New music
Kieron Tyler
Heart’s Ease is about more than the music. Through its songs, it also chronicles a life lived. Shirley Collins learnt “Barbara Allen” at school. She first encountered “The Christmas Song” when it was sung by her early influence and inspiration The Copper Family. “Merry Golden Tree” was originally heard in 1959, in Arkansas. One song takes lyrics by her former husband, Austin John Marshall, and sets them to music. “Sweet Blues and Greens” draws from her 1964 collaboration with Davy Graham for the Folk Roots, New Routes album. “Locked in Ice” interprets a composition by her late nephew Buz Read more ...
mark.kidel
Everything Ellie Goulding touches turns to pop gold: her first three albums were big hits. She is yet another of those miracles bred in the British provinces, in this case a Herefordshire village. Inspired no doubt by a string of power-women from Madonna to Beyoncé, Shakira to Joss Stone, Goulding mixes and matches a variety of styles in a manner that exploits familiarity with just enough freshness to make it sound new.The girl-wonder has matured a little: in a recent interview she spoke of having freed herself from the ubiquitous sexual pressures of a male-dominated industry. But her Read more ...
Katie Colombus
I have had an obsessive-loop Dixie Chicks tune for every eventuality of my life so far – “Ready To Run” for a big break up; “Wide Open Spaces” for road tripping; “Cowboy Take Me Away” for whimsical love affairs; “Not Ready To Make Nice” for general rage and “Travelin’ Soldier” for a good old cry.With the release of their 8th album, some 14 years after the last, I am wondering if there is a fitting sound for unkempt-hairy-make-up-lacking-global-pandemic-PJ-wearing-lockdown-lacklustre. And I’m delighted to say, that of course there is. Not only have the 13 time Grammy winning group produced an Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The lockdown which began in March is now noticeably easing, although in the realm of gigs and festivals things are still nowhere near operative. Nonetheless, theartsdesk is responding to the changes by ceasing our many weeks of New Music Lockdown Specials and looking forward to an increasing amount of actual live events. This week, we can only offer one, alongside plenty of streamed entertainment, but it’s early days. Here’s to the future. Dive in!Supersonic presents SofasonicBirmingham’s Supersonic is one of the only shindigs in Britain’s jammed annual summer festival calendar that truly Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The last experience that this writer had of Nicolas Jaar’s glitchy soundscapes was through his 2011 debut album Space Is Only Noise. Nine years and five discs on, as well as other releases under the Against All Logic alias, not much has changed. However, Jaar’s work remains distinctly strange yet compelling on Telas and rarely lurches into formless noodling. This disc, his second in 2020 after this spring’s Cenizas, is divided into four tracks, each about a quarter of an hour long, incorporating minimalist and abstract sounds, woven and entangled to produce a laidback conceptual soundtrack Read more ...
Asya Draganova
It is difficult to live up to your own legacy when you’ve reached an iconic status in rock’n’roll. It is even harder when you are a frontwoman in a “masculine” genre where age makes you increasingly invisible and/or viciously criticised. Like Chrissie Hynde sings in the autobiographical “Can’t Hurt a Fool” from the new record, she does not “play the rules” and is “too old to know better/too young for her age”. She rises to the challenge with confidence and oomph: the tunes from the new Pretenders album Hate for Sale are well worth the listen.If you are a Pretenders fan, you will not be Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s been a long strange trip for Dennis Herrold. The Virginia-born rocker’s sole single, December 1957’s “Hip Hip Baby” / “Make With the Lovin’”, was a full-bore rockabilly two-sider. Yet it made no waves despite being reviewed glowingly by music biz journal Billboard. “Hip Hip Baby” was “a la Presley on a fast moving rockabilly tune,” while “Make With the Lovin’” “packs plenty of sales savvy into another infectious rockabilly song.” The single sold barely any copies. Nonetheless, over sixty years on Herrold is a rockabilly phenomenon.The 10-inch album The Mystery Of Dennis Herrold includes Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Peter Culshaw’s periodic global music radio update is back, quicker than usual as there is some catching up to do. There’s a focus on Ennio Morricone, who died this week - with his amazing range from Westerns to lush soundscapes and experimental hipster 1960s hipster pop. A secondary focus is on re-issued and new Moroccan grooviness - the wonderfully stoned 1970s soundscapes of Abdou El Omari to the hot off the press fabulousness of Bab l’Bluz. Other sizzling new stuff includes a rework of Saint Germain’s “I Want You To Get Together Right Now”(who sampled it from Marlena Shaw in the first Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
National treasure Jarvis Cocker recently claimed in an interview with the New York Times that lyrics really aren’t that important. He’s so very wrong. Within this very album – brief though it is (seven songs, 40 minutes) and long overdue (the band started working on the material in 2013) – are some exceptional titbits. Both thought provoking and merry making.The whole album is so very much of these weird times. But it was with some prescience that tracks like recent single "House Music All Night Long" anticipated us all being stuck at home, unable to properly kick up our heels ("goddam this Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lockdown’s easing and the record shops are opening here and there. So, to help vinyl junkies on their way, here’s 7000 words of reviews, capturing the best of the last couple of months’ releases on plastic. As ever, the sounds go everywhere, from hip hop to post-punk to Moroccan trance music. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHThe Four Owls Nocturnal Instinct (High Focus) + TrueMendous Huh? (High Focus) + Telemachus Boring & Weird Historical Music (High Focus)Three albums from Brighton’s High Focus Records which showcase many kinds of verve and ambition. The label is best known for nurturing the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Given the collaborator list on this album, it should be a bit of a mess. Brit punks IDLES, Aussie woozy pop auteur Tame Impala, pumping bassline house producer Chris Lorenzo turning his hand to drum’n’bass, as well as Ms Banks, Dapz On The Map, Oscar #Worldpeace and a host of other UK rap talents all add their distinct musical personalities to the mix. Yet somehow, what Mike Skinner drolly called “really just a rap duets album”, put together while waiting for a film to accompany The Streets’s comeback album proper, is some of his most coherent work ever.It is sonically diverse, mind. In Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Hot Shot 2020 has been billed as a rerub of Shaggy’s colossal turn of the century release Hot Shot. It’s not quite an accurate description of an album that has already been released in three different forms and shifted nine million copies though. In fact, this version only has six tracks in common with the original and adds cover versions, re-recordings of some of Mr Boombastic's other huge hits, like “Oh Carolina” and, of course, “Boombastic”, and a few other odds and sods. However, taken on its own terms as a grab bag of Orville Burrell’s musical highlights, it hits the spot on a relaxed Read more ...