tue 08/07/2025

New Music Reviews

Sabrina Carpenter, Hyde Park BST review - a sexy, sparkly, summer phenomenon

Katie Colombus

Has Sabrina Carpenter officially conquered London? A year after bestie and fellow Disney alumni Taylor Swift declared the “Summer of Sabrina” stateside, the army of fans clad in pink cowboy hats, bloomers and kiss transfers streaming into Hyde Park would seem to suggest so.

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Music Reissues Weekly: Motörhead - The Manticore Tapes

Kieron Tyler

Manticore was owned by Emerson, Lake and Palmer and their manager. The organisation provided the name for the band’s label. Apart from ELP and its individual members, the best-known signees to the imprint were Italian prog-rockers PFM and former King Crimson member Pete Sinfield. Despite this new album’s title, Motörhead were not with Manticore.

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Glastonbury Festival 2025: Five Somerset summer days of music, controversy and beautiful mayhem

Caspar Gomez

MONDAY 30th JUNE 2025

“I think you’d better drive,” says Finetime, his face sallow, skull-sockets underscored by dark brown rings. He looks peaky.

“Why?” I enquire. Sweat nodules down my face, my body, everywhere. So saline-intense it leaves powdery white steaks.

“My eyes,” he replies, “They’re wobbling about.”

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Album: Brìghde Chaimbeul - Sunwise

Kieron Tyler

The first five-and-a-half minutes of Sunwise’s opening track “Dùsgadh / Waking" are taken up by a drone. Played on the Scottish small pipes – a form of bagpipes – this is in due course supplemented by a series of individual notes played in clusters. What’s heard symbolises the arrival of winter and the activities of Cailleach Bheurr who, in Celtic folklore, wanders moors and summons the elements to conceal any greenery, so winter’s blanket is absolute.

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Music Reissues Weekly: Rupert’s People - Dream In My Mind

Kieron Tyler

Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was an instant phenomenon. Recorded in April 1967 and issued as a single on 12 May after pre-release play on pirate station Radio London, it topped the UK charts four weeks later. Globally, it hit big on most pop markets and was integral to launching the classical music/pop hybrid which evolved into prog rock.

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Brad Mehldau Trio, St George's Bristol review - exquisite intelligence

mark Kidel

There's something luminous about the Brad Mehldau Trio. The music they create with such joy shines with a special clarity, in which ever-changing forms constantly reveal lines of shared thought, explicitly, yet purveying an abiding sense of wonder. Intellect – and there is plenty of that – is matched here with the fire of inspiration and the thrill of constant surprise.

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Ian Leslie: John and Paul - A Love Story in Songs review - help!

John Carvill

Do we need any more Beatles books? The answer is: that’s the wrong question. What we need is more Beatles books that are worth reading. As the musician and music historian Bob Stanley pointed out, in his 2007 review of Jonathan Gould’s Can’t Buy Me Love, probably the best biography of The Beatles to date, “the subject is pretty much inexhaustible if the writer is good enough.”

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Album: BC Camplight - A Sober Conversation

Kieron Tyler

A Sober Conversation is the work of a master songwriter, one who knows how to achieve their goals. As the album’s nine tracks pour from the speakers, comparisons come to mind: 20/20 and Smiley Smile-era Beach Boys, Lindsey Buckingham, the early solo years of Todd Rundgren.

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theartsdesk on Vinyl 91: Sex Pistols, Pink Floyd, Tropical Fuck Storm, Sparks, The Sisters of Mercy and more

Thomas H Green

VINYL OF THE MONTH

Frank From Blue Velvet I Am Frank (Property of the Lost) + Column258 Interloper (The Workshop Sessions, Volume One) (Property of the Lost)

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Music Reissues Weekly: The Sonics - High Time

Kieron Tyler

“Theirs is truly rock in extremis, a précis of the youthful impetuosity and cathartic chaos at the heart of real rock ’n roll.”

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