New music
howard.male
Believe it or not, it’s been 14 years since the one-time Talking Heads frontman’s last solo album proper. Perhaps it doesn’t feel like that because his interim collaboration projects always sound so very David Byrne. Even when he took equal billing with the formidably talented and highly individualist Annie Clark (St Vincent), it still sticks in the memory as a Byrne album with guest Clark. But anyway, here we have it, and it too sounds very much like a David Byrne album. Is this meant as a backhanded complement? Not at all.For one thing, it’s not as sonically dense as that St Vincent Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Considering the coal-dark nature of her music, it was unsurprising Sweden's Anna von Hausswolff was dressed entirely in black while meeting up at London’s Rough Trade East shop to talk about her new album Dead Magic. Less foreseeable was her sunny disposition and willingness to veer off topic. She happily explored what has brought her to this point and spoke enthusiastically about her inspirations. Whatever was discussed, the overriding impression was of a cheerful but nonetheless serious-minded person who puts a lot of thought into their music.Dead Magic (pictured below) is the Gothenburg- Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There was a hint of what was to come in Gwenno Saunders’ debut, Y Dydd Olaf. It was, for the most part, a Welsh-language affair, save for the closing track “Amser”, a song sung in Cornish and the album’s dizzying slow dazzle. For her follow-up, Le Kov, Gwenno has chosen to record an entire album in this Brythonic language that has, in recent times, gamely rallied itself from UNESCO-declared death.Le Kov, then, exists as a document of a living language, albeit one that the majority of listeners will have no working knowledge of. In order to make real sense of the songs, we have to do the Read more ...
joe.muggs
For some a lack of development is failure; not for Kim Deal. Her songwriting and voice have influenced hordes of indie bands from the Eighties until now – indeed the “angular” clang and arch drawl of bands indebted to Pixies, and The Breeders, her band with sister Kelly, is as great a cliché as blues licks were in the Sixties and Seventies. Yet still, on this reunion album for The Breeders' 1993 lineup, the voice, sound and structures remain utterly distinctive and gloriously alien, a world away from the imitators, just as they shone out as different from all around them during The Breeders' Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Without further ado, let’s cut straight to it. Below theartsdesk on Vinyl offers over 30 records reviewed, running the gamut from Adult Orientated Rock to steel-hard techno via the sweetest, liveliest pop. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTH 1Zoë Mc Pherson String Figures (SVS)Where to begin with this one? Zoe Mc Pherson [sic] is a Brussels-based producer of French-Northern Irish extraction who collects field recordings around the world, from Indonesia to Greenland, then works with the accomplished percussionist Falk Schrauwen, and a load of electronic equipment, to turn them into something thrilling Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Chestnut-brown canary, ruby-throated sparrow” sang Stephen Stills in his “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”, a song from CSNY’s 1969 debut album to Judy Collins, with whom he was ending a two-year affair. Collins’s big baby-blue eyes haven’t faded with time. Nor has her voice – indeed, it is far more secure now than it was 40 years ago, when she was battling pills and booze, a fight she’s documented in a number of books.Collins was a star in 1969; CSNY were making their celebrated Woodstock debut and that iconic first album had harmonies that were spine-chillingly beautiful and pitch-perfect. The tie- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What is music? When pondering archive releases, compilations and reissues the question doesn’t come up. Knowledge of context and history means there’s never a need to muse on this fundamental issue. A package, say, dedicated to Northern Soul says what it is and the prime considerations are how well it has been executed and defining its place in the relevant narrative. The same applies to anything previously covered in this column.However, the release of the Voyager Golden Record raises this concern. Twenty-seven pieces of music are collected, ranging from a Navajo Chant to part of Beethoven’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
Of all the wave of neoclassical or postclassical music of the past half decade or so, some of the most popular is a new breed of rippling, repetitive solo piano piece. And, really, I mean staggeringly popular: Spotify's Peaceful Piano playlist, curated in-house, has three and three-quarter million subscribers, and a simple inclusion of a track on this playlist is enough to earn a composer a good few quid. As well as established film composers and and artists like Nils Frahm, Max Richter and co, Spotify include plenty of unknowns so, given the low overheads for recording a short, won't-scare- Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Sixty years after her debut at Club 47, Harvard Square, Joan Baez this year bows out of formal touring and recording with an album every bit as remarkable as her 1960 debut, preserved by the Library of Congress in the National Recording Registry. Now 77, she’s reached an accommodation with a voice once famously described as “an achingly pure soprano”, which wrapped itself effortlessly around Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras #5. Once a bright-white diamond, it is now a deep topaz, still an exquisite instrument in the lower registers in which Baez is most comfortable.Whistle Down the Wind, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a career that began in 1967 and may yet have further life in it, Genesis have sold 150 million albums (and possibly more), and in their original incarnation with Peter Gabriel as vocalist were an influential force in the development of progressive rock. They then enjoyed an extraordinary rebirth when Phil Collins took over the microphone, and with albums like Duke, Abacab, Invisible Touch and We Can’t Dance blossomed into one of the most popular acts of the Eighties and Nineties. They became flag-wavers of a record industry pumped up on the compact disc boom and the MTV revolution.But Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
After two albums of battle anthems for Trump-addled times, raging against the machine with his “Void Pacific Choir”, Moby’s fifteenth long-player is ostensibly a return to his millennial purple patch, when Play conquered the world and was bought by millions. The tune especially touted thus is the single “Motherless Child”, a spiritual standard revisited, but soul singer Raquel Rodriguez, accompanied by Moby rapping, over bass-propelled electro-funk sounds nothing like that old stuff. And so it is with the rest of the album.This is a good thing, because that would be boring. That period of his Read more ...
Guy Oddy
A superstar elsewhere in the world, particularly in West Africa, Femi Kuti still lives somewhat unfairly in his dad, Fela Kuti’s shadow in the West. While this might be somewhat inevitable to those with a limited taste for afrobeat grooves, One People One World needs no family leg-up with its funky guitars and scorching soul-powered brass. This fiery 50-minute rant against the greedy and corrupt has more than enough to satisfy both the head and the hips.While there isn’t a great deal of either musical or lyrical variety, One People One World never feels dull or worthy. “Africa Will Be Great Read more ...