hip hop
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHBuñuel Mansuetude (Skin Graft/Overdrive)This is a balls-out punk rock’n’roll mess, grunge that’s eaten the hash-cake then swigged a pint of Bourbon at high speed. Buñuel is Eugene S Robinson of San Francisco noiseniks Oxbow, accompanied by a trio of Italian musicians. Across this two-record set, which comes on gatefold double on vinyl that looks like a neon green alien has thrown up breakfast, the quartet are having a ball. Robinson leads the charge, his shrieking vocals whirlpooling around a caterwauling riff assault that’s psychedelicized in the manner of bands such as 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 ...
Guy Oddy
In many ways, 2024 has been a stellar year for New Music. There have certainly been plenty of albums released that could easily have gained “year’s best” status in recent times and would have buried those that actually did receive those plaudits.Veteran artists like the Very Things, Peter Perrett and Les Amazones d’Afrique all put out career highlights. As did plenty of bands who finally found their feet after making initial tentative steps, such as Aussie pub rockers Amyl and the Sniffers, political punk-rappers Bob Vylan and French-Moroccan psychedelicists Bab L’Bluz. However, the record Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHBlood Incantation Absolute Elsewhere (Century Media)When death metal takes LSD it’s quite a thing. Whether this band have done acid or not, the output of Colorado's Blood Incantation feels that way on their fourth album. Each side is one long suite. “The Stargate” and “The Message”, 20 minutes and 23 minutes respectively, both three-part odysseys that take in Floydian guitar solos, ambient Gregorian-style chanting, Seventies synth-wizarding, lilting reggae rhythms and much else, occasionally and suddenly exploding into galloping guitar squalls underpinned by frenetic blast Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Watching Dan McCabe’s 2019 play, older folk might be reminded of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s indelible lyrics, “Can blue men sing the whites, or are they hypocrites…?” The Purists moves the question into the 21st century in a teasing but very enjoyable way.Clearly McCabe has dodged the attention of the cultural appropriation monitors here, a young white man daring to write about hiphop, seemingly a passion of his. His play tags a weightier form of cultural appropriation: the incursion of capitalism into the world of emcees and rap battles, where the enemy is seen as the mighty record Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As the name of a music genre, new jack swing was coined in an issue of the Village Voice dated 18 October 1987. Writer Barry Michael Cooper was profiling producer, songwriter and member of the R&B trio Guy, Teddy Riley when he created a tag exemplifying the mix of R&B and hip-hop which had hit super-big in 1986 with Janet Jackson’s Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis-produced Control. Riley was on the same wavelength, and Cooper recognised a groundswell.Swingbeat was interchangeable with new jack swing, but it was the latter which caught on. So When TLC and SWV emerged in 1992 they were swiftly Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Mad Hatter gets it about right when he tells Alice: “You’re entirely bonkers… but all the best people are.” Kate Prince takes this line and runs with it in her riotous but surprisingly sweet and often moving hip hop take on Lewis Carroll’s 1865 book, a production now enjoying a 10th anniversary revival, coinciding with a revival of Christopher Wheeldon’s three-act Alice ballet in the Covent Garden main house.The premise of Prince’s show, at first, seems bleak: the familiar characters (the Mad Hatter, March Hare, White Rabbit et al) are inmates of an asylum, ruled by a blinkered and cruel Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album only has one serious flaw: LL COOL J didn’t open it with “OK you can call it a comeback”. Sorry, cheap joke (if you didn’t know, his classic hit “Mama Said Knock You Out” starts with the lyric “Don’t call it a comeback!” and this, his 14th album, is his first in 11 years).But honestly no, there really isn’t a lot wrong with this record: LL is in fine voice and furious flow, and the beats – entirely produced by Q Tip from A Tribe Called Quest – are a reminder that old-school, sample-based hip hop can be as heavyweight, as compelling, as mind-bending as anything post-trap youngsters Read more ...
joe.muggs
Trip hop is everywhere these days. From Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey on down, some of the biggest artists in the world channel a smoky, bluesy, late 90s mood – and in the UK something even more interesting is happening that taps into a longer, deeper continuum.In the burgeoning soul/jazz underground (and mainstream!) the likes of Jorja Smith, Dave Okumu, Yazmin Lacey are all tapping into a wellspring of uniquely British introspective groove that runs not just through Massive Attack and Nightmares On Wax but back through Sade, Soul II Soul to the years of lovers rock and Cymande.Squarely in Read more ...
joe.muggs
Oh this is sad. Up until this point Camilla Cabello has been a good pop star. Her biggest songs were loaded with familiar-to-the-point-of-cheesiness retro Latin samples, or angsty mini-dramas loaded with the musical theatre-style chops that had made her an X-Factor star in her teens, always delivered with a ton of conviction and feeling. Even the infuriatingly catchy “Senorita” with her then boyfriend Shawn Mendes somehow managed to maintain likeability despite its ubiquity. There was a general sense that she knew what she was doing and was good at it; she had her own lane.It feels churlish Read more ...
joe.muggs
The noise in the international mainstream in recent years might be about dance-pop, hip hop beefs and the serious balladry of Taylor, Billie and Lana – yet at the same time, R&B has been strange, brilliant, ultra-popular, but generated a tiny fraction of the column inches and “discourse”.Jhene Aiko, Tinashe, SZA, H.E.R., Mahalia: these are radical artists, each making fascinating music that generates billions of streams, yet certainly in the UK they’re generating micro-fractions of the column inches that their contemporaries in other genres are. The reaction to SZA’s Glastonbury Read more ...
caspar.gomez
If the weather’s good TGE Beach is a grand start to a day. As it sounds, it’s a purpose-built seafront space to the east of central Brighton, containing three stages as well as stalls selling vegan kebabs, Filipino street food and German sausage.Every Great Escape’s closing Saturday it’s taken over by Sounds Australia, offering a fresh selection of what that country has to offer. And there’s a bar, of course, where, at midday, photographer Finetime and I avail ourselves of a traditional media breakfast of BrewDog Wingman pale ale (4.3%).The first music of the day is a short set by Tamara Read more ...