New music
Ellie Roberts
Reading Festival’s 2024 line up was the embodiment of playlist culture. Once a key contender in the UK’s Rock and Alternative market, then a rite of passage for students partying their way into their first year of university, it’s fair to say that the festival has experienced some uncertainty in its identity in recent years.Over the course of the opening day, it was clear to me that the feeling of transition had mellowed and that no group in the diverse audience felt ownership over the festival in a way that they once might have done. As it should be, it was all about the music, and the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Miguel Zenón’s Golden City (Miel Music) is an ambitious album. Its ten tracks and a postlude seek to portray “the beauty and resilience that give San Francisco its soul”.The timing of the release is fortuitous, coming just eight days after Kamala Harris gave her nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, and is impossible not to make a connection. In her impactful and historic speech, not only did Harris set out her stall to be the next US President, she also told her own story, in which the key part was her San Francisco immigrant background – and she also drew Read more ...
joe.muggs
I won’t give it loads about the atmosphere and attendees at We Out Here – suffice to say that in its fifth edition, it has maintained all the strengths I mentioned last year, with the added benefit of slicker-operating infrastructure having ironed out any remaining wrinkles in its new Dorset site. The navigability, sound levels, smooth running bars etc were all just a little better, which only added to the good vibes that have been there from the start.Given how fun last year had been I wasn’t going to miss Thursday this time. As I set up my tent I could hear the brilliantly quirkly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Some pointers suggest how Finland’s Shadowplay might sound. They took their name from a Joy Division song. Their key founder member was Brandi Ifgray – born Visa Ruokonen. He had been in the final line-up of first-generation Finnish punk band Ratsia. Add in Shadowplay’s 1988 first album Touch and Glow’s cover version of Gang Of Four’s “Damaged Goods” and that would seem to nail it. Dark then, with the edge of punk.However, the back of Touch and Glow’s sleeve has a picture of the band which includes a trumpet player, someone at an upright piano and a double bassist. The only electric Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Whether it’s maturing or selling out, the tendency for rock bands to soften and smooth down their sound is understandable and, for fans, usually dispiriting – edge, purity, and strangeness evaporate as the dollars roll in. With their fourth album Romance, Fontaines DC have not only pulled away from their mordant, Dublin-dank post-punk toward a heady melange of rap, shoegaze, indie, and grunge, they've also become winningly tuneful. The miracle is that they’ve arrived at this eclectic juncture without sacrificing the danger and anxiety, as embedded in the music as in the lyrics, that Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I had been softened up for the Medicine Festival by a recent visit to the global music extravaganza WOMAD – a trio of us met a guy called Paul aka SpriITman – an ex-IT expert who after a health crisis realised he was a healer. Bear with me on this.All three of us, no spring chickens, had health issues. I had been hospitalised for a couple of nights after a bad bike crash and couldn’t sleep on my shoulder, one of us had bad skin problems on her hands, and other had a damaged knee. After some magic from SpirITman, all three of us were essentially cured. Sleeping was ok again, hand more or less Read more ...
mark.kidel
Jon Hopkins is on a journey, and we’re fortunate that he feels he can share the trip with us. His latest offering takes the listener beyond the paths opened up in Singularity (2018) and Music for Psychedelic Therapy (2021).There's a coherence in the new album that builds on the explorations of the previous two. A reflection, no doubt, of the clarity he's feeling inside, an increased mastery of the electronic and acoustic means (from synths to strings) at his disposal and brought to the studio by his gifted collaborators, including regulars such as Leo Abrahams (guitar) and Cherif Hashizume ( Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The music of Brit alt-rocker Cassy Brooking, AKA Cassyette, comes from the emo school of pop-metal. Her 2021 debut single was, appropriately, called “Dear Goth”, she’s much-hyped by Kerrang, and has been tour support for both Bring Me the Horizon and My Chemical Romance. All these are apt reference points for the music on her debut album which is feisty, occasionally spicy, and – contradictorily – very precisely produced to suggest a gnarly aesthetic.The songs flip about between crunchy sampledelic wodges of metal riffage, Prodigy-ish electronic hammering, and howled, but polished vocal angst Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The UK festival scene has been going through a bit of a difficult time in the last couple of years, with a number of events closing down due to financial problems. This has obviously hit the “boutique” end of the marketing hardest, with several smaller capacity, specialist weekends going to the wall. Stowaway Festival seems to be bucking this trend, however, and opened for its third year of business last weekend.Buckinghamshire-based and with a capacity of 4,000 or so, Stowaway explicitly caters for “true ravers, new ravers and little ravers” in a similar vein to family-friendly shindigs like Read more ...
joe.muggs
For a record whose subject matter involves unfaithfulness, ageing, loneliness, fear of death, darkness, sorrow, battles, haunting, sleeplessness and struggling to breathe, this is a lot of fun. But then Susanna Wallumrød has always leavened fathomless darkness with wry wit.Early on in her career she was covering songs like Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” and even Kiss’s “Crazy Crazy Nights” as icy ballads, and throughout she has always had an arch cool that has allowed her to gaze into the abyss and relay what its gaze says back to her as startlingly enjoyable music.On this album, that enjoyment Read more ...
Guy Oddy
From time to time, we all come across a band name that’s new to our ears and that raises a smile and the hope of some wild and original sounds. Illuminati Hotties is such a name.However, Illuminati Hotties isn’t really a band – being the solo musical vehicle for Grammy-winning producer and engineer Sarah Tudzin. Unfortunately, Power isn’t really the home of any wild and original sounds, either. Instead, it is something of a single speed homage to the pop-grunge sound of the early 90s. At best, it digs deep in territory that has previously been mined extensively by the likes of the Lemonheads Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The Rollin' Stones are probably destined to be the biggest group in the R&B scene if it continues to flourish. They aren't the jazzmen who were doing trad 18 months back and who have converted their act to keep up with the times. They are genuine R&B fanatics.”So said Record Mirror’s Norman Jopling in May 1963 of the band which soon added a “g” to become The Rolling Stones. He went on to point out that “the number of R&B clubs that have [recently] sprung up is nothing short of fantastic.”At the year’s end the R&B-smitten Jopling wrote two articles for Record Mirror, each Read more ...