New music
Kathryn Reilly
Our very own prophets of rage are back and their anger is – quite understandably – off the scale. Even these hardened cynics couldn’t have dreamt that the country would have deteriorated even further since the release of their most successful album to date – Spare Ribs – in 2021. Morally and financially bankrupt, there’s not much to celebrate in the UK right now. Which suits Sleaford Mods down to the ground.Fortunately for them, they speak for a significant section of the nation, some of whom help keep us sane by holding the mirror up to the corrupt. Could there be a better creative pairing Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This double album takes Van Morrison back to one of his early muses – Skiffle and its repertoire, that precursor to the rock'n'roll years that took hold of Britain in the 1950s, having percolated across the USA through the first half of the century, combining folk, blues, country, bluegrass and jazz into one steaming head of home-brewed folk, hopped up on washboards, jugs, washtub bass and the like.It was arguably the first flame of the fire that consumed the music world of the 1960s as Skiffle-addicted teens like Van grew into leaders of the Sixties beat boom and the subsequent invasion of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
According to the press release for Karin Dreijer’s third album as Fever Ray, its completion was preceded by many hours of therapy with the result new things are known. Amongst them that Dreijer “can be struck by despair but also by the big feeling of love and awe”. Dreijer declares “I know what love is and I want to show you”. Radical Romantics is the result of these realisations.However, despite the seeming openness getting to Dreijer is difficult, not least as the person is hidden behind so total a stylisation it could be anyone beneath the make-up, cloaked by the artifice. Nothing under Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Jon Savage's 1980-1982 - The Art Of Things To Come continues a series which began in 2015 with 1966 - The Year The Decade Exploded, a compilation springing off from Savage’s book of the same name. A follow-up looked at 1965, but after that the series has marched forward chronologically.This new 35-track double CD set – as before, the tracks are from singles rather than albums – follows seven compilations dedicated 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969-1971, 1972-1976 and, most recently, Jon Savage's 1977-1979 - Symbols Clashing. Together, they chronicle Savage’s take on popular music from the beat- Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“I’ve found another way / I’ve found another Heaven” sings Stuart Gray on the feedback-soaked opening track of Black Helium’s new album, Um. And if that’s what has fed into these psychedelic barbarians’ tunes on their third disc, it’s truly something that he needs to share around.Um certainly feels like a noticeable step-up when measured against 2020’s The Wholly Other and their debut album, Primitive Fuck, due to both Black Helium’s significantly improved song writing and Wayne Adams’ magical production skills – even if song titles like “Summer of Hair” aren’t of quite the same calibre as “ Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s almost 40 years, but I still vividly remember the excitement of hearing Suzanne Vega for the first time. Singer-songwriters had always mattered to me, even though I grew up in the vacuous era of glamrock and insipid teen idols such as David and Donny. Nor did much of what followed speak to me. Suddenly, a new voice was getting airplay. I still have all the old vinyl.“Queen of the bedsit blues” she was inevitably dubbed, but Vega opened the door for a new generation of young guitar-playing women, American and English, many of them now largely forgotten. She emerged, as many of her Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
The years since slowthai’s Mercury Prize nominated debut have been patchy. There was the public reckoning after his oafish behaviour at the NME awards, but then he scored his first number one album a year later. He’s become a father but also struggled with his mental health. UGLY is slowthai's third album and he continues to grapple with who he is and his hedonistic impulses. What’s noticeable with UGLY is how he now firmly draws more from rock than grime. Despite the new sound, slowthai is still best when he is rapping. Slowthai has flirted with rock music since “Doorman” off his Read more ...
joe.muggs
One of the greatest things a musical artist can achieve is world building. That is, creating a distinctive type of environment, language and coordinates for everything they do such that the listener is forced to come into the musical world, and to engage with it on its own terms rather than by comparison. It’s something that musicians as diverse as Prince, Kate Bush and Wu-Tang Clan achieve have achieved, likewise plenty of more underground creators too.Belgian polymath Marc Hollander has achieved this in particularly special way. Over more than 45 years, he’s built his sonic world not only Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis knocked it out of the park with the vibrant, eclectic global pop of debut Isolation, one of the best albums of 2018.Since then, she's gained career traction via guest appearances with Gorillaz, Little Dragon, Mac Miller, and others, and consolidated things with a new, determinedly downtempo direction on the Spanish-language album Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios), and its breakout tune, “Telepatía” (nigh-on-800 million streams on Spotify). Her third album continues the trajectory, but mostly in English, a stoned bedroom affair of warm, squidgy, modern Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Although We Are Scientists onstage chat is always delivered with a light touch, there is truth running through it as well. Early on at this set their singer and guitarist Keith Murray quipped that he wouldn’t be needing his lucky charm for the evening, and in a way he was right.If the UK has always been the New Yorkers' adopted home, then Glasgow in particular is a welcoming host, and by the end of this 90-minute performance the crowd was a bouncing, singing congregation, eagerly taking a trip down memory lane.However that doesn’t mean the actual show was a resounding success, even if Murray Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I have to confess, the name Harlan Howard meant little or nothing to me – but as I pressed play and the first twanging guitar notes of “Tiger by the Tail” filled the room, I quickly got the picture.Willie Nelson’s latest album celebrates the extraordinary work of the Detroit-born songwriter whose heart belonged to Nashville from an early age. The man who defined country music as “three chords and the truth” wrote (in some cases, co-wrote) songs such as “Heartaches by the Dozen”, “Pick Me Up on Your Way Down” and “I Fall to Pieces”, a country classic if ever there was one and a song most Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After Del Shannon took his own life in February 1990 at age 55, some obituaries were careful to point out that he stood apart from other pop stars who were big in pre-Beatles America. “The most tragic thing would be for Del Shannon to be lumped with, as he sometimes was in the past, all the Bobbys and Frankies and the other teen idols,” said the L.A. Weekly.As he surfaced in 1961, Shannon would inevitably become lumped in with contemporary US male teen-pop singers. Fair enough to a limited degree as he had the moodiness of Roy Orbison and the edge of Dion, but he was his own thing.In their Read more ...