New music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Now this is exactly what I want for Christmas: a beloved fixture of Saturday afternoon TV putting a lounge jazz spin on some festive classics, backed by an 18-piece swing band. …And a Happy New Year is, somewhat implausibly, the second holiday collection in as many years from Chris “Kammy” Kamara – last year’s debut being the sort of unexpected Top 10 success to justify another run for the former professional footballer turned genial Sky Sports pundit and occasional light entertainment star.With Rudolph, Frosty and the rest of the lowest-hanging festive fruit anchoring last year’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Scars’s tour de force album Author! Author! has been out of sight for too long. Originally released in 1981, it first reappeared on a swiftly withdrawn CD in 2007. Apparently, there were issues about where the rights for its reissue lay. Now, it has re-emerged.Author! Author! was great. On the surface it was poppy, but a darkness coursed through its ten tracks. “All About You”, the March 1981 single trailing its release, sounds like a hit (its promo video is on YouTube). Driving, melodic and mysterious, it suggested Scars as an artier, more subtle counterpart to the U2 of “I Will Follow”. It Read more ...
Barney Harsent
After a 16-year wait for the second album from Australian sample-stitchers The Avalanches, their third, a mere four years later, feels like a rush release by comparison. We Will Always Love You has been preceded by no fewer than four singles which, while welcome, are in danger of distorting the overall picture slightly.While it could still be broadly catagorised as hip-hop and psychedelic pop, We Will… is a more thoughtful collection, peppered throughout with considered call-backs to connecting themes of distance, loss and transcendence. And while the quality isn’t always consistent, the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Doncaster musician Dominic Harrison – Yungblud – appeared a couple of years ago, a self-proclaimed punk, alive with vim and righteousness, touting music that, loosely speaking, fused the snarling northern outrage of Arctic Monkeys with hip hop-tinted power-pop. It was a lively combination and his debut album, 21st Century Liability, had its moments. Since then, his profile has raised dramatically, a cult Gen Z figurehead, his appearance an impressive, sexually fluid spin on Keith out of The Prodigy. This album could be the one that supernovas him – it’s catchy enough – but it does so by Read more ...
joe.muggs
Dance music has a notably different relationship to its past than other kinds of music. This has a real, material basis: because its core experience is that of the mixed DJ set, in principle nothing is ever the same twice, elements are constantly combined and recombined, so past and present are constantly churned together in new contexts. Once a style is established, it never completely stops being current, because its main riffs, samples or tracks are reused and remixed enough to maintain familiarity with every new generation of listener/dancer. “Revivals” of acid, dub, hardcore and what Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Songs from Home has been an anchor-point almost since the beginning of lockdown for many people, all of us invited into the singer’s sun-dappled Virginia farmhouse, often the kitchen, where, accompanied by Angus the most golden of retrievers, she chats and sings. Last weekend, America still celebrating Thanksgiving, she performed a concert. Solo in every respect, its punning title: One Night Lonely.It was a generous performance, two hours, filmed at the Filene Center amid Wolf Trap’s 117-acre Park for the Performing Arts, “a treasured place in the DC area” where Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Covid pandemic has meant, with both performance and recording opportunities at a minimum, that many musicians have had to apply a bit of lateral thinking to keep their creative juices flowing. Nick Cave, of course, is not renowned for running with the pack, and used his time by performing his Idiot’s Prayer solo show in front of cameras at the Ally Pally early in the lockdown period. However, not one to stand still, he has now gone further leftfield by writing the libretto for Nicholas Lens’ chamber opera L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S.Cave and Lens have had previous experience of working together, with 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 ...
mark.kidel
Odin’s ravens Huginn (thought) and Muninn (memory) are the great Norse god’s messengers, at the heart of a myth that was borrowed in watered-down form for Game of Thrones. The myth inspired a suite of pieces by Sigur Rós and a star-studded group of Icelandic friends and collaborators. Unreleased for many years, and only performed a few times, this recording from a Paris concert in 2002 will delight the band’s fans, as well as intriguing admirers of "post-rock" or contemporary classical.The band’s moody and cinematic style is very much present: wide swathes of sound, conjuring landscapes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fifty years after their first album The Garden Of Jane Delawney was issued in April 1970, Trees seem to be better known than when they were active. Despite Françoise Hardy’s cover version of the title track a couple of years after it hit shops, the UK band’s debut album was a poor seller. Original pressings fetch upwards of £200. It’s the same with its follow-up, January 1971’s On The Shore. This one sells for at least £250.The band formed in London in 1969, split in 1972 and even though they recorded seven BBC radio sessions as well as the two albums, it took a while for their reputation to Read more ...
joe.muggs
As with so much in these unprecedented times, online performance is evolving, and fast: different approaches are becoming established formats. Some go ultra intimate – raw acoustic performances, live chats with fans – as if trying to strip away the digital divide. Big, serious rock bands with like Metallica and Radiohead try to keep their established fanbases sated with sheer volume of professionally recorded archive performance. DJs and electronic acts try and build on the models already provided by pirate radio or Boiler Room type platforms, while the more adventurous try and create virtual Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tankus the Henge are one of Britain’s most energized, entertaining and spirit-raising live bands. If they were allowed to endlessly tour the nation, exempt from lockdown rules, they could eliminate the COVID blues, concert by ebullient concert. They have not, however, in their decade-plus history, achieved crossover success, despite their two previous albums being joyous festival-friendly romps. For those who enjoy their sing-along burlesque, their latest is a welcome addition to the canon.The qualification of the last sentence is important. Tankus the Henge are an acquired taste, their Read more ...