mon 17/06/2024

New Music Reviews

Music Reissues Weekly: Pharoah Sanders Quartet - Live at Fabrik Hamburg 1980

Kieron Tyler

Promises attracted a lot of attention upon its 2020 release. The album brought together UK electronica artist Floating Points, The London Symphony Orchestra and storied US jazz individualist Pharoah Sanders, who died in September 2022. It became his last album. Promises – composed by Sam Sheperd in his Floating Points guise – cannot though have been conceived to be as high profile as it became.

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The Damned, Town Hall, Birmingham review - original punks bring some darkadelica to a full house

Guy Oddy

The last time I saw the Damned live in concert was in a big tent in Finsbury Park in 1986, to celebrate the band’s 10th anniversary. It remains, without any doubt, the most violent gig that I’ve found myself experiencing to this day.

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The Orielles, G2, Glasgow review - shoegaze trio keeping their eyes on the future

Jonathan Geddes

It is temping to wonder what path the Orielles would have gone down in a world where the coronavirus never occurred. The Halifax trio had just released their second album, Disco Volador when the pandemic struck, and wiped out any hope of touring the record. Instead they reworked material from the record for use scoring a film, and have now returned with last year’s Tableau album as a significantly different beast.

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Orbital, Brighton Centre review - a solid hands-in-the-air night out

Thomas H Green

Just before the encore, the crowd is finally warmed up and dancing. It took a while, but hands are now in the air, middle-aged bodies are shifting about, muscle memory of MDMA nights in the last century.

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Music Reissues Weekly: Too Much Sun Will Burn - The British Psychedelic Sounds Of 1967 Volume 2

Kieron Tyler

Together or separately, British psychedelia and 1967’s related music have been ceaselessly looked at. There cannot be an awful lot more to say. Nonetheless, the law of diminishing returns is there for ignoring so herewith the follow-up to the 2016 box set Let’s Go Down & Blow Our Minds.

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Mimi Webb, O2 Academy, Glasgow review - TikTok queen fails to fire with sparse set

Jonathan Geddes

Blake Rose clearly wasn’t leaving anything to chance. The support act bounded onstage draped in a Saltire, and soon brought up his days growing up in Aberdeen before moving to Australia. That Scottish upbringing helped inspire one of his songs, “Sweet Caledonia”, and going by the lively reaction he received from the youthful Glasgow crowd they were glad to take him as their own.

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Vossa Jazz 2023 review: Norwegian festival’s 50th-anniversary edition keeps traditional music close

Kieron Tyler

Two drummers are drumming. One held the beat on ABBA’s “Super Trouper”. He is Sweden’s Per Lindvall, more usually associated with jazz. The other is Norway’s Rune Arnesen, whose recording credits are also stylistically varied. Locked-in tight together, their groove provides the backbone for a band led by Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær, whose 1996 album Khmer was his first for the ECM label. This is a live revisitation of the album.

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Music Reissues Weekly: McNeal and Niles - Thrust, Wilbur Niles and Thrust - Thrust Too

Kieron Tyler

An original pressing of 1979’s Thrust fetches at least £1000. Its 1980 follow-up Thrust Too can be a relative bargain at around £400. The prices are partly explained by J Dilla having sampled Thrust Too’s “Survival of the Funkiest” and Thrust’s “Summer Fun” being sampled by Daphni. Both funk-soul albums – the first credited to McNeal and Niles, the second to Wilbur Niles and Thrust – were barely circulated and barely sold. Text-book collector’s items.

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Inspiral Carpets, Concorde 2, Brighton review - a raucous catalogue of Madchester-era hits

Thomas H Green

As Inspiral Carpets play “She Comes in the Fall”, a great song and one of their signature tunes, its martial drumming drags me into my own past. Seeing them play it at a 600-capacity venue makes me recall seeing them, over three decades ago, headlining the Reading Festival and, indeed, their own festival-style event at Alexandra Palace, when a female marching band would come onstage during this song. They were huge news then.

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Music Reissues Weekly: The Barracudas - Drop Out with the Barracudas

Kieron Tyler

From around July 1977, Jeremy Gluck began contributing to the UK music weekly Sounds. Amongst his pieces were features on The Lurkers, The Rezillos, 999 and his home country Canada’s punk band The Viletones. He’d also written about Generation X for what ended up as the final issue of Sniffin' Glue. In parallel, along with guitarist Robin Wills, he was formulating the band which became The Barracudas.

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