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Album: Squarepusher - DostrotimeSaturday, 02 March 2024
Tom “Squarepusher” Jenkinson has covered a lot of ground over three decades, from dank cellar ambience to refined baroque composition, and from chirpy funk to monstrous noise. But his default mode is instantly recognisable: 170+ beats per minute... Read more... |
Album: Helado Negro - PHASORWednesday, 07 February 2024
Floridian-born, longtime Brooklyn resident, now Asheville, North Carolina based Roberto Carlos Lange doesn’t rush things, but he gets them done. This is his ninth album in 15 years, during which time he’s built a substantial body of audiovisual /... Read more... |
Album: J Mascis - What Do We Do NowWednesday, 31 January 2024
It seems like time flows differently for J Mascis. He’s now not far off 60, it’s 40 years since he founded Dinosaur Jr, and he’s been involved in untold musical project from the most rarefied of abstract psychedelia to guesting with Lemonheads and... Read more... |
Album: Gruff Rhys - Sadness Sets Me FreeWednesday, 24 January 2024
Halfway through this album, “They Sold My Home to Build a Skyscraper” unlocks it. On first listen I’d been nodding along with the first few songs, enjoying how they find glimmers of more or less forlorn hope in amongst sadness and middle-aged... Read more... |
Albums of the Year 2023: Kesha - Gag OrderFriday, 15 December 2023
Some years there’s no obvious Album of the Year. 2023 is not such a year. Any one of five albums could have been my choice. I chose Kesha from that esteemed selection because her fifth album bombed commercially, and I want to BIG IT RIGHT UP.The... Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 81: Nobro, Adrian Sherwood, Evian Christ, Ozric Tentacles, Maple Glider, Viken Arman and moreTuesday, 12 December 2023
The first of two December theartsdesk on Vinyls which will appear in quick succession. This one's mostly new artists. The next one will be our Christmas Special, filled with seasonal fare and present-suitable reissues and boxsets. For the best... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: 23 Seconds to EternityTuesday, 14 November 2023
The KLF are endlessly fascinating. There’s never been a “pop group” like them. From the late Eighties into the early Nineties, they treated music, especially electronic dance music, as a laboratory for lunatic experiment. Unlike most avant-garde... Read more... |
Snayx/Shelf Lives/Monakis, Patterns, Brighton review - storming, punking triple-headerFriday, 20 October 2023
Patterns is a small, low-ceilinged, underground, seafront venue. Tonight it would be a feast for any passing ancient succubae who happens to feed on raw human energy. From 7.00 PM until 10.00 PM, the room plays host to a package tour of three rising... Read more... |
Album: Oneohtrix Point Never - AgainThursday, 28 September 2023
The music of Daniel Lopatin – AKA Oneohtrix Point Never – exists at the sonic/electronic vanguard. Were the likes of avant-gardists such as Iannis Xenakis, George Antheil and Edgard Varese around today, maybe even Stockhausen, they might dig... Read more... |
Album: Kristin Hersh - Clear Pond RoadWednesday, 06 September 2023
Kristin Hersh’s voice, it transpires, is ageless. In the 80s when Throwing Muses broke through, she hit a particular combination of tones – blurring boundaries between harsh and smooth, melodic and discordant, trad and weird – that became vastly... Read more... |
Medicine Festival review - the new New Age gathers in leafy BerkshireWednesday, 30 August 2023
Fia is a Swedish singer with a crystalline voice and a ear for a great melody - her singalong choruses are not typical for a festival Friday night headliner, like getting the audience to join in with “Sit with your pain/ cradle it close/ and when... Read more... |
The Walkmen, SWG3, Glasgow review - a classy return for New York's finestWednesday, 23 August 2023
As the relentless, hammering beat of “The Rat” faded away, the Walkmen’s singer Hamilton Leithauser was evidently in buoyant mood. “Like riding a bike,” he declared to the Glasgow crowd, and this was a statement that proved consistently accurate... Read more... |
