New music
joe.muggs
Music awards shows are a strange beast: part window display, part industry conference and part party. Especially if you don’t have Brit Awards or Mercury Prize budget to create a whizz-bang spectacle, the ceremonies can be an interminable pileup of attempts to earnestly celebrate both musicians and behind-the-scenes figures, in front of a room full of increasingly drunk and impatient people.The pandemic, though, requires something different. With the announcements and performances on a live video stream, and extra interviews and video clips on an app, the Association of Independent Music had Read more ...
mark.kidel
Together for over 20 years and with a string of incredibly successful albums, the Scottish trio return with a ninth release that offers more of the relatively sophisticated bombast they've consistently delivered, not least in perfectly-paced audience-pleasing festival performances.Biffy Clyro are a metal band with heart, with little of the doom and gloom or Gothic menace associated with so much of the genre. They're creatures of the golden sunlight rather than the dark underworld. And yet also macho guitar heroes, fuelled by fiery energy that borders on anger but never gives way to excess. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Although Metallica are screening a freshly recorded concert across America’s drive-in cinemas at the end of the month, we’re no nearer to actual gigs anywhere, especially the UK. Hold tight. We’ll get there. In the meantime, here are three events worth taking a look at.AIM Music AwardsTonight (Wednesday 12th August), the annual AIM Music Awards will occur online here from 7.00 PM. The event features performances by two leading names in UK hip hop, Little Simz and AJ Tracey, as well as a tribute to the late great Afro-beat drumming legend Tony Allen by Femi Koleoso from UK jazz unit the Ezra Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
One of the most evocative tracks on James Dean Bradfield’s second solo album is hardly his at all. The Manic Street Preacher takes “La Partida”, a haunting, finger-picked melody by the Chilean musician Victor Jara, and blows it up to the size of an arena, its central refrain echoed back by a stadium’s worth of voices. As a tribute to Jara who, with thousands of his countrymen, was tortured and shot by General Pinochet’s troops in the stadium which now bears his name, it’s both apt, and breathtaking.Fans of the Manic Street Preachers are quick to list the art, music and literature they have Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s exciting to come to an album with no preconceptions and no context and find you fall immediately in love with it. Tanya Donelly is probably less well-known in Britain than she deserves to be: she last toured here in 2014 with Throwing Muses, one of two bands she co-founded (the other was The Breeders) before founding and fronting Belly, finally going solo in the mid-'90s.Stateside she’s more of a name, particularly in the Boston area, and essentially known as a singer-songwriter. She’s no stranger to covers and during lockdown has been laying down a series of modern classics at # Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Whether explicitly or indirectly, what’s written on a master tape box can tantalise. Revealing part of a picture creates a desire to want to know more. Take the example seen above. It’s for an album by South African alto saxist Dudu Pukwana. The annotation gives a date of July 1968 and the client is Witchseason, the company run by manager/producer Joe Boyd. The recording took place at Sound Techniques, the independent Chelsea studio favoured by Boyd for his other clients. He’d worked there with Pink Floyd in 1967. Around the time of this session, Boyd had brought Fairport Convention and The Read more ...
joe.muggs
This documentary is bittersweet viewing on quite a number of levels. First, it’s got all the glory and tragedy of the most compelling music stories: a Liverpool band struggling from humble beginnings, trying to find an identity, fraternity and fallings-out, coping with huge success and its aftermath – not to mention sex, drugs, mental illness and death. On top of that there’s a constant layer of narrative about the endless pressures of racism on black British musicians, told brilliantly both explicitly and in the micro-details of 1960s and '70s life.Maybe most devastating thing of all, though Read more ...
Barney Harsent
After 2016’s A Shot in the Light, DJ, producer and Disco Halal labelrunner Chen Moscovici has leaned full-tilt into synth-pop and, with Time Slips Away, has created a collection that’s both carefully placed and cleverly paced. Alternating between solo tracks and collaborative songs, the album is stuffed full of vocal hooks and earworm moments that have long been hinted at in the producer’s past work but never been this fully realised.That’s not to say that fans of Moscoman’s more four-to-the-floor outings need to look elsewhere for their fix, there’s plenty here that fits the bill. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
New Heavy Sounds is one of Britain’s most exciting and undersung labels. Founded in 2011, they have consistently released music that boasts innovation, imagination and a strong female presence. The added sweetener is that this comes attached to sheer guitar-slingin’ power of the kind heavy rockers, from the 1970s to the present, have always relished. Styling themselves in favour of “anything with dirty, big riffs and attitude,” their output has one foot in the metal camp but aspirations beyond it. The two men behind New Heavy Sounds, Ged Murphy and Paul Cox, avoid gimmicks and hype and let Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mike Skinner got out just in time, pulling the plug on The Streets at the point of exhaustion. After Original Pirate Material’s hopeful bedroom dream of English rap came true in 2002, four further albums wearily analysed fame and self-destruction, and ended in 2011 when Skinner saw only dead ends ahead. The garage laureate of clubland and kebabs had set his own template too well, and was too gloomily self-aware to fake progress.Subsequent work has suited his discursive mind, from rock band The D.O.T. to DJing. The Streets’ 2017 return for a Greatest Hits tour still protectively distanced them Read more ...
Guy Oddy
That Deep Purple are still putting out albums over 50 years since they first got together and still have three members of their early Seventies classic line-up on the payroll is quite a feat. That they are also still looking for new ways to express themselves and have resisted the temptation to spend their time knocking out pale imitations of “Highway Star” and “Smoke on the Water” is even more impressive. To some extent, this is inevitable. Singer Ian Gillan is now 74 years old and is probably unable to scream like a banshee anymore. However, he has reinvented his singing style since the Read more ...
joe.muggs
When does the avant-garde become folk? Both of the participants in this album have certainly been on the very cutting edge of sound-making, on multiple occasions. Conrad Schnitzler was a student of radical artist Joseph Beuys and leading light in the utopian thinking and radical soundmaking of 1970s West Germany as a member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster. Frank Bretschneider was, bravely, an underground musician in East Germany in the 1980s, in partnership with Olaf Bender – and, again with Bender and later with Carsten Nicolai, in unified Germany in the 1990s and on was responsible for some Read more ...