fri 21/03/2025

punk

Album: LOUISAHHH - The Practice of Freedom (HE.SHE.THEY.)

Somewhere in dance culture or other, the Eighties revival has now been going on more than twice as long as the actual Eighties did. Starting around 1998, it reached an initial peak in the early 2000s as the dayglo-fashion led electroclash, but...

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Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliche review - memorialising her mother

There was always something a little diffident about teenage Marion Elliott-Said, who created her on-stage persona Poly Styrene after putting together her band X-Ray Spex from a small ad in the back pages of the NME in 1977. Male fans and the music...

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Album: Genesis Owusu - Smiling With No Teeth

The debut album by Australian-Ghanaian artist Genesis Owusu is so musically restless it’s exhilarating. What’s clear is this guy doesn’t want to be placed in a box, marked hip hop or anything else. Over a wild variety of music, he adopts multiple...

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Album: Alice Cooper - Detroit Stories

A decade ago, Alice Cooper reconnected with his roots. He created a sequel to his 1975 album Welcome to my Nightmare with Bob Ezrin, the producer whose vision crystallized Alice Cooper, the band, and shot them to stardom in the early-Seventies. The...

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Disc of the Day 10th Anniversary: the level playing field

Theartsdesk is a labour of love. Bloody-mindedly run as a co-operative of journalists from the beginning, our obsession with maintaining a daily-updated platform for good culture writing has caused a good few grey and lost hairs over the years. But...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Disco Zombies - South London Stinks

“Witless punk” was the weekly music paper Sounds assessment of Disco Zombies’s first single “Drums Over London”. NME’s Paul Morley was more measured, declaring it “ill-disciplined slackly structured new pop but the chorus alone makes up for it.”...

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Album: Goat Girl - On All Fours

South London all-female post punkers, Goat Girl caused a bit of a splash with their self-titled debut album and early, belligerent tunes like “Scum” back in 2018. Now, however, is time for its follow-up and, unfortunately On All Fours is indelibly...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Richard Hell & The Voidoids - Destiny Street Complete

"Three plus versions of the same album. It’s ridiculous, but I’m glad.” The first paragraph of Richard Hell’s text in the booklet accompanying Destiny Street Complete lays it out. There are, indeed, three versions of his and his band The Voidoids’s...

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Album: Sleaford Mods - Spare Ribs

What’s all this? Female voices, guitars, a song lasting over four minutes… harmonies? Have Britain’s savviest social commentators gone soft? Fear not, their sixth album is wall-to-wall uncomfortable sleaziness, biting observation and bruising...

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Album: Viagra Boys - Welfare Jazz

Their PR cannot put the band name in the header of promotional emails, as they’ll go straight to the spam bin, but Swedish punk outfit Viagra Boys have, nonetheless, become a name to contend with. It’s their wild live persona that’s put them on the...

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Albums of the Year 2020: Melt Yourself Down - 100% Yes

I’ll leave it to others, better placed, to unpack 2020’s gruelling impact on so many. But one of its side effects was the elevation, alongside food and television, of recorded music. It became a salve, a focus, a locus of social media blather about...

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Album: Yungblud - Weird!

Doncaster musician Dominic Harrison – Yungblud – appeared a couple of years ago, a self-proclaimed punk, alive with vim and righteousness, touting music that, loosely speaking, fused the snarling northern outrage of Arctic Monkeys with hip hop-...

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