New Music Reviews
Album: Nadine Shah – Kitchen SinkThursday, 25 June 2020
Why don’t you have children? Why aren’t you married? Why don’t you own your own home? Why are you a failure? These are the societally enforced questions that, as a 34-year-old woman, Nadine Shah finds inescapable. Much like the rest of us. When talking to friends who also considered themselves “non-achievers”, she realised something was very wrong. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks - Orange Crate ArtSunday, 21 June 2020
Orange Crate Art makes most sense in the context of Van Dyke Parks’s solo career rather than that of Brian Wilson’s. For the former it was preceded by Tokyo Rose, an orchestrated set tackling the intersections of American-Japanese cultural and socio-political relations. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: John Lee Hooker - Documenting The Sensation Recordings 1948-1952Sunday, 14 June 2020
John Lee Hooker’s recording career began on Friday 3 September 1948. He’d attracted the attention of the Kiev-born Bernard Besman, who was in Detroit after his family moved there in 1926 following five years in London’s East End. By the 1940s Besman, who played piano, was a veteran of dance bands and also worked as a booker. Read more... |
Laura Marling, Union Chapel, YouTube review - communication breakdownMonday, 08 June 2020
Music, as the sociologist Simon Frith long ago pointed out, is “an experience of placing: in responding to a song we are drawn, haphazardly, into affective emotional alliances with the performer and with the performer’s other fans”. Music makes you feel things, it’s about shared emotional experiences. And while, since the invention of the Walkman, those experiences are possible in the isolation of one’s own headphones, nothing can begin to touch the communal concert experience. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: The Belfast GypsiesSunday, 07 June 2020
There’s something wrong with the picture above. It’s the sleeve of a French EP issued in August 1966 credited to a surly looking band called “Them”. The chap standing in the middle has what appear to be bullet holes in his shirt, but where’s the band’s frontman and main songwriter Van Morrison? Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Edikanfo - The Pace SettersSunday, 31 May 2020
Ghana was visited by two British musicians in the early Eighties. One was Mick Fleetwood, who recorded the Visitor album in Accra during January and February 1981. The other was Brian Eno, who came to the country in late 1980 to attend the National Festival of Arts and Culture (NAFAC). Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Keith Relf - All the Falling AngelsSunday, 24 May 2020
“Collector of the Light” is based around what sounds like a treated bass guitar. As the neck is moved up and down, multiple notes are plucked at once. The instrument’s sound is subaquatic, wobbly. Over this, a distant, echoey voice sings of being the “collector of light”, restoring dreams and “silver points of wonder”. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Damily - Madagascar Cassette ArchivesSunday, 17 May 2020
Outside his home country Madagascar, Damily was first heard via a couple of tracks on the 2004 French compilation album Tsapiky, Panorama D'une Jeune Musique De Tulear, an overview of the tsapiky dance music of the south-west of the island. He’d moved to France in 2003. His first internationally issued full-length album, Ravinahitsy, followed in 2007. Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 57: Gramme, Terry Edwards, The Orb, The Monochrome Set and much moreSaturday, 16 May 2020
After C19 delays theartsdesk on Vinyl is back. My initial policy, reckoning that new vinyl would dry up under COVID conditions, was to do regular lockdown mini-editions with the material already set aside here, until it ran out. That didn’t work out. The vinyl, to my surprise, kept on coming. Global crisis be damned! A backlog grew! Thus, theartsdesk on Vinyl 57 is a catch-up on the past couple of months. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Bob Stanley & Pete Wiggs Present The Tears of TechnologySunday, 10 May 2020
“Like mellotrons before them, synthesisers could project a strange and deep emotion – something in the wiring had an inherent melancholy. Read more... |
Pages
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take a subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Surviving Black Hawk Down, Netflix review - the real story b...
Ridley Scott’s 2001 film Black Hawk Down was a technically superb blockbuster bristling with thunderous action sequences and famous...
Churchill in Moscow, Orange Tree Theatre review - thought-pr...
Playwrights who work for decades often acquire a moniker. In the case of Howard Brenton, who began his career as a left-winger in the turbulent...
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy review - older, sadder Brid...
Bridget Jones has grown up: v.v.g. Our heroine is still prone to daft pratfalls and gaffes and bursts of sensational idiot dancing....
Album: Fantastic Twins - Suite of Rooms
This album is SHORT. At 27 minutes and just five tracks, one might wonder why Julienne Dessagne (this is a solo act) didn’t call it an EP. But...
Festen, Royal Opera review - firing on every front
So the Royal Opera had assembled a dream cast, conductor (Edward Gardner) and director (Richard Jones). The only question until last night was...
Northern Winter Beat 2025, Aalborg review - The Courettes, D...
The exhortations don’t seem necessary as the audience is already letting off the steam which has built up in anticipation of a full-bore show....
theartsdesk Q&A: Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof on...
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is now an...
Album: Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking
Manic Street Preachers’ earnest and literate pretentiousness is both their Achilles Heel and their superpower. Their greatest songs are amped by...
Gilliver, Liverman, Rangwanasha, LSO, Pappano, Barbican revi...
For all its passing British sea shanties and folksongs, Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony does Walt Whitman’s determinedly global-oriented...