New music
Alfred Quantrill
Born in the bedroom of keyboard player Charles de Boisseguin, bathed in a sleek, quintessentially French tradition of electro-pop, L’Impératrice materialised on the darkened stage at the O2 Shepherds Bush, with glowing hearts beating in unison on their chests. The beat quickened into a single tone to lead into “Off to the Side”, leaping from an intimate, near whispered opening to a snappy, electric chorus.Postponed three times, the gig was initially advertised as the London leg of a world tour for the group’s “Matahari” debut album from 2019. It became instead an adrenaline-fuelled romp Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s a period of British club music that deserves to be much better appreciated. Before hardcore and jungle, before the Underworlds and Leftfields and other arena acts, came a generation who were much closer to the most song-based US house music, to considerable success. Between 1988 and 1990 came dazzling records from S’Express, The Beloved, Coldcut’s earliest manifestation, and several Eighties pop acts that evolved with the times: The Style Council, The Blow Monkeys and Boy George with his Jesus Loves You project.Into this milieu came four Brummies known as the Groove Corporation, and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“Maybe it’s just me, but I think you need some weed” chants B-Real on “Come with Me”, just one of the hymns to getting high on Cypress Hill’s tenth studio album of tales about gang-banging and smoking industrial volumes of cannabis. However, while their tunes used to very funny and even inspired, as they forced you to get up on your feet and shake a leg, Back to Black sees the formula start to get a little thin.Things start well with “Takeover”: a statement of intent with a dirty, stoned groove. “Open Ya Mind” is a call for a consistent implementation of weed legalisation across the United Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Britpop-era favourites have been critically buried for the most part, unwelcome reminders, much like a hangover, of a wild party now seen as a regrettable generational aberration. The Boo Radleys were outsiders even at the time, Wirral experimental pop classicists not far off thirty when 1995’s “Wake Up Boo!”, a deliberate hit as atypical as REM’s “Shiny Happy People”, hit the Top 10 and introduced Chris Evans’ hedonistic Radio 1 Breakfast Show. They were gawky, shoegaze-y relics of the old Creation Records now Oasis were its cocky figureheads and, behind the single’s euphoric rush, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 2000, Broadcast’s first album The Noise Made By People entered the UK’s mainstream Top 100 and claimed the top spot on the dance charts. Three years later, their second album Haha Sound was in the Top Ten of America’s dance/electronic charts. It also went Top Five on the UK’s dance charts.Although this confirms Birmingham's Broadcast weren’t necessarily outsiders, their third album Tender Buttons did not chart. By this point, in 2005, they had slimmed down from a five-piece to core members James Cargill and Trish Keenan. Tender Buttons was followed by the 2009 collaboration album Broadcast Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After a count in, the first lines of album opener "Commune" are “I’ve been away now far too long, lost and alone with no commune.” Fair enough. For the Sake of Bethel Woods is Midlake’s first album since 2013’s Antiphon.The second track is “Bethel Woods”. Eric Pulido sings “I could get rid of it all for the sake of the Bethel Woods, to a time and place where peacefulness was stood.” Upstate New York’s Bethel Woods was the site of 1969’s Woodstock Festival. Midlake’s flute/keyboard player Jesse Chandler grew up in Bethel. The album’s sleeve image draws from a fleeting shot of his now-passed Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Seems odd now, but there was a time when many Brits found country music laughable. It was a common thing. For instance, when Keith Richards embraced country, Jagger initially thought it a joke. By the time I was coming up in the Eighties, post-punk still a long shadow, my peers and I mostly felt the same; country was corny schmaltz dominated by middle-aged rhinestone blandness. I soon realised the error of my ways, but The Shires’ fifth album reminds me that, back then, we did also have a point.On their debut, The Shires sang, “We can build our own Nashville underneath these grey skies.” The Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Norwegian artist Jenny Hval is a novelist as well as a singer-songwriter, and her new album certainly has a literary approach to music making.Classic Objects is made of up little stories set to music - standalone units of narrative outside of the usual verse and chorus structure. They’re not quite the made-up fables of folk but not quite a straight up representation of reality either, meandering between real life observation and constructed philosophical sketches.The title track, “Year of Love” introduces a theme which flows through the album – the analysis of a musician during a time when Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Dead Awake may be the first album by London-based trio Black Doldrums, but it is one with very deep roots that grow from dark psychedelia, early Goth sounds and those ever-reliable touchstones, Suicide and the Velvet Underground. In short, it harks back to a time before the Acid House revolution, when all the cool kids dressed in black and were rarely to be seen shaking a leg on the dancefloor.Opening tune “Sad Paradise” explicitly sounds like an outtake from Darklands-era Jesus and Mary Chain, with fuzzy guitars and mumbled vocals drenched in reverb riding on the back of a driving drumbeat. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In July 1967, a British band called The Ingoes changed their name. Up to this point they’d traded in R&B, blues and soul, and tackled some rock ’n roll covers too. Ingoes referenced the 1958 Chuck Berry song “Ingo”. As they’d just recorded their debut album, a rebranding was needed. It was psychedelic so their management came up with Blossom Toes.When it was issued in November 1967, that album – We Are Ever So Clean – wasn’t a strong seller but, in time, its magnificence was recognised. Original copies now fetch around £250. It’s reissued as an expanded three-CD edition, supplementing the Read more ...
theartsdesk on Vinyl 69: Andrew Weatherall, Courtney Barnett, Wings, Los Bitchos, Popol Vuh and more
Thomas H. Green
As the year starts to rev up, theartsdesk on Vinyl returns with over 7000 words on new music on plastic, a smörgåsbord of the kind you will find nowhere else. This month we also have a competition for the dance music lovers among you, a chance to win a £50 gift card for the new app Recycle Vinyl (online stock of 10,000 records + 25,000 in their warehouse + 500 more added every week). For a chance to win, simply email the answer to the following question to recyclevinylcomp@gmail.com: who is described in the reviews below as a "Canadian violinist”? (check in on Recycle Vinyl here). That aside Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Seven and a half years ago, Loop frontman Robert Hampson retired the band's back catalogue in front of a live audience. “You won’t hear these old songs again,” he told the audience at Islington’s Garage.As shocks go, it might not have been up there with Bowie handing Ziggy Startdust – and most of his unsuspecting band – their P45s live on stage, but it was still a searing statement of intent. It signalled Loop as a continuing concern, but one determined not to trade on past glories.With Sonancy, Hampson has made good on his promise. While some might hear the muscular riffing and relentless, Read more ...