dance music
Kieron Tyler
After a burst of gun-shot drumming, “Hot Coffee” instantly hits its groove. Simple but insistent guitar, a rubbery bass line and electric organ all fall into line. For the instrumental’s two-and-half minutes, it is unstoppable.“Gig Soul Party” is as tight but more ornate as the organ playing incorporates flourishes. There’s a spindly solo guitar line and some funky-drummer drumming too. But it’s as effective. Dance floors would have been crowded.Then there’s “Soul Crazy,” another instrumental with the same emphasis on a rigid rhythmic foundation and forward motion. A guitar solo is minimal Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There’s polarising discourse and there’s polarising discourse, and then there’s Beyoncé discourse. On the one hand, there’s “the Bey Hive”: the very model of a furious modern fandom who will boost her and monster her critics at a microsecond’s notice. There are the commentators for whom everything she does is by definition profound, moral and important, regardless of any hypercapitalist excesses and hanging out with dicators’ offspring. And they're all buoyed up by a press so desperate for “access” that every profile is done with HELLO! magazine levels of management-vetted swooning. Read more ...
Barney Harsent
After four years, three releases and a slew of remixes, the identity of spotlight-shunning producer Vyvyan ended up the subject of intense speculation.There were no obvious clues from the records themselves. Channelling open-armed enthusiasm and rampant eclecticism, the releases were wild rides full of thrilling energy, nodding to the past as they ran full-pelt into the future. Could it be some Berlin-based wunderkind? Maybe the work of an established veteran? Was it Henry, the mild-mannered janitor?Tired of the anonymity (“mystery is for Daft Punk and the Catholic Church”), composer, DJ and Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Last days of June 2022, I sit in my writing hut. My liver is radioactive jelly, my nose reinforced concrete, my leg muscles marathon-cramped, and poisoned perspiration rolls down my forehead, stinging my eyeballs.You’ll already have seen a trillion Twittering threepenny-bit reports on Glastonbury, but you haven’t taken this trip, I promise. So stroll in, fall over, pick yourself back up, take it all in, sniff it all up, drink it all down. Let’s do this.THURSDAY 23rd JUNEFinetime, my regular Glastonbury partner and photographer, is very proud of the tent he’s bought me from Lidl. My own tent Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Summer has arrived outside and sunny sounds are blasting from the speakers at theartsdesk on Vinyl. But not just sunny sounds, to be truthful, also sounds that cover most of the human emotional range, all from plastic discs in varying colours. Check in below for over 8000 words on music, from Afro-electro to Cornish rock to tango to genres beyond naming. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHShelf Lives Yes, Offence (Sorry Mom)Juddering, sweary, punkin’, sneering electro-rock is the game of London-based duo Shelf Lives, fronted by single-monikered Canadian frontwoman Sabrina and Brit producer-guitarist Read more ...
Tom Carr
For the Oxford alt-rock mainstays Foals, the past two years brought an anti-climactic pause to a triumphant 2019: their meteoric trajectory had kept pace with their duo of albums, Everything Not Saved Will be Lost Part 1 and 2. The sister albums had given the group their first UK album #1 with Part 2, and their live reputation was glowing brighter still.And then it all stopped.Now, as the bleak lockdown years silhouette their new album Life Is Yours, it’s no surprise they return with a sound steeped in summertime vibes. Moving away from the cinematically framed Part 1 and Part 2, Life Is Read more ...
Joe Muggs
A gothic aesthetic is very common in the left field of electronic/club music these days – but it tends to go with fairly extreme sounds: either industrial pummelling, or glitched-out “deconstructed club” as in artists like Ziúr.But Andy Butler and his Hercules & Love Affair project have gone for something altogether different on the fifth H&LA album. Just as, in his early records, Butler went back to the source building blocks of house and disco music, here he's gone right to the roots of goth. So this album is rife with influences. Woven throughout, you can clearly hear Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
As Bloc Party singer Kele Okereke noted at one point in this gig, his band have now been visiting Glasgow for nearly two decades. Yet few of the shows played in that 18 year span, which have touched upon nearly all of the city’s main music venues, have been as contrasting as this one. By the night’s end, when the band blasted out a rare outing of their very early single “Little Thoughts”, the audience were a jubilant and sweaty throng, but it was hard work getting there.Okereke noticed it as well. Clad in a bright multi coloured shirt that possessed more vibrancy than the early part of the Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
“This town makes me sweat”, declared Charlotte Aitchison at one point in this set, as she took a brief breather between songs. The 29-year-old should have tried being in the audience, for this was a sweat-drenched evening right from the opening seconds, with a wildly devoted crowd which congregated into a heaving mass rapidly and consistently.Aitchison might have too many quirks to ascend beyond a venue like the O2 Academy, but something about both her personality and performance suggested she is better suited to such a setting anyway.Which isn’t to say that the Essex native is Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Prior to alt-j’s encore getting underway their video wall switched to the Ukrainian flag. “Fuck Putin!” bellowed keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton, to hearty roars of approval, in what was both a brief reminder of the outside world beyond the increasingly humid Barrowland and also a look at the band themselves and their own emotions, which otherwise remained distant during this show.That distance was quite literal, particularly early on. The trio were on a raised platform on the stage, meaning they truly towered over the audience, while a large portion of the gig was spent with them in shadow, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What’s in the groove isn’t necessarily the end of the story. Sound is fixed into a record when it’s pressed. Get it revolving on a turntable, dump the needle onto it and what’s heard is what’s intended to be heard. It’s fixed. Nonetheless, DJs realised a record can be part of the route to something else, something which becomes their creation.Saturno 2000 - La Rebajada de Los Sonideros 1962-1983 celebrates a previously obscure form of sonic manipulation. In Mexico, DJs were playing records at a lower rpm than the standard 33 1/3 or 45 bringing their tempo down to make them more easy to dance Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There are few people, especially musicians, who would wish to revisit the spring and summer of 2020 with any fondness, but Sophie Ellis-Bextor might be an exception. Her kitchen discos, in which she and her husband Richard Jones, aided by their children, played a variety of covers became a lockdown source of solace and regular entertainment at a time when it was much needed.Two years later she has taken the concept out on the road for a celebratory party, albeit sans the kids, as she admitted with a laugh. To replace her children’s unexpected antics we instead had a large wheel, spun on a Read more ...