New music
Tom Carr
With a title like The Alchemist’s Euphoria, Kasabian set senses tingling; anticipating something trippy with this seventh album, their first in five years. But the context behind it is all the more real and raw.In 2020 former frontman Tom Meighan was charged with assault by his domestic partner. As quickly as questions arose of whether the band’s legacy was now tainted, the issue was resolved by Meighan’s departure. But in the time since it has looked understandably uncertain, posing many hard questions to the remaining members.It was a big knot to untangle for Serge Pizzorno, the band’s long Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This month’s reviews take in everything from New York new wave pop to apocalyptic electro to kitsch exotica. There are no genre boundaries at theartsdesk on Vinyl, just a constant desire to play music loud, whether new or reissues, then share what it felt like. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHCongotronics International Where’s the One (Crammed Discs)Crammed Discs is a label that understands how music can connect different cultures and sounds. They put their money where their mouth is when they conjoined crossover African percussion-led outfits Konono No.1 and Kasai Allstars with exploratory indie Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Raf Vilar grew up in Rio De Janeiro he has been based in London for over a decade, where his second album Clichê was recorded. It appears on a label operating from Malmö, Sweden. In keeping with this internationalism, what’s emerged isn’t wholly identifiable as a Brazilian album. His 2011 first was unequivocally titled Studies In Bossa. Now, the designation is more inscrutable.Clichê ends with its title track. Jazzy, with a Bossa Nova lilt, it is intimate, quiet and restrained. The lyrics are in Portuguese, so immediate understanding is difficult – but clichê does translate as cliché Read more ...
theartsdesk
Without doubt, the WOMAD Festival is a major international music institution and an annual landmark in the UK summer festival season. It has also been the major catalyst in the popularisation of non-western music in the UK and further afield from the 1980s onwards.2022 marked the 40th anniversary of the WOMAD Festival and so theartsdesk sent Peter Culshaw, a veteran writer about the scene and an attendee at the first WOMAD, and Guy Oddy, a regular festival visitor but WOMAD newbie to join 40,000 punters and check out this major music event.Prologue – Peter CulshawIt was the 40th anniversary Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s about 30 years since the ever-influential Spacemen 3 called it a day amid a storm of backbiting and recriminations. Yet in 2022, within a couple of months of each other, the band’s twin powerhouses have both released albums of their own. However, while Jason Pierce’s Spiritualized let rip an opus of space rock sounds on Everything Was Beautiful, Sonic Boom has linked up with fellow adopted Portuguese and Animal Collective-ist, Panda Bear for something considerably more breezy and poppy, if no less trippy and head-spinning.Apparently influenced by listening to Sonic Boom’s collection of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
On the last weekend of July, as they have every year since 1965, when an enlightened city council decided that Cambridge – like Newport, Rhode Island – would have a folk festival, thousands of people trekked to Cherry Hinton to enjoy what is now Britain’s premier folk event. One of the biggest in Europe and celebrated throughout the world, Cambridge is a calendar fixture and its return after the inevitable Covid absence was clearly very welcome.Some 1,400 people came to that first festival, which featured the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, Shirley Collins, Bob Davenport, Peggy Seeger, Hedy Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Violinist and composer Ruby Colley combines elements of folk, contemporary classical and jazz with explorations and evocations of the natural world.Her debut release, 2010’s Murmurations, was a minimalist, paired-down evocation of nature and natural forms, and since then, she has written music for films, collaborated on a range of theatre and dance projects, and played with the likes of Sinead O’Connor, The Unthanks and Cosmo Sheldrake.Some of the music from Overheard, her first album in 12 years, stems from collaborations with the arts-and-tech AltPitch festival, and a film of the album’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s polarising discourse and there’s polarising discourse, and then there’s Beyoncé discourse. On the one hand, there’s “the Bey Hive”: the very model of a furious modern fandom who will boost her and monster her critics at a microsecond’s notice. There are the commentators for whom everything she does is by definition profound, moral and important, regardless of any hypercapitalist excesses and hanging out with dicators’ offspring. And they're all buoyed up by a press so desperate for “access” that every profile is done with HELLO! magazine levels of management-vetted swooning. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On the cover of The Hit Parade’s Pick Of The Pops Vol.1 it says “London’s No.1 Pop Group.” Underneath, a strapline states “File under: C86 twee Sarah Sixties pop.” Obviously, irony is at play with some of this – from the band name to the album title and the top pop group boast. The suggested categorisation might be nearer the mark.Pick Of The Pops Vol.1 is a vinylisation of a Hit Parade comp first issued in 2012. Back then, there were 20 tracks. Now, it’s 14. Picking these particular pops must have been tough as The Hit Parade formed in 1984 and since then there’s been seven albums and, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Over the past few years, Joe Pera Talks With You has been one of television’s joys. Each episode finds the small-town American music teacher navigating life in Upper Michigan. Unhurriedly, with good humour, he deals with the day-to-day small things. The big things are more complicated, but he finds his way. Every programme is a warm bath in goodness.Joe Pera himself is a stand-up comedian who has created the character with his own name. Now, he has directed the promo film for “Hank” from Philadelphia band Friendship’s fourth album Love the Stranger. An older man goes by boat to Little Read more ...
Katie Colombus and Caspar Gomez
FRIDAY 22 JULY by Caspar GomezWhen my regular festival pal Finetime and I have set up the wibbly, inflatable-poled tents he bought from Lidl, we settle to drinks, his from a chill-box, mine from a 35-pint container of Pilton Labyrinth scrumpy. We attune to the neighbours. Next to us is a tent-corral proudly flying a flag featuring a pink unicorn with penises for legs, spunking out rainbows. They are discussing the history of the Soviet Sputnik programme of the late 1950s. The people from the tents next door, that is. Not the unicorn’s penis-legs.As we will learn, this is the way people Read more ...
Liz Thomson
From Brighton to Berlin with the Brit School alums, who formed 20 years ago – allegedly out shopping in Primark. Virgin signed them three months later. What started as “a joke” has endured through five albums – and here comes their sixth, 10 Tracks to Echo in the Dark.And how appropriate that this slice of Eighties retro should appear right now – just as we’re reprising many of the grimmer aspects of that decade, not least a recession and, possibly soon, a Thatcher 2.0 if Liz Truss cosplay fools the ever-gullible public.It was also the decade of synthpop – electronica, disco, Eurodance – as Read more ...