New music
Thomas H. Green
From the biggest man band of all time to a rising Doncaster DJ, from the lofts of New York to the garage studios rooms of Scotland, the best of current musical lockdown life is here. Dive in!Take That/Robbie Williams: Meerkat Music ConcertThe big news this week is that the classic Take That line-up, minus Jason Orange, who left for good in 2012, will be reuniting for an at-home concert at 8.00 PM this Friday (29th May) via the Youtube channel of the price comparison website-related Compare the Meerkat. Supporting music therapy charity Nordoff Robbins and Crew Nation, a relief fund for workers Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Joe Casey is the final refugee from the Detroit garage-rock scene which spawned The White Stripes. He has led this otherwise young band for five albums now, every one of which feels like an indignant last stand. Feeling under the baleful influence of unspecified, pre-Covid sickness, and unsure if the source lay in his body or an increasingly depressing world, he conceived this record as a raging epitaph, “last words...while I still had breath to say them”. Esoterically original post-punk soundscapes are meanwhile marshalled by guitarist Greg Ahee. “I Am You Now”, haunted by doppelgangers and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
At the start of March an obscure alt-metal outfit called Cegvera released a concept album titled The Sixth Glare. The physical album featured the headline “DISEASE” alongside a photograph of a woman in a protective facemask, and the sleeve notes expand on the idea that, if we don’t tend to our environment, an illness will arrive to which the world doesn’t have immunity. It opens with a cut called “Infection”. Looked at now, it’s bizarrely prescient. The Bristol-based, British-Mexican band were ahead of the notorious curve to come.In the three months since, hordes of musicians have thrown Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In pop music, less is often more and it doesn't come much shorter-and-sweeter than Quickies, the new collection from New York songwriter Stephin Merritt. The tracks range in length from a brisk 13 seconds to a whisker over two and a half minutes, all chock-full of wry humour. Numbers like "Let's Get Drunk Again (and Get Divorced)" are a glorious blend of cynicism and charming vulnerability. That basic recipe is, of course, Merritt's stock-in-trade. It formed the basis for The Magnetic Fields' celebrated concept album, 69 Love Songs, and features throughout his work. This time, though, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“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”. Atmospherically and structurally, a parallel is the 1968 13th Floor Elevators’ single “May the Circle Remain Unbroken”. “Sunbury Electronics Sequence”, with its obviously after-the-fact title, is a disconcerting nine-minute mélange of speeded-up snatches of voice – “mar-mi Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Word has been out for a while that EDM megastar Diplo has decided to throw a curve ball with his musical career, don a cowboy hat and release a country and western album. If that is truly the case, then there must be another disc in the pipeline because the somewhat awkwardly titled Diplo Presents Thomas Wesley – Chapter 1: Snake Oil certainly isn’t anything which displays any meaningful kinship with the likes of Willie Nelson or Hank Williams.Sure, there are miniscule hints of cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats in places, but “Intro” has more in common (unintentionally, I suspect) with the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The 1975’s career is about navigating ambition, and finding ways to be an interesting, worthwhile big band after the music industry and rock music got small. This fourth album rambles and sprawls through 22 tracks, a double-album in no hurry to settle down.Greta Thunberg’s opening monologue is a typically on the nose lunge for meaning from frontman Matthew Healy. And yet elsewhere he insistently describes insularity, uncertainty and scared fronts, like an accidental report from the viral frontline. It’s as if lockdown was always lying in wait for generations struggling with online mediation, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Footsie might not have the profile of a Skepta or Wiley, or even his Newham Generals partner and recent IKEA advert soundtracker D Double E. But anyone halfway schooled in grime will know that both as MC and producer he's a key player from grime's original generation, and still a pillar of the scene. Amazingly, though, despite the fact he's released a couple of mixtapes and four compilations of his instrumentals, he's never made an official solo album until now. So given that, since his beginnings in N.A.S.T.Y. Crew, he's been in the game for some 20 years, there's quite some weight of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Onto our seventh Lockdown selection and things are only getting busier out there, with more to see, hear and get involved in. Below are five of the best for this week. Dive in!BBC Radio One Big Weekend 2020BBC Radio One’s annual Big Weekend shindig, a free primary-coloured pop festival-cum-party-cum-promo event, has taken place in a different region of the UK every year since 2012. The COVID-19 crisis will not be stopping it going ahead, and this time artists will be performing from multiple locations. On BBC iPlayer throughout the coming weekend, the virtual show runs from Friday 22nd to Read more ...
Barney Harsent
In 2000, when Badly Drawn Boy released his debut album, The Hour of Belwiderbeast, it felt like an embarrassment of riches. Along with the string of singles he’d previously put out, ranging from the lo-fi to the luminous, Damon Gough’s creative tap was in full flow. His 2002 follow-up, the soundtrack for hit film About a Boy, was similarly sublime. Of course, if you’re going to place a bar that high, you won’t always reach it. Gough’s last album proper was 2010’s It’s What I’m Thinking…, an introspective affair that pays dividends, but demands close attention and repeated listening Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Guy Clark, Steve Earle’s mentor and champion and the singer-songwriter to whom he paid homage on his 2019 album, once said that “songs aren’t finished until you play them for people”. By which he surely meant live, creating that vibe for which the best system, or headphones, is no substitute. Nothing beats the communal concert experience, and Earle in the flesh really gets the blood pumping – never more so for me personally than when I was able to present him on stage in Washington Square Park last year. Live is what all of us with music at the centre of our lives are truly missing right now. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
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. Since then, there’s been three more albums: the last of which was 2018’s Valimbilo.The new compilation Early Years – Madagascar Cassette Archives soundtracks a previously untold backstory by revealing what Damily’s music was like on his Read more ...