tue 01/07/2025

New Music Reviews

Hidden Door Festival 2025 review - the transformative Edinburgh event's most site-specific festival yet

Miranda Heggie

"When I was your age, I worked in a corrugated cardboard factory!" is a phrase my father was fond of telling me as a teenager, presumably in an attempt to extol the virtues of a good Presbyterian work ethic.

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Pulp, O2 Arena review - common people like us

Nick Hasted

Jarvis Cocker is proudly holding the No 1 trophy handed to him on the day Pulp topped the album chart for the first time in 27 years with More, their first album in almost as long. “It’s nice they’ve got something to do when they’re getting on a bit,” Cocker says, acidly imagining the response. “Fuck that!”

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Sam Fender, St James' Park, Newcastle review - Geordie Springsteen scores with celebratory homecoming

Jonathan Geddes

Had a passer-by from outwith Newcastle been asked to guess what was taking place at St James' Park, football would have been the likely answer. It felt like nearly every person walking to see Sam Fender was clad in a replica top, bearing the name of club legends past and present or, most commonly, the official kit released to mark Fender's newest album.

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Music Reissues Weekly: Pilot - The Singles Collection

Kieron Tyler

"It was really strange. Really quite conflicting, the sort of thing most bands didn't have to deal with. At the front, we'd have the kids who'd come along to scream and at the back were the people who'd come along to hear the music. We didn't know whether to talk to the kids at the front or to speak over their heads to the other people.”

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Album: Mary Halvorson - About Ghosts

Kieron Tyler

Although Mary Halvorson leads the sextet Amaryllis on About Ghosts, instrumentally, she does not place her guitar to the fore. The first time her playing really leaps out on her new album is during second cut “Carved Form,” where it weaves through the arrangement. A guitar solo arrives just over a minute in: precise yet slippery, it complements the early space-age feel of the Pocket Piano synthesiser she also contributes to the track.

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Eva Quartet, St Cyprian's review - polyphonic bliss

Tim Cumming

Eva Quartet are four outstanding Bulgarian voices of polyphonic purity and depth, drawn from the legendary choir Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, who guested on Kate Bush’s classic Eighties album The Sensual World.

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Music Reissues Weekly: Gather In The Mushrooms

Kieron Tyler

“Forest and the Shore” by Keith Christmas is remarkable. In his essay for Gather In The Mushrooms, compiler, author and Saint Etienne member Bob Stanley says it is “as evocative as its title. The song has a deeply wooded sound, like a cross between Serge Gainsbourg’s “Ballade de Melody Nelson” and Ralph Vaughan Williams.” To this can be added the brooding, dramatic melancholy of Scott Walker’s “The Seventh Seal.”

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theartsdesk in Fes - world music central

Peter Culshaw

With WOMAD not happening this year, where could one go for a feast of global sounds? Fes in Morocco has been presenting its sacred music festival for 29 years. I’ve been several times and although this wasn’t an absolute classic, it was as ever, full of extraordinary moments. 

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Songhoy Blues, Hare & Hounds, Birmingham review - West African crew raise the roof

Guy Oddy

No-one needs to be living in Trump’s USA to be aware that governments never feel that it’s in their interest to prioritise great art and music over attention-grabbing and ill-conceived populist policies. Mali’s Songhoy Blues, unfortunately, have now found themselves at the receiving end of such nonsense.

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Music Reissues Weekly: Pete Shelley - Homosapien, XL-1

Kieron Tyler

Pete Shelley’s departure from Buzzcocks felt abrupt. When he left the Manchester band which had been integral to British punk since 1976, the other members thought it was still a going concern. Shelley had reached a different conclusion.

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