house music
Album: Steve Mac - Bless This Acid HouseFriday, 05 May 2023
Some rock bands base their career around being musically fluid, an ever-changing what-will-they-do-next? conundrum. Others, such as, famously, Motörhead and The Ramones, simply go on doing their thing, honing it, repeating ad infinitum, with an... Read more... |
Album: Jessie Ware - That! Feels Good!Friday, 28 April 2023
“If you’re going to do it, do it well” goes a chanted refrain in the opening title track here. And it’s words Jessie Ware clearly lives by – she is not someone who has time to do anything rubbish. From featuring on the cream of post-dubstep... Read more... |
Album of the Year 2022: Hercules & Love Affair - In AmberFriday, 16 December 2022
It’s been a shit year. Global horrors from Kiev to Karachi and Tehran to Texas all somehow feeling too close for comfort, and even closer to home heatstroke, frostbite, floods, strikes, impoverishment, the grinding realisation that pestilence is a... Read more... |
Album: Leftfield - This Is What We DoWednesday, 30 November 2022
This Is What We Do is only Leftfield’s fourth album in a career that has lasted almost 35 years (on and off). But if there is a dance outfit that can demonstrate the worth of quality over quantity, it’s the duo of Neil Barnes and Adam Wren (Barnes’... Read more... |
The Orb, Hare & Hounds, Birmingham review - ambient house duo celebrate 30 years of UF OrbSaturday, 22 October 2022
Ten minutes before The Orb got on stage at the Hare & Hounds, Alex Paterson was standing in the building’s courtyard with a big old spliff in his hand “clearing his head” and getting ready for action. So, it was good to know that some things don... Read more... |
Album: Beyoncé - RenaissanceMonday, 01 August 2022
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... Read more... |
Album: Vyvyan - YWednesday, 06 July 2022
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... Read more... |
Album: Ron Trent presents WARM - What Do the Stars Say to YouMonday, 13 June 2022
In 1990, teenage prodigy Ron Trent released a single on Armando’s Warehouse imprint. Recorded on cheap equipment it was, nevertheless, a staggering piece of music. Urgent, insistent and unrelenting its piercing strings, metallic cymbals and ... Read more... |
Album: Hercules & Love Affair - In AmberSaturday, 11 June 2022
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... Read more... |
Album: Confidence Man - TiltSaturday, 02 April 2022
Despite a five-year career and no breakout hits, Australian outfit Confidence Man has grabbed the attention of some heavyweights.Signed to Heavenly Records, a label which knows their Roscoff onions from the common-or-garden variety, their 2017... Read more... |
Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow review - pop songstress partying like it's 2020Tuesday, 29 March 2022
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... Read more... |
Album: Electribe 101 - Electribal SoulWednesday, 16 March 2022
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... Read more... |
