New music
Guy Oddy
It must be exhausting to be a member of Belfast hip-hop crew, Kneecap. Having already recorded a debut album and fistful of fine singles like “H.O.O.D.” and “Get Your Brits Out” in the late 2010s, during the last couple of years they’ve participated in a semi-autobiographical film and its soundtrack, put out the splendid Fine Art, toured relentlessly and then had to endure the circus of being named pop’s latest bogymen because of their support for the Palestinian people.Not ones to retreat into moneyed exile, however, their new album tries to make sense of the situation with a barrel load of Read more ...
Katie Colombus
In an era of excessive production for live shows, it is striking to see a band of Big Thief’s stature walk onto a stage this large and offer almost nothing but the songs themselves. No grand entrance, no visual shenanigans, no swag. Just four musicians, a handful of instruments, and darn good songs. But then their appeal has always lain elsewhere – in the frayed and tender edges of their songs, in the way they can make the intimate feel infinite, and the infinite feel as ordinary as a dirt road at dusk. At Brixton, that same hum of nonchalant chill settled over the evening. They came on Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
In just over three years Olivia Dean has gone from taking the stage at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow to selling out two nights at the city’s largest venue. Such a leap up in surroundings in a short space of time did not seem to faze Dean though, the 27-year-old Londoner possessing both a honeyed voice and a Disney Princess smile onstage. She was confident enough, in fact, to drop in a cover of the classic “Movin On Up” late on. It was a risky choice that did not totally work, but you could not fault the boldness of it, and you can understand why she has reason to feel such Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Mille Petrozza was born in 1967 to a Calabrian father, and a mother who was a refugee from Communist East Germany. He grew up in the Altenessen district of Essen, in Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley, where his father worked in the coal mines. As a young teenager, inspired by a KISS concert, he and school friends Jürgen "Ventor" Reil (drums) and Rob Fioretti (bass) started a band.By 1984, after going by various names, the band was called Kreator, with Petrozza the frontman and rhythm guitarist. Their raw 1985 debut album Endless Pain was followed by 1986’s seismic Pleasure to Kill. The latter Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Cast your mind back to the release of “Never Be The Same Again” (1999), which seemed to come out of nowhere and turned Sporty Spice’s image on its head. For the least pushy of the fabulous five, it was something of a turn up for the books. And now, at the ripe old age of 52 (whipper-snapper), she’s pulled off what could be considered another volte face.Ask me to name the female artist with the most songs at number 1 in the UK chart’s history and I wouldn’t have plumped for Ms Melanie. But that’s what the blurb claims, alongside this mega fact: “she is he only female performer to top the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I first saw country singer songwriter Kacey Musgraves perform at the Arts Club on Dover Street back in 2013 for the launch of her first major-label album, Same Trailer Different Park, which won her the first of her eight Grammies, and she was a great performer and an even more striking songwriter – witty, concise, memorable, with great turns of phrase and a great clarity in her storytelling and characters. She was/is a superior version of the uber-megastar that is/was Taylor Swift.She’s funnier and filthier than Taylor; I can’t see gazillions of preteens bawling out her lyrics without Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It is almost without fail that Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival is guaranteed to be one of my annual musical highlights – and despite it still only being April, I suspect that it will be the same again this year. As is usually the case, the line-up of this celebration of the weird and distinctly wonderful was one where only the most musically literate would be aware of more than a handful of the performers. However, it was again a set-up where most would have gone home having discovered a new favourite band. This time, mine would most certainly be the raw and visceral Prostitute. That said, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ostensibly, Jesca Hoop’s music is categorised as folk. How to square this with “Big Storm,” the fourth track from the singer-songwriter’s seventh album, Long Wave Home? The percussion sounds like – but, it turns out, actually isn’t – a drum machine. Hoop’s voice is close-miked, intimate. The choruses are gospel-esque. Brass instruments stab. Overall, there’s a country music lilt. Just before it abruptly stops, Hoop says “OK.” Odd, and folk-adjacent rather than folk, but it coheres – and makes sense.After this, “Love is Salvation.” Here, notwithstanding the jazzy arrangement, a kinship with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Last year, Paul Weller compiled a collection of his favourite soul tracks. A highlight of That Sweet Sweet Music was Jon Lucien’s affecting “Search for the Inner Self.” Originally issued on 45 in September 1971, it’s a long-time favourite of deep-digging soul enthusiasts. As is Lucien’s dance floor-filler “We got Love.” However, the latter cut was not issued when it was recorded – or even soon after.“We got Love” was first propagated by the DJ Snowboy. He’d played percussion for Lucien at a London show in 1995. Lucien gave him a home-made CD including tracks which had never been issued. Read more ...
peter.quinn
This first full-length album from K-pop sextet NCT WISH – one of a number of NCT sub-units including NCT 127, NCT Dream, WayV, and NCT U – is a 10-track delight, with not a filler in sight.A multilayered, widescreen banger, album opener “2.0 (TWO POINT O)” channels the bassline-driven, vocally rich melodic pop of SM Entertainment labelmates SHINee. The immaculately produced title track is an up-tempo, 130+ BPM anthem with strong UK Garage influences, delicious harmonic motion, and an abundance of ear candy, not least the way in which it reimagines the opening earworm vocal hook from The Read more ...
Joe Muggs
All of us, no matter how media-literate we think we are, in some way or another absorb received opinion about particular musicians. It’s particularly easy when they are, in the literal sense of that most abused of words, iconic: when you are constantly exposed to a condensed simulacrum version of them. So it is that I realise that, even though I know deep down that it’s a construct, I have bought into the cliché version of Ringo Starr: the lunkish, clowning, “not even the best drummer in The Beatles”, along-for-the-ride foil for his more mercurial bandmates.Of course, it’s not like he hasn’t Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lurking within the heaviness and tractor-reversing-through-sludge dynamics of Hastings-based hairies Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s fifth album is a sense of poppiness. In an early Seventies Status Quo way, that is. Although it has a lengthy breakdown section, “Kind Boy” evokes Quo hits such as “Paper Plane” and “Caroline.” The vocals nod to the trademark Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi blend. There is a tune.However, this is not 1972 or 1973. Nonetheless, this power trio – named after the Admiral of the British Fleet and MP who perished at sea in 1707 – are wedded to an approach which might Read more ...