jazz
Nick Hasted
Charles Lloyd is too graciously, fully alive to set in iconic aspic, his latest golden era still in mid-flow aged 82, when his surviving sax peers, Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter, can no longer blow. The worlds he’s passed through beyond jazz indicate his broad curiosity and importance. Lloyd knew Elvis when he was a truck-driver, dropped in on Dylan and The Band’s basement sessions, played with Howlin’ Wolf and the Beach Boys. He was on Fillmore rock bills before Miles, breaking down jazz’s walls.This third album with his occasional, Americana-leaning outfit the Marvels accordingly Read more ...
joe.muggs
Theartsdesk is a labour of love. Bloody-mindedly run as a co-operative of journalists from the beginning, our obsession with maintaining a daily-updated platform for good culture writing has caused a good few grey and lost hairs over the years. But it has also been rewarding – and looking back over the 10 years of Disc of the Day reviews has been a good chance to remind ourselves of that. One thing in particular that drew me into the collective when it was founded, and has kept me going throughout, was the understanding that artistic forms would be treated with equal respect and Read more ...
theartsdesk
On Valentine’s Day 2011 Disc of the Day album reviews sprang into being, and has been solidly reviewing five albums a week ever since. Out of the many thousands, which ones did we rate the most? To mark 10 years since its inception, 12 of theartsdesk’s music writers mark the occasion by choosing an Album of the Decade. They appear in alphabetical order by writer.Alt-J – An Awesome Wave – by Russ CoffeyThe early 2010s was a period when UK rock music slowly lost its swagger. The harsh economic climate meant songwriters increasingly forgot about the good times; instead, they turned their minds Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ten years ago yesterday, on Monday 14th February 2011, one of theartsdesk’s writers, Joe Muggs, reviewed an album called Paranormale Aktivitat, by an outfit called Zwischenwelt. It was the first ever Disc of the Day, a new slot inserted into theartsdesk’s front page design, where it still resides today. By the end of the year, we’d introduced the now-obligatory stars-out-of-five system, keeping in the swim with other reviewing media. Since then, Disc of the Day has covered approximately 2600 albums and, before COVID, when the tube trains were running, it gave me great pleasure to see those Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Arrival Of The New Elders is unlike anything Norwegian trio Elephant9 have done before. Previously, their jazz-prog mélange was as full-on as it could be. Attacking, hard and heavy. Now, a previously unfamiliar pensiveness has been revealed.While Elephant9’s sixth studio album still sounds like keyboard player Ståle Storløkken, bassist Nikolai Eilertse and drummer Torstein Lofthus, there’s a more measured, clearly less improvised approach. Tempi are slower and the interplay between the players is easier to discern. There’s a new space too. Storløkken plays more electric piano than before, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two of the four CDs in this set are of a live performance taped on 16 April 1964. The other pair of discs were recorded on 9 July 1975. Each show issued on Charles Mingus @ Bremen 1964 & 1975 was captured by the north German regional broadcaster Radio Bremen. There was an audience of 220 at the earlier show, 440 at the later.While each performance runs to just short of two hours, the contrasts between them are not limited to representing different periods in the career of double bassist/pianist Charles Mingus. The compositions played are unique to each show, and there's a different Read more ...
peter.quinn
One of the great ironies of 2020 was that, in a year in which the importance of music – as escape, as release, as comforter – was amplified like no other, vast swathes of musicians saw their livelihoods disappear overnight.A far-reaching commentary on the unending cycle of human greed and corruption, couched in music of Ellingtonian richness, Wynton Marsalis’s The Ever Fonky Lowdown was the latest in a line of hard-hitting socio-political works from the acclaimed trumpeter and composer which includes Black Codes (1985), Blood on the Fields (1996) and From the Plantation to the Penitentiary ( Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 2020, one archive release exerted a more forceful presence than any other. Live At Goose Lake August 8th 1970 caught The Stooges as they promoted their second album Fun House. The source was a previously unknown, professionally recorded tape documenting the whole album as it was played live, in its running order. Iggy Pop and the band were hard yet sloppy, tight yet rough, always blazing. Wonderful – and a reminder that musical surprises still crop up.While contemplating what’s been covered in this column over the last year, the feeling that archive releases can shift perceptions rises to Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This year of all years – surely – we need music which takes us to better, happier places. And the new album from Norwegian-born saxophonist/composer Marius Neset does that. It also gives us a bit more hindsight and context as to what his two previous albums involving large ensembles were all about. One can now see more clearly that the 500+ pages of dense orchestral scoring that he painstakingly wrote for his quintet and the London Sinfonietta in Snowmelt and Viaduct were his ‘années de galère’ as a composer.Tributes (ACT) is not simple music by any means, and yet there is a complete sense of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I’ll leave it to others, better placed, to unpack 2020’s gruelling impact on so many. But one of its side effects was the elevation, alongside food and television, of recorded music. It became a salve, a focus, a locus of social media blather about what was getting us through. Lockdown ears were lifted by a heady gumbo of new discoveries and old favourites. Certainly, my best-of-year lists are overfull. There’s nothing I'm taking a punt on; it’s all lived stuff, revelled in.100% Yes, the third album from London jazz-punk-funk unit Melt Yourself Down, from its title onwards, musters an Read more ...
theartsdesk on Vinyl 61: Amy Winehouse, Krust, Motörhead, Extrawelt, Sade, Chase and Status and more
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the penultimate 2020 edition of the world’s vastest, most musically wide-ranging, regularly posted, online vinyl reviews. This year vinyl boomed, especially in the wake of COVID-19, with gig-goers stuck at home but wanting new music. 2020’s sales are now heading for the £100 million mark, vinyl’s biggest year since 1990. When theartsdesk on Vinyl began, six years ago, it was a very different picture. All things must pass, and vinyl eventually will, but that’s for the churls! Let’s enjoy these boom times. So check out the reviews below, which run the gamut from the grungiest thrash Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Gary Barlow’s Music Played By Humans is, in all but name, a Christmas album. Mixing big-band jazz, Latin and pop, it’s an assortment box of bubbly, broad-based business bangers deployed by the Take That veteran with help from a host of showbiz pals. Michael Bublé, Barry Manilow, Chilly Gonzales, Alesha Dixon, Beverley Knight, James Corden… these are big boots to put on the ground.It’s got “Secret Santa” written all over it – and not just because it’s a precision-built, one-size-fits-all, weapons-grade gifting opportunity for work acquaintances and pissed aunties alike. No. It’s Read more ...