dance music
Guy Oddy
Despite its title, Mdou Moctar’s new album is no slow-paced mournful dirge. In fact, it is louder, faster and more overtly political than any of his band’s previous discs – not so much desert blues as desert punk.Taking up the twin causes of the Tuareg people of West Africa and the post-colonial disaster that has befallen Niger since the end of French occupation, it is nothing short of ferocious in its revolutionary zeal. Repeated riffs, hand-clap percussion, explosive guitars and call-and-response vocals all combine to build an irresistible set that will no doubt create a serious storm when Read more ...
joe.muggs
At 24, Bradfordian Nia Archives has already clearly marked out her musical territory.While many of her Gen Z contemporaries have embraced the rave, jungle and drum’n’bass sounds of the early-mid 1990s, she’s done it more wholeheartedly than most: particularly rebuilding the rolling breakbeats and deep bass of jungle as a kind of British urban folk music, collaborating with older generations (original junglists DJ Die and Randall of Watch The Ride), and demonstrating how her natural Caribbean-influenced Yorkshire vocal articulation fits perfectly into that. Crucially, though, having shown Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A few records changed music. One such was “The Love I Lost (Part 1)” by Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes. Issued as a single by the Philadelphia International label in August 1973, its release introduced what would become a major characteristic of disco music. This was the first time a particular groove was heard; the percussive use of the drum kit’s cymbals with an emphasis on the hi-hat.The inventor of this soon-to-be ubiquitous signifier was Earl Young, a studio-based drummer who since around Autumn 1971 was regularly booked by Philadelphia International producers and songwriters Kenny Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Back in 1979, Koko operated as The Music Machine. As such, the Camden Town venue lent its name to the film Music Machine, marketed as the British equivalent of Saturday Night Fever. Buying into this vision of the North London setting as a hot-bed of dance-floor action required a suspension of belief: at the time, the then-grubby Music Machine’s staple bookings were metal, punk, post-punk and the emerging Two-Tone bands. This was no disco.Flash forward to 2024, and the New York-based Say She She are headlining the recently refurbished Koko. With their roots in late Sixties soul, mid-Seventies Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album starts on an extremely literal note. The whole record is themed around Belgian born-and-raised Bolis Pupul’s explorations of the Chinese side of his heritage after his mother’s death in 2008, and his regrets at not having done so when she was alive. And the opening title track has him explaining precisely this, in a portentously pitched-down voiceover reading the titular letter to his mother. It’s sweet in its directness, but in context its “this is what this record is, and this is what it’s going to do” statement seems blunt – like turning the sleeve notes into a tune.It feels a Read more ...
joe.muggs
Paloma Faith is pretty much the dictionary definition of “full-on”. Always in elaborate hairdos and outré ruffles, big of personality and big of voice, she enthuses and emotes with firehose intensity at any opportunity. So it comes as no surprise that her big breakup album doesn’t pull any punches. Like, really: this is a record which features at its most climactic point, a song called “Eat Shit and Die.”That song – a big production number soul shoutalong which practically demands a Busby Berkley style visual with a cast of hundreds plus fireworks and fountains – is actually a bucketload of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Shaun Ryder is now known mostly for being Shaun Ryder, via any random TV programme that will pay him a couple of quid. In this light, his musical achievements have lost some of their shine over the decades. But, if given the chance, a couple of those Happy Mondays albums and the first Black Grape album still own the room. It’s 30 years since that first Black Grape album, It’s Great When You’re Straight… Yeah (they weren’t!), but the band's two albums since have both been, well, pretty good, actually. And the same can be said for their fourth.The band now consists of just Ryder and his old Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis hasn’t made large waves this side of the Atlantic. Perhaps this is because her appeal has partly been rooted in Latin communities across the US and, indeed, Central and South America. Last year her third album, Red Moon in Venus, reached the Top 5 of the US album charts. At the time she said she already had her next album ready, a Spanish language affair. This is it and it’s a slightly feistier creature than its woozily narcotic predecessor.Uchis’s current default setting remains sexy-stoned. Her voice is a seductive instrument. She silkily rolls language Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the Light of Time - UK Post-Rock and Leftfield Pop 1992-1998 was unexpected. Collecting 17 tracks, it brought a fresh perspective on a particular aspect of the UK’s independent-minded music. This ground-breaking, agenda-setting release was effectively the soundtrack to what has been written about post-rock.The groundswell dug into by In the Light of Time ran in parallel with shoegazing but what was heard – while as much about texture as shoegazing – came from a different perspective as it embraced elements of Krautrock and techno. This was music which impacted on Radiohead and sigur rós. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The KLF are endlessly fascinating. There’s never been a “pop group” like them. From the late Eighties into the early Nineties, they treated music, especially electronic dance music, as a laboratory for lunatic experiment. Unlike most avant-garde thinkers in pop, though, they made a glorious and highly unlikely commercial success of it, via a series of globally successful singles (and, to some degree, the album, The White Room).From their beginnings to demise, filmmaker Bill Butt was an accomplice, creating films and videos as asked. The BFI's 23 Seconds to Eternity gathers these together Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Since first coming together in 1989, The Chemical Brothers have done more than enough to earn their place in the Pantheon of Rave Legends. They may not have been there at the birth of Acid House, but six number one albums, 13 top 20 singles and six Grammy awards is nothing to be sniffed at – especially for a couple of nerdy blokes who basically push buttons on boxes of electronic gadgets.Rave, Techno, Big Beat, Electronic Dance Music, whatever you want to call it, however, is essentially a medium best experienced in the live arena. The soundtrack to a communal experience, where audiences can Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Early on in this arena gig by New Order, a youthful, enthusiastic voice could be heard to say gleefully, “They’re just so 80s!”. That statement was both accurate and yet also misleading, for as this near two-hour performance showcased New Order’s music is both of that decade and yet above it. Take the throbbing “Vanishing Point”, which swirled majestically for several minutes with a driving groove, lights shooting over the crowd. It was a hypnotic, rich tune to lose yourself in, and going by the number of flailing limbs that is exactly what the all ages crowd, from 80s clubbers to Read more ...