New music
Guy Oddy
If there’s been one thing that has coloured the UK music scene in 2020, it’s been the lack of any type of performance in front of a living, breathing and sweating audience for much of the year. Who was to know back at the beginning of January that we would only have about nine weeks to get in all of our gig-going? Fortunately, I managed to see a handful of concerts during this time and the most glorious by a country mile was Slipknot’s show in Birmingham. Despite taking place in a huge barn-like venue, Iowa’s arch misanthropes put on a fierce, attention-grabbing performance of extreme energy Read more ...
joe.muggs
Among the glints of light in this overcast year, one particularly bright one has been the state of British soul music. Not just in the sense of good records released, although there’ve been plenty of those – but something significantly deeper: a contextualisation, an acknowledgement and a pride in the rich history and unique talents of these islands. This manifested in things like the BBC showing a long overdue documentary on The Real Thing, the announcement of Sade’s catalogue getting the full deluxe box set treatment, Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock (re)schooling a mainstream audience in that 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 ...
Tim Cumming
Booking a venue, filling it with people, and handing out awards-night hardware to a range of international artists is a challenge to be reckoned with at any time, even more so in the wake of this year's pandemic. Such was the challenge met by Songlines magazine, for which I have been a regular writer for many years, as it mounted its annual World Music Awards show online – and at the mercy of an internet connection for the first time. It was fronted by singer and broadcaster Cerys Matthews, a Songlines Awards regular who, in this virtual edition, held the reins from home, and featured Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Leave a 78-year-old ex-Beatle locked down for long enough, and this what he comes up with: a sequel to his two previous wholly solo albums, cooked up in his Sussex home studio. The results find the once derided, “Thumbs Aloft” McCartney’s slow creative redemption nearly complete.Loved up and by his own account stoned for much of the Seventies and Eighties, his easy musical fecundity was only jolted into full power by trauma and challenge: the Fabs’ bitter divorce for McCartney (1970), career back to the wall in Kenya for Band on the Run (1973), Wings’ doldrums for the scatty, sometimes lovely Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It didn’t take long for The Stooges to acquire an afterlife. They played their final show in February 1974. In May 1975, Nick Kent wrote a multi-page feature for NME on the ups and downs of Iggy Pop and Co. In September 1975, Sounds reviewed a new album by the defunct band titled Metallic KO. One side of it was recorded at that final show.“I'm a tasteless little bastard and I really enjoy it,” wrote Giovanni Dadomo of the wreckage captured on the vinyl. “It's no great rock 'n' roll record per se. What I do believe is that it's an astonishing piece of documentary work, revealing as it does the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
I'm sure there's an audience somewhere that will love this Carrie Underwood Christmas croonfest. The people on Pinterest who collect nicely designed Bible quotes, seasonal recipes and images of matching family onesies, perhaps?For those who don't love a seriously traditional holiday season however, you might like to give My Gift a wide berth. It's very much more about the spiritual side of Christmas than a holly jolly romp around the tree. The album is made up of slow, same-paced festive tunes such as "O Come All Ye Faithful", "Little Drummer Boy" (featuring Underwood's cutesy-toots 5 year Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The music year draws to a close and theartsdesk on Vinyl presents its festive selection. We go easier on the cheesier at this time of year, but there are also gold nuggets in there too. Time to buy the vinyl lover in your life a little something? Here's a vibrant cross section of many, many kinds of music on plastic, running the gamut from Neil Diamond to a feminist concept album about mermaids. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHTiña Positive Mental Health Music (Speedy Wunderground) + Tom Sanders Only Magic (Mosho Moshi)Usually December’s Vinyl of the Month is a Christmas album but this year, for Read more ...
joe.muggs
Think hard. How much schmaltz do you think there is in this album? OK, double that. Now double it again. Nope, you’re still nowhere close. This is the world schmaltz lake with the entire EU cheese mountain forming an island in the middle, all decorated with a Willy Wonka factory worth of sugar candy and more camp than the Boy Scouts Of America. It’s like an entire planet done up like that weirdo down your street who lights up their entire house and garden for the whole of December every year. It’s ridiculous. It’s preposterous. It’s absolutely off its not inconsiderable tits. But, well, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Christmas albums are traditionally, pretty cheesy affairs and Seasonal Shift sees Tex-Mex rockers Calexico join in with the spirit of things, invite a disparate group of friends into the studio and lay the Panela on seriously thick. As well as some original tunes, which often find themselves channelling Roy Orbison at his most family-friendly, there are covers of songs by the Plastic Ono Band and Tom Petty, and even some surprising cultural cross-overs. There’s not too much that actually references a birth in Bethlehem though and sometimes it works and sometimes it really doesn’t. Quite what Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Island Records were apparently keen for half of Jamie Cullum’s first Christmas album to consist of covers, but the singer/songwriter thought otherwise, and simply said no.“When you think of all the people who have recorded “The Christmas Song” [...]”, he has said, “why should I do the same thing?”With re-heated old chestnuts off the menu, what Jamie Cullum as songwriter with his classy team of arrangers – mainly Tom Richards, and also Callum Au and Evan Jolly – have most often done in the ten tracks of The Pianoman at Christmas, recorded at Abbey Road, is to stay relatively Read more ...