New music
Thomas H. Green
Neil Arthur is on a mission. He was once one half of Blancmange, the British synth-pop band most famous for middle-sized hits of the early 1980s, songs such as “Don’t Tell Me” and “Living on the Ceiling”. He has been the group’s sole member since 2011 and, recently, he’s been busy. Two albums came out last year, the playful Semi Detached and the instrumental, experimental Nil by Mouth, both decent outings that threw off the shackles of being a tribute act to his younger self. A few months later, Commuter 23 appears, a successful continuation of the same mission.This isn’t to say that the new Read more ...
joe.muggs
DJs and techno producers doing “real music” doesn't always inspire the greatest of confidence: they often seem in thrall to other musicians, blind to what makes their own music special, or afraid to take the risks they would with their electronic production.However, Julius Steinhoff of Hamburg's Smallville records and Abdeslam Hammouda, with whom he's been producing house tunes since 2008, defiantly buck that trend. On this album for the ever-reliable Tokyo label Mule Musiq, they've left the dancefloor a long way behind them, and created 13 gentle meditations on life, love and the mind: each Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Music is no exception to the rule that history is littered with winners and losers. In commercial terms, however they are looked at, San Francisco’s Charlatans were losers. They issued just one single in 1966 and a belated album in 1969. While the world hummed along with Scott McKenzie’s "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" in 1967, these pioneers of the city’s scene were without a label and left adrift in the rush to sign Bay Area bands. Big Brother & the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape and Quicksilver Messenger Service saw their stock Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The answers, for the listener curious as to whether Emmy the Great’s Second Love fared any better than her first (it’s the title of her 2009 debut as much as any reference to the songwriter’s psyche), do not emerge until its final track. “Once I was a flight risk,” Emma-Lee Moss sings softly, almost swooning, “but soon I think I will be safe … Let me get lost in you”. Which sounds as close as one gets to a happy ending, until the lyric changes with the second verse to “I wish I was a flight risk”.It’s been five years since Moss’s last album proper: five years in which the Londoner moved to LA Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Barry Adamson has recently moved to Brighton and is clearly delighted with his new home town, which he refers to, shortly after starting his set, as a “dressing-up box by the sea”. Later in the evening he introduces the Hammond organ-laden “The Sun and the Sea” by telling his audience it was written about Brighton a few years ago, before he moved there, dryly informing us that he couldn’t fail to be drawn to somewhere that has “hail in the springtime and pebbles on its nudist beach”. He appears to have already gathered a coterie of local fans who crowd to the front of the low ceilinged-venue Read more ...
mark.kidel
Jeff Buckley, who died much too young, only made one studio album, Grace. Part-channelling his sweet-voiced father Tim, and part-exploring a strand of rock that was both dangerously wild and exquisitely sophisticated, it was a revelation and a masterpiece. To this day, it sounds as fresh and deeply moving as ever.There has been, over the years, a series of posthumous releases, some of them constructions based on half-finished work, little of which matched the sheer brilliance of Grace, as well as some impressive live material – Buckley was a powerhouse on stage, with a band that fed on his Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Read the track listing of Belgica and you might assume that this soundtrack is a compilation featuring 15 different artists from a wide variety of musical genres. In fact, it has been written and produced in its entirety by Belgian experimentalists Soulwax, using virtual bands created purely for this project. Soulwax is actually made up of Belgian brothers Stephen and David Dewaele (AKA dance titans 2manydjs) and Stefaan Van Leuven, and their latest offering accompanies a film set in a nightclub in Ghent which, on this evidence, sounds like quite a wild venue with plenty to recommend it.The Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Ten years after his debut album, the former N.A.S.T.Y Crew MC from East Ham has produced a distinctly British album. It’s probably his best yet. Kano has skirted the fringes of mega success and previous albums have been criticised for chasing hits and the American Dream rather than staying true to his own style. Now, he’s returned to what he knows, creating a series of polaroid snapshots of himself and what made him.Made In The Manor talks about the streets he grew up on ("A Roadman's Hymn"), his mates ("Strangers"), his family ("Little Sis"), the trappings of fame and the reality of living Read more ...
Barney Harsent
So the Coral have hit their eighth studio album, Distance Inbetween. This is, I’m ashamed to say, news to me. It’s like realizing that a show you used to really like transferred to Sky Atlantic and you’ve failed to keep up and extend your subscription. The question then is how will it be, jumping in now, so far down the line? Particularly when their last offering – 2014’s release of "lost" album, The Curse of Love – comprised an extended flashback sequence that received a mixed response. This is, I’m assuming, the first time that the Coral will have found themselves compared to the ‘85-‘86 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When the Sixties-inspired The Prisoners released their second album Thewisermiserdemelza in 1983, the decade they looked to for their musical and sartorial style was closer to the album itself than it is to today. Now, the half-century remove from what the Medway band drew from then ought to be as distant as, say, the minutiae of 1916 are from those of 1966. Yet this is not the case. The 1960s have never been consigned to the dusty drawer of distant memory, a point rammed home by the Victoria & Albert Museum's annoucement last week that they are to hold a major exhibition dedicated to the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Loretta Lynn’s first album in over a decade begins not with a song, but a spoken word introduction: the Queen of Country Music, still hands-on in the studio at the age of 83, telling her collaborators about the first song she ever wrote. “I had to get all these songs wrote in two days, so I wrote 12 of them,” she says, that rich Appalachian twang still strong in her voice, before the album proper begins with a new version of that very same song.Lynn and her longstanding producers – daughter Patsy Lynn Russell and John Carter Cash – have been exploring her archives, re-recording both the old Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Gloaming’s return to the Union Chapel in north London is a packed-out affair – and with good reason. Their British debut here, before the first album was released back in 2013, was a revelation. Few knew what to expect as Clare fiddler Martin Hayes, New York pianist Thomas Bartlett, Dublin-born viola and hardanger fiddle player Caoimhin O Raghallaigh, Sean Nos singer Iarla O Lionaird and Chicago guitarist Dennis Cahill launched into the epic "Opening Set" from that debut album.Over the next 20 or so minutes they astonished all who were there with the space, dexterity, lightness and Read more ...