club music
Thomas H. Green
Morcheeba reach their 30th anniversary this year. The 1990s band, a unit once synonymous with phrases such as “trip hop” and “chill-out”, are up to album number 11. Their multi-million-selling oeuvre is based around a hazy combination of low-slung hip hop beats, stoned electronic atmospherics, spacey, slightly John Barry wah-wah guitar, and the luxurious voice of frontwoman Skye Edwards. Because the formula is always approximately the same, each album wins or loses dependent on whether they’ve nailed a sweet set of songs. On this occasion they do.Morcheeba has been the duo of singer Skye Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Ammar 808 is the high octane vehicle for the Tunisian-born producer Sofyann Ben Youssef, now based in Denmark. His first album Maghreb United (2018) struck hard and fast in a field already well-populated by the fusion of traditional Arab sounds and modern electronics. It was a marriage made in heaven. His second album Global Control/Invisible Invasion (2020) explored links with South Indian sounds, but in the latest, he returns to his roots and the result is a frenetic and very danceable mix of ancient and modern.In the company of some of Tunisia’s most popular vocalists, the producer weaves Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Danish singer MØ is a paradox. Initially she appeared to be another Scandi electro-pop princess of the bangers. The monster 2015 hit “Lean On” with Major Lazer jacked her profile, briefly, through the roof, but, while she’s worked with everyone from Iggy Azalea to DJ Benny Benassi, she seemed to step sideways from pure pop, tempering it with something more Nordic and melancholy. Her fourth album persuasively continues in this direction.This isn’t to say that there are no clubby stompers. Those after that pure rush should head straight to “Keep Moving”, an Eighties-tinted 4/4 cruncher, created Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Rooted in South African electronic styles such as kwaito, amapiano and gqom, the music of Moonchild Sanelly also shows a rich in awareness of US and European hip hop and pop.Initially a product of Durban’s poetry scene, Sanelly, born Sanelisiwe Twisha, spent years building a reputation there and in Johannesburg, before coming to wider attention when Beyoncé featured her on her Lion King soundtrack. She signed to the forward-thinking Transgressive label in 2020, and her second album for them, her third in total, bounces with her trademark sex-positivity and booty-shaking beats’n’bass.There are Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
What’s to be said about an album that’s half well-executed body-moving, dancefloor pop and half sickly, slick schmaltz? It’s as if the creator is covering off all possible fanbases, those with taste and those lacking it. From a reviewing perspective, with theartsdesk’s score-out-of-five system, it’s tricky; one song I’m thinking, “Yes, a whopper, and the next, yuk, a pure zero.” But, staying positive, about 20 minutes of Do What Makes You Happy’s approximately 40, are full of entertaining verve and bounce.Alice Ivy is the stage-name of Melbourne-based German-Australian electronic producer Read more ...
Joe Muggs
If the names Pinch, Vex’d, Burial, Digital Mystikz, The Bug mean anything to you, stop reading now and buy or stream this album. Seriously, go. Go get it. That honestly is all you need to know: if you like the imperial phase when British dubstep was first establishing lasting artistic careers and extending its tendrils into the wider musical world – completely separately from its branching into a fizzy, EDM / rave form in big arenas – then you will love this record.Which is not to say it’s a throwback. Alicia Bauer aka Alley Cat has been in the bass music realm for a long time – starting in Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Every lover of folk-tales knows that the seeker has to endure dangers and setbacks before they finally win the prize. Last night, the ever-enterprising Aurora Orchestra played The Firebird – Stravinsky’s own musical vision of the intrepid hero who outwits the forces of darkness – on a unique site that presents an audience with its own kind of ordeals. Once the Tottenham IKEA, Drumsheds has undergone a metamorphosis from super-store to super-club.Set in a wilderness of concrete lots and wire fences, across a roaring highway, the big blue terminal-sized shed now offers 608,000 square feet of Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Dan Snaith’s career has been a joyous thing to watch. Almost a quarter of a century the Canadian started out as Manitoba (soon renamed to Caribou) making a giddy mixture of dreamy ‘60s psychedelic pop, glitchy electronica and then cutting-edge dance music.Since then, much like his friend and contemporary Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden – latterly joined on their journey by Sam “Floating Points” Shepherd – he’s refined and tightened his sound, reaching bigger and bigger crowds, while impressively retaining the same fundamental character and inspirations. This is his 11th full album – eighth as Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Sometimes a gig suddenly and completely elevates. Such is the case tonight when Moby, on his first UK tour in 12 years, plays “Extreme Ways”, his 2002 anthem for hedonism and its desperate consequences. What has been an adequately entertaining night blossoms into something more riveting. The 20,000-strong O2 crowd, previously mostly seated, rise en masse, move and sing along. The place is a-buzz.Perhaps this is because it’s the moment when Moby finally owns the stage. He is up front on guitar, delivering the song like a classic rock turn. Much of his multi-million-selling back catalogue, Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There’s been a lot of early 90s rave aesthetics in popular culture lately, but an awful lot of it has been at the level of signifiers. Fila, Stüssy, Air Max 90s, smiley faces, sirens, rewinds, crowd noises, hop in a Ford Cortina, tribes coming together, dancing at dawn, baggy hoodies for goalposts, isn’t it, wasn’t it, hmm? There’s been a little less discussed, though, about what raving actually felt like, and in particular that it its revolutionary character came from everyone having the same feeling of being on the same drug at the same time.Again, we might see the signifiers of tablets, Read more ...
Joe Muggs
I made a terrible mistake when I first got this LP: I played it on my laptop speakers. That’s not the straight up foolishness you might think, mind – after downloading something for review I’ll often play it quietly in the background while I catch up on admin, because it can be a good way of getting the general shape of an album, an overview as it were, before properly diving into it. But for this album in particular that really didn’t work.Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points is a virtuoso producer – and one of the world’s best DJs, which has taken him on a consistent upward trajectory parallel Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Some performers are born to perform. It seems obvious, but it’s not a given in the music world. Some just want to make sound, some want to compose, not all are in it to connect directly to an audience. Rob Gallagher, however, is all about that connection, and he’s never stopped doing it. It was there in his band Galliano’s genial funk from 1988 through 1997: his London beat poetry always felt like it was addressing you direct, and the band came to live above all on the live stage where he could speak to the crowd.In the subsequent band Two Banks of Four he did admittedly step back from the Read more ...