New music
Kieron Tyler
“This is a record company’s idea of new wave. Clichéd heavy metal riffs and someone shouting in a cockney voice. This is a con and I hate it”.Notwithstanding that it would be a record company’s idea of things as just such an organisation was putting the record out, Geoff Travis, of the Rough Trade record shop, was unequivocal in his view of Cock Sparrer’s crunching debut single “Runnin’ Riot” for Record Mirror in July 1977.Considering “Runnin’ Riot”, NME said “Decca finally have a punk, sorry skinhead band. Not surprisingly they play faster than you’ll ever get to talk – like a souped up Read more ...
Katie Colombus
What a conflict of interests. I feel like Jean-Claude Van Damme in that Volvo ad, with the truck on the left hand side being my music editor who was recently name-checked by Lewis Capaldi after describing him as “a constipated Hozier”, and my children on the other who are constantly squawking about the video snippet from “Wish You the Best” shared on Tiktok about the little dog in the bike basket that’s making hoardes of adolescent children sob at the bus stop.Personally, I massively rate Capaldi for being so snort-inducingly dry in his self-deprecating humour, and his honesty about living Read more ...
Tim Cumming
These encounters are ones that may lead to lifelong relationships, with the halls at Kings Place this coming weekend filled with music from Mali, Colombia, Turkey, Georgia, Estonia, Tibet and a woodland in Sussex.Friday’s double-headed line-up features Malian blues-rock guitarist Vieux Farka Toure returning to his roots on his recent album, La Racines, with a focus on Songhai music from northern Mali, while in Hall Two the all-female London-based Mariachi band Las Adelitas reverse a few macho stereotypes.Saturday will be a high point, with not only a surround-sound remote connection with Sam Read more ...
Tom Carr
In the era of TikTok and Spotify playlists, it’s hard to gauge when an artist will reach the nebulous threshold and become popular. But for those who can ride this game of algorithms – the change can be sudden.Look no further than Sleep Token. The British metal collective whose anonymity and heavy gothic apparel set them apart upon entering the scene. Their unique style, coupled with a metal sound that defies firm genre definitions quickly garnered them a niche following since 2017.With their two albums so far (2019 debut Sundowning and 2021’s This Place Will Become Your Tomb) their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Estonia’s Mart Avi styles himself as “the twilight samurai of alternative pop”. He creates “nowhere-somewhere music, mapping uncharted territories between avant-pop and timeless grandeur”. The characterisations are issued via AVICORP, his internet presence.The in-person Mart Avi has an arresting charisma; a star quality making it impossible not to be drawn in by his 40-minute performance at Tallinn Music Week. The look could be enough – cutting a David Bowie and Brett Anderson dash. Despite what he says about its nebulousness, his music is a moody electropop with shades of The Associates, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kesha is one of the 21st century’s most characterful pop stars. She’s regularly stepped out of the boxes people have put her in, musically and otherwise. But, even taking into account truly oddball songs such as “Godzilla” (from 2017’s Rainbow), or projects such as working with Flaming Lips, Gag Order, created with cosmic ultra-producer Rick Rubin, is by far her most out-there work. It’s also the sound of a tormented human being.On her first two albums Kesha personified young American women raucously embracing hedonism, breaking out of the cultural straitjackets that had head-melted Britney, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Paul Simon is an ornery bugger. Full of awkwardness and perversity as a person, seemingly hugely detached, but as an artist capable of as much tenderness and directness as just about anyone out there. Capable of making world-changing artistic statements but queering his pitch with bizarrely, unnecessarily reactionary statements or actions. Really, a very weird man.But thankfully, he’s never gone all the way into cantankerousness. He’s not a Morrissey, so high on his own farts that the perversity becomes his entire persona, and every action and word is layered with provocation and second Read more ...
caspar.gomez
“stay with the beer. beer is continuous blood. a continuous lover.” So said Charles Bukowski in his poem “how to be a great writer”. Who am I to argue. It’s a bright day and 11.50 AM. The sun isn’t past the yard-arm but the beer is cold and good. IPA. Finetime and I stand with Vanessa, her 18-year-old son Cody and her mate Jodie. Vanessa has a short blond crop which glows.We’re to the west of Brighton, by the sea, the outdoor enclave of The Great Escape. As in other years, the three stages are dominated on Saturday by Australian acts. We’re here to catch the first of the day in the Amazon New Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Life is better together, and the beauteous sounds created by The Milk Carton Kids proves it. Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan got their acts together in 2011, having each pursued solo careers that never quite gelled. Ryan pitched up at a Pattengale gig in Eagle Rock, California, which was home for both of them.They recorded their first album live at Zoey’s Café in Ventura a few months later and would soon be featured in the all-star line-up for Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of Inside Llewyn Davis. Now comes their sixth studio album, their first since The Only Ones, a short Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In July 2007, an article in The Guardian expressed surprise that shoegazing was influencing a series of current musicians, Blonde Redhead, Deerhunter, Maps and Ulrich Schnauss amongst them.“You could hear the heady, woozy influence of a style of music that had been a byword for naffness and overindulgence for the past 15 years,” said the article’s opening paragraph. “A type of music that Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers had said he ‘hated more than Hitler’".Five years on, in the same newspaper, a May 2012 live review of America’s Beach House said much the same thing: “The early Read more ...
joe.muggs
In one sense you know what you’re going to bet with Róisín Murphy. Disco beats, a lot of bright colours, costume changes, goofing about, kick-arse vocals, and hats – lots and lots of hats. And yes, all that was present and correct at the Royal Albert Hall. But in another way, any given show is alien territory.Murphy is an artist who has never sat still since her first releases with Moloko in 1994, not just reinventing herself from project to project as is standard for savvy pop acts, but shifting from minute to minute between accents, sounds, attitudes, seriousness and foolishness, futurism Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Mali’s Tuareg superstars, Tinariwen have been burnishing their assouf desert blues sounds with the echoes of folk and country sounds from the rural USA for some time – most especially on their 2014 Emmaar and more recent Amadjar albums. However, these foreign sounds have never felt more than a bit of decoration before now.Amatssou, an album produced by Daniel Lanois, with pedal steel, banjo and fiddle from Wes Corbett and Fats Kaplin and additional percussion by Amar Chaoui, feels more like a focussed collaboration between two distinct musical genres – even if it was largely put together at a Read more ...