dance music
Thomas H. Green
The fourth Ibibio Sound Machine album is produced by Hot Chip (who also contribute musically). However, fans will not hear a drastic step away from their last album, 2019’s Doko Mien. Instead, it has the feel of a logical progression, albeit with just that bit more techno-pop heft in places, and a subtle flavour of the Eighties. Business-as-usual, then? Maybe, but Ibibio Sound Machine’s Afro-inventive business-as-usual stands out brightly from the competition.The London-based band, fronted by Eno Williams, who sings in both English and Ibibio, a southern Nigerian language, open proceedings Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There’s a period of British club music that deserves to be much better appreciated. Before hardcore and jungle, before the Underworlds and Leftfields and other arena acts, came a generation who were much closer to the most song-based US house music, to considerable success. Between 1988 and 1990 came dazzling records from S’Express, The Beloved, Coldcut’s earliest manifestation, and several Eighties pop acts that evolved with the times: The Style Council, The Blow Monkeys and Boy George with his Jesus Loves You project.Into this milieu came four Brummies known as the Groove Corporation, and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Wind the clock back 45 years and the Big Apple was bankrupt, the lights had gone out and many native New Yorkers were packing their bags. Gangs controlled whole neighbourhoods, drugs were the currency of choice and, for a kid with no college, prospects were strictly limited. The movie Saturday Night Fever captured this social decay, illustrating the crisis of confidence that suffused so many big Western cities.In faraway England, the nihilism of punk was leaning into the "no future" narrative, but suddenly, here over the ocean was Tony Manero, this strutting master of the universe, Read more ...
Barney Harsent
A Life in the Day is the second album from Bed Wetter, nom de plume of DJ, producer and experimental artist Geoff Kirkwood. Perhaps best known for his dancefloor-centred productions under the Man Power moniker, Kirkwood’s thoughtful and committed approach to his art has often seen him venture into uncomfortable territory and work within self-imposed boundaries – from a spell as Artist in Residence for the Sage Opera House and Concert Venue to his music subscription service that promised fans an EP a month for the duration of 2021.During the UK’s second big lockdown, roughly a year ago, the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title borrows from the lyrics of Siouxsie and the Banshees’s August 1978 debut single “Hong Kong Garden”: “Harmful elements in the air, Symbols clashing everywhere.” It also refers to Marcus Garvey’s prediction that on 7 July 1977 two sevens would clash with damaging consequences, a forewarning acknowledged that year by Culture’s Two Sevens Clash album.Yet Jon Savage's 1977-1979 - Symbols Clashing Everywhere collects “Voices,” “Hong Kong Garden’s” B-side, and Two Sevens Clash producer Joe Gibbs’s single “Prophesy Reveal,” a version of "Two Sevens Clash" voiced by Marvin Pitterson in his Read more ...
Joe Muggs
2021 might not seem the most likely of years for the globalisation of dance music to intensify, what with the lack of travel and the lack of... well... dancing. But, in fact, thanks partly to the enforced time spent online which led to a lot of discovery for a lot of people, and partly to a simple yearning to get back out there dancing, the connections made have been wild. And no record exemplifies this quite like Toya Delazy’s Afrorave. The adopted Londoner comes from Zulu royalty, and is very keen to represent her heritage in her music: this entire album is rapped/sung in Zulu, its Read more ...
India Lewis
Perhaps appropriately, when I called Pete Tong for his 10 questions I was hungover, on the phone in a park after a night at a very good party. It’s a sign of the times that things are appearing to return to a relative normal, despite the threat of Omnicron and a precipitant winter lockdown.Pete is on the cusp of releasing his new eight-track EP, to be accompanied by a live show on December 3. These live shows with the Heritage Orchestra were the genesis of the series of four releases, of which Pete Tong + Friends: Ibiza Classics is the latest. Tentatively, the nights are opening up again just Read more ...
Joe Muggs
“Flashbacks / driving in your car volume pushed right up to max / all those late nights I’d try to drink them back” These are almost the first words you hear on this record, coming in as South London Afrobeats producer P2J’s bass tones roll in on the opener “Under my Skin”. And they’re a perfect introduction to the theme and mood of the record too. It’s over five years since Katy B’s third album, Honey; back then she was still the unofficial narrator of millennial club culture, her songs perfectly catching the whirl of the dancefloor and hypersociality, locked exactly into the finest dance Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Amon Tobin is hard to pin down. His music has mutated over the years. He initially fitted in with Ninja Tune’s late-Nineties/early-Noughties roster of post-hip hop stoner breaks, heavily jazzed. But in more recent years, he’s wandered into an area where glitchy soundscaping and avant-classical experiments are laced with warped sampling. Then there’s his industrially heavy Two Fingers crunch-step project. And that’s not even mentioning his extensive video game and film work. Now this. A head-battering, unhinged outing that’s uncategorisable, surprising, highly original, often also gorgeous. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
To coin a cliché, the fourth album from London pop-dance success story Rudimental is a game of two halves. The first is off-putting and dull but halfway through, the band seem to wake up. There are 16 songs on the album. The eighth, “Handle My Own”, is the first one to make the ears prick up, and from track 11 on we’re in continuous business.A decade ago, the coming together of an unknown EDM trio, Rudimental, and a super-hot producer looking for a project, Amir Amor (who soon joined them), resulted in the chart-topping “Feel the Love”, featuring John Newman. The group encapsulated a moment Read more ...
peter.quinn
This second full-length album from South Korean 10-piece Golden Child moves seamlessly from pop balladry to anthemic EDM without ever losing its footing.With ghostly, submerged bell noises, ominous-sounding low brass, joined by strings and pounding drums that reaches a riotous crescendo, the pithy opener “Game Changer” certainly packs an incendiary charge, a figurative grabbing of the listener’s lapel which nicely sets up the dynamic rhythmic power of “Ra Pam Pam”.Incorporating 1980s-style power guitar riffs, cowbell hits and a squiggly synth line embedded into its chorus, “Bottom Of The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This writer has often pleaded to move away from vocal homogeny in pop. The current value placed on technical skill and hackneyed vulnerability-signifying has become a bore. It’s limiting that Chris Martin-meets-Ed Sheeran or Beyoncé-meets-Whitney Houston are primary templates. That said, the voice of Aussie singer Toni Watson – AKA Tones and I – is a challenge, a cloyingly cute teen-squeak of an instrument (although capable of taking flight). In the end, though, her music represents her bountiful character, and her voice suits it just fine.Debut album Welcome to the Madhouse will be a test- Read more ...