New music
Jonathan Geddes
Beth Ditto protests too much. 'Do you feel young" she hollered early on, before adding "I don't", one of several references during the gig to her age now being 43. Yet the Gossip singer still displayed the glee and energy of a teenager at their first show, even if her band are now into the reunion phase of a career spanning over two decades. From the start she was sashaying across the stage with joy, a state possibly pumped up by the fact one of her favourite ever bands, the Yummy Fur, had supported on the night. She even donned a T-shirt of the cult Glasgow group for the encore, and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As a live sensation, Fat Dog have been the talk of the year. The London five-piece offer a dementedly energized night out. Performative concerts, tight as zip-wire but hedonistic and loose round the edges. They’ve developed a solid rep for sending audiences nuts. Consequently, there’s a hungry new fan-base salivating for their debut album, WOOF. Coming in at just over half-an-hour, it captures their battering zing; short, sharp and ballistic.Fat Dog’s sound is rooted in proto-techno crunch akin to the movement once known as Electronic Body Music, which is to say bands such as Front 242, Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
Sundiver is the daylight chapter that follows Boston Manor’s 2022 introspective concept album Datura. The second half of the story continues with the same poetic, immersive style but offers a brighter and more substantial experience across the 11 tracks.The transition from the experimental, lingering dusk of Datura into a full and extroverted dawn happens through the continuation of birdsong heard in the former’s closing track “Inertia”. “Datura (Dawn)” opens Sundiver with the same early morning sounds before peacefully asking “could you please open that window, let the new world in”, Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Marie Ulven had not even stepped onstage and her fans were in raptures. Such was the level of excitement for her second night in Glasgow that sing-a-longs to Chappel Roan and Sabrina Carpenter were ringing out almost as soon as support act Nieve Ella had departed.Like Carpenter, Ulven was blessed with the backing of Taylor Swift through a support slot on the Eras tour, but as a live performer there is far less pop sheen and considerably more indie dancefloor sweat to her. From the start she was sprinting about the stage or running on the spot as if limbering up for a park run, and the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
I’ve been a regular attender of the Supersonic Festival for about 15 years and much has changed in that time. When I first rocked up to see Swans, Stinky Wizzleteat, PCM and other sonic treats, the event was a bit of a white boys’ club, both in terms of the artists and the audience, despite being put together and curated by a couple of women.Since then, there has been a major effort to decolonise the line-up and bring in many more explicitly non-Western, female and LGBT+ artists, adding new sounds and textures, while remaining resolutely outside the mainstream. So, it was surprising to Read more ...
mark.kidel
Laurie Anderson is what Leonardo da Vinci would have hailed as una donna universale: inspired by science and technology, she's wide-ranging artist, a writer, film-maker, and explorer. She has a remarkable gift for story-telling, and her latest offering, an imaginative account of the woman aviator Amelia Earhart’s last voyage, taps into many of the creative currents that distinguish her.With a voice that feels as if she were sharing her tale in the most personal way, a style that she originally displayed on her first super-hit, still as fresh as ever, “O Superman” (1981), she creates a feeling Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When the first solo album by Tangerines Dream’s Peter Baumann was released in the US in 1977, its promotion was striking. Press advertising (pictured below left) said “he possesses the infinite vision that has made his group one of the most important contributors to mystagogic lore.”Baumann had joined Tangerine Dream — "his group" — in 1971, and left in late 1977. The album in question, Romance ’76, was recorded in Berlin and Munich in July and August 1976 and first issued in the UK by Virgin Records in February 1977.Discussing the album with NME’s Miles before its release, there Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Lee “Scratch” Perry, Reggae’s dub emperor and all-round sound magician died in 2021, after a 60-odd year career that is rumoured to have produced something in the realm of 2,000 albums and numerous additional tracks. So, perhaps it isn’t such a surprise that there have been a rash of releases in the last couple of years claiming to be Scratch’s last recordings.In fact, to the excellent collaboration with New Age Doom, Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Guide to the Universe and the solo King Perry, we can now add this album with Youth, Killing Joke’s bassist, producer and co-creator with the likes of Paul Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After the client has settled on the analyst’s couch, the lights are dimmed. Music sets the mood. A wordless vocal is accompanied by chimes. Cool saxophone breezes in. Sparse piano lines ripple like heat haze. Drums are understated, yet oddly insistent. The atmosphere is mysterious. Increasingly enflamed.Then, a voice begins speaking. It seems incorporeal; neither that of the analyst or the person seeking understanding. There is mention of mood swings which cannot be controlled, of an ancient love coloured by the sands of time. Gradually, as one track bleeds into the next, the speaker Read more ...
joe.muggs
Some performers are born to perform. It seems obvious, but it’s not a given in the music world. Some just want to make sound, some want to compose, not all are in it to connect directly to an audience. Rob Gallagher, however, is all about that connection, and he’s never stopped doing it. It was there in his band Galliano’s genial funk from 1988 through 1997: his London beat poetry always felt like it was addressing you direct, and the band came to live above all on the live stage where he could speak to the crowd.In the subsequent band Two Banks of Four he did admittedly step back from the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There’s a specific vocabulary that attends the arrival of a new Nick Cave album in the 21st century. Words like redemptive, cathartic, stark, unsparing are a crucial part of his music’s terroir. They’re as inescapable as the figure of death, and that’s something that looms large too, in the art and in the life. With a Gothy, druggy, doomy and well-dressed back story trailing from the Birthday Party and post-punk years of the 1980s, through to the presence of the Lord, interventionist or not, on The Boatman's Call, and the epic, wracked albums of the past decade, you suspect any new Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The sun coming out for our festival-organised boat shuttle down the Thames was relief indeed, as we ditched the wellies and reached for the Crocs on our way into the arena.Saturday afternoon was a melee of young folk, festering in the mire of their GCSE exam results – something the organisers are obviously battling with, given the amount of drug searches, water hand outs and well-oiled system of pulling kids out of the mosh pit.To kick off the afternoon fun, Grian Chatten in his bright green shell suit jacket, led the swells and synth of Fontaines DC, in a top notch set mixing up old songs Read more ...