New music
Kieron Tyler
Speaking to America’s Hit Parader magazine in August 1967, Frank Zappa said “If you want to learn how to play guitar, listen to Wes Montgomery.” The article was titled My Favorite Records and the head Mother was being featured shortly after the release of Absolutely Free, the second Mothers Of Invention album. Montgomery was in good company. Zappa also namechecked Bartok, Pierre Boulez, conductor Robert Craft, Stockhausen, Stravinsky, Cecil Taylor and Anton Webern. No pop was mentioned.At this point, Montgomery had just released the A Day In The Life album on A&M. It featured covers of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
If there’s someone who could claim to have proved Arnold Schoenberg’s pithy phrase “If it is art, it is not for all” it was Alan Vega. His and Martin Rev’s abrasive synth-punk duo, Suicide were famously detested by fans of the Clash, one of whom even threw an axe at him on stage when they supported Strummer’s more straightforward punk rockers in the late 70s. Yet, he was also worshipped by the Sisters of Mercy, Andy Weatherall and, somewhat surprisingly, Bruce Springsteen, among plenty of others. In fact, Suicide may even rival the Velvet Underground as largely ignored prophets of a new way Read more ...
Russ Coffey
A trend's been emerging, of late, for ageing rockers to actually sound younger on each new record. We last saw it with AC/DC's Power Up (2020), an infectious blend of carefree swagger and blistering solos. Now it's the turn of Cheap Trick to recapture some teen spirit. In Another World may not quite see the Illinois quartet at their classic best, but they clearly had a ball making it.Their new LP mixes crunching rock riffs with their trademark power-pop. Occasionally, the songs have a political edge – like the band's cover of John Lennon's politician-bashing " Read more ...
joe.muggs
The career of Raf Rundell has had one of the most satisfying trajectories of any in UK music – a steady process of self-realisation, from record label staff via DJing and artist management, through being a serial studio collaborator, to becoming a fully fledged artist in his own right. For a musician to only now, in his late 40s, be releasing his second full album might seem odd, but there’s something very natural about the way it’s all happened, which is expressed in the confidence of his sound which only continues to mature like fine wine.At the heart of this record sits the single “Always Read more ...
Liz Thomson
At 85, Peggy Seeger has lived in Britain for most of her life, arriving in 1956 as a Radcliffe dropout at the invitation of folklorist Alan Lomax, who had plans for a British equivalent of the Weavers. That didn’t work out, but the visit brought her together with Ewan MacColl, folk singer, song collector, actor and left-wing firebrand. They wouldn’t marry for years, but they were soon singing together and living together, criss-crossing the country, kids in tow, playing clubs, collecting songs from communities of fishermen, miners, navvies and gypsies, and preserving a history that would soon Read more ...
mark.kidel
Ballaké Sissoko is one of the greatest musicians in Africa – a kora player of extraordinary quality, strongly rooted in the Manding and family traditions that have nourished him. He’s also a born collaborator, with a sense of adventure that has resulted in very fruitful performances and recordings with musicians from his own culture as well as others from further afield.His relationship with the French label No Format has been immensely fruitful, not least the two now classic albums with the French cellist Vincent Ségal – Chamber Music (2009) and Musique de Nuit (2015). His latest release Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Heard now, InnerSpeaker sounds as it did when it was issued in 2010. Tame Impala’s debut album was crisp, fizzing; a pithy collection of psychedelic rock nuggets which made its case instantly. This was modern psychedelia, infused with a dash of Sweden’s Dungen, which still sounds fresh. Despite brushing the borders of freak-out territory, it was direct. Tuneful too. Fantastic.Up to this point, the Perth-based Kevin Parker had used the name Tame Impala to release an EP and single, the second of which was recorded in 2009 at London’s prime garage rock set-up, Toe Rag Studios. Travelling there, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Now we are at the beginning of lockdown’s end and the gradual loosening of the pandemic’s grip on pretty well every aspect of our lives, what is perhaps one of the warmest and most uplifting of albums recorded under Covid conditions comes in the shape of Rhiannon Giddens and her partner, Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi’s fine new album They’re Calling Me Home.The title track opens the set, and it feels like it’s sung in prospect of returning to life after lockdown, albeit under the shadow of the toll of death the pandemic has wrought. Alice Gerrard’s song is a classic leave- Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who hasn’t spent more time alone with their thoughts than they otherwise would have liked over the past 12 months. Manchester musician Caoilfhionn Rose has been confined a little longer: forced to take a year off from music after she became ill on tour in Denmark, her second album documents a physical, emotional and spiritual healing. A sonic and lyrical tapestry that is part inward-looking, part looking to the natural world for comfort, Truly offers a musical balm to a world getting ready to step outside again.The root of that universality is Rose’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Rumours keep swirling of pressing plants stumped by the effects of COVID-19 lockdown, and it’s true that vinyl editions of many albums have been delayed, yet still those records keep arriving. At theartsdesk on Vinyl, no-one cares if an album was streaming or out in virtual form months ago. Vinyl is the only game here and when those albums arrive, they are heard, and the best of them, from hip hop to Sixties pop to steel-tough electronic bangin’ to whatever else, makes it into 6000 words of detailed reviews. There’s no shortage of juice or opinion here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHSubp Yao Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Glasvegas deal in hyper-emotion, personal dramas playing out in Spectoresque caverns of sound. Their signature songs, “Daddy’s Gone” and “I’m Gonna Get Stabbed”, wrung wrenching feeling from singer Jamie Allan, melodramatic blood and heat pulsing through his Glasgow tragedies, which pierced the sky and hearts from a root of dour realism. It was a place Springsteen and Strummer had been before, dirtied by the fuzz of The Jesus and Mary Chain, and elevated by worship of early Elvis.Making this fourth album was, though, more prosaically wearing. Godspeed’s studio was Allan’s spare room, making Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Course In Fable is, as Ryley Walker albums go, pretty straightforward some sharp left turns indicate that the formerly Chicago-based, now New York-dwelling guitar whizz isn’t content with limiting a single musical line of attack to one song. Three-minutes, 30-seconds into the atmospheric, jazzy, King Crimson-meets-John Martyn nugget “Clad With Bunk” a sudden blast of “Spirit in the Sky” fuzz guitar opens the door on the song’s freak-out coda, a hard-edged outro nodding towards Swedish psych-heads Dungen. Next up, “Pond Scum Ocean” is more linear overall but odder: it evokes Flowers Read more ...