked like they could quite easily have been there the first time round too. A room full of mainly 40- and 50-something blokes, with a surprisingly small smattering of female counterparts, were packed in, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Witch Fever are a seething punk outfit from Manchester whose debut album rampages at the patriarchy with unbridled fury. The tone throughout is summed up in “Sour”, wherein grimy, gloomy riffin’ is accompanied by oblique references to Christianity, before the whole slams into a chorus of shrieked outrage, “They won’t take no for an answer/As if they ever fucking ask/Yeah, we incite this violence/Nothing ever changed in silence.”Frontperson Amy Walpole draws from her past, growing up in a family that was part of an evangelical sect (the Charismatic Church). Her lyrics take God as the ultimate Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Among those making her Cambridge Folk Festival on the diminutive Club Stage back in the summer was Angeline Morrison, a Birmingham-born singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist who these days makes her home in Cornwall, drawn at least in part by its folk music. Her short solo performance was noteworthy, and earlier this month it was announced that Morrison has been awarded the Christian Raphael Prize 2022, presented in association with the Festival. She is the fourth honouree, the roster including Katherine Priddy and Nick Hart.Last night, Morrison and her three excellent musicians ( Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Who could really make head or tail of Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino? It was weird. Interesting, occasionally brilliant, but definitely weird. Now it’s time to almost come back down to earth (but not Sheffield earth, obviously). Alex Turner’s move from LA to Paris has surely levelled things a tad, and the result is a supremely confident, more mature creation with diverse musical references, orchestration by Bridget Samuels and a lot of falsetto.Is it any good? Yes. Is it a return to form? If you’re looking for the bangers of yore, no. It’s not pop, it’s not rock n roll Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Folk music? It’s all old blokes in shapeless clothes wailing on about ploughmen and fishermen, isn’t it?Not in the hands of the Bonfire Radicals it isn’t. In fact, their sophomore album launch at the Hare and Hounds not only challenged this somewhat outdated and clichéd view of Europe’s traditional roots music, but completely blew it out of the water. For south Birmingham’s self-proclaimed un-traditional folk band brought out reels, jigs, a murder ballad and plenty of global grooves – which had their audience bouncing around from the first notes to the final fade out at the unveiling of Read more ...