rave
theartsdesk
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★ The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary thingsArcade Fire: Everything Now ★★★★★ A joyous pop album that depicts a world in tragic freefallAutarkic: I Love You, Go Away ★★★★★ Tel Aviv producer Nadav Spiegel's latest collection is a triumph of head and heartBrian Eno: Reflection ★★★★★ Slow-motion cascades Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Camp Bestival 2017 was defined by the weather and how everyone reacted to it. DJ-impresario Rob Da Bank’s family festival, which reached its tenth edition this year, took place, as ever, on the Lulworth Estate in Dorset. However, where the previous nine have cast the grassland surrounding the rebuilt 17th Century castle in balmy, blissful sunshine, the tenth most certainly did not. The weather, then, is where theartsdesk starts and ends its overview, sandwiching a multiplicity of juicy reviews and other festival stuff…THE WEATHER (Part One)Friday and Saturday were dominated by an assault of Read more ...
caspar.gomez
It’s a Tweet-age Glastonbury aftermath. It’s monsooning grey outside. The real world’s back, consensus reality fast encroaching. Everything’s moved on, spun to the next thing as we A.D.D. onto Wimbledon, Hard Brexit or whatever. Even my 14-year-old daughter knows the “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” chant (to the riff from White Stripes “Seven Nation Army”) that rolled across this year’s Glastonbury crowds like a steady rumble of perturbed destiny. “Jeremy Corbyn isn’t just Jeremy Corbyn, he’s a thing now,” she explained. And I sort of know what she means.I woke up today with Rag’n’Bone Man’s chorus Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Imagine that The Ramones were not only still playing into the mid 2000s, but were still writing new songs as good as “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” and still sending young audiences completely delirious to boot. That might seem fanciful, but it's a pretty accurate analogy for where Lorenzo D’Angelo – Lory D – is now. From 1991, Rome-born and bred Lory D has been making techno that boils all of the European and black American history of the genre down to its most perfectly minimalist but completely wild core elements, and delivering it to crowds who want nothing more than that. One of the most Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
While the 36 records reviewed below run the gamut of Wreckless Eric to Democratic Republic of the Congo Afro-electronica, this month there’s also a special, one-off section for modern classical. This is due to an ear-pleasing haul of releases reaching theartsdesk on Vinyl lately. Modern classical, often computer-treated, is on the rise, recalling the long ago days when tweedy collectors would have chests of classical to dig into on Sunday afternoons, place on weighty old stereos, and sit quietly, eyes closed, contemplating the eternal verities (well, I knew one older gent who did that, back Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kasabian are more musically exciting than a multitude of bands taste-making hipsters thrust our way, yet they’re universally derided by those sorts. The reason is their blokeyness. And it’s true, even the light, lovely, strummed ballad “Wasted” from their new, sixth album has (quiet) terrace-chant backing vocals. And anything singer Tom Meighan touches musters a certain Liam Gallagher belligerence. That, however, isn’t a good enough reason to dismiss them. For Crying Out Loud is full of tasty bits.For those familiar with Kasabian’s back catalogue, the album’s flavour is midway between 2006’s Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Detroit techno music is important. Any student of the club music of the modern age knows this. The sound that fermented among the majority black population of the decaying industrial city in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as disco's last remnants fused with the avant-garde experiments of Europeans who were first getting their hands on synthesisers and drum machines, went on to change the world. It seeded the UK's rave explosion, jungle, drum'n'bass and all the electronic experiments that came after. It created a futurist aesthetic, which managed to be somehow both optimistic and dystopian, Read more ...
Joe Muggs
A few beers down, in the middle of a crowd listening to music you love, you tend not to think of the latest news story as your highest priority. But Britain's relationship to Europe weighs heavy on the mind these days, and when the news of the violent attack on Jo Cox started filtering through as we danced under the Catalan sun on Thursday afternoon, it threw the nature of Sónar festival into relief.Unlike a lot of international music events, which can often be little more than monocultural awaydays for Brits and/or Germans seeking hedonism in the sun, Sónar is both proudly reflective of its Read more ...
Barney Harsent
If there was any doubt as to the musical preferences of BBC4's commissioning arm, consider this: the whole history of funk got an hour. Meanwhile, indie music – a niche, artistic movement that somehow ended up drinking champagne while wallowing in its own mess by the mid-Nineties – gets a three-part series. Just thought I’d mention it.With time on its side, as we began part two, Music for Misfits was up to the Eighties. Following last week’s implication that punk was some kind of year zero for privately pressed records (it wasn’t), this episode started with the claim that, in the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s been worth the wait. There’s something about the affection Shane Meadows feels for his characters; the street action that doesn’t often (in this opener especially, though that may well change) tip into overt drama; the family elements that could, but don’t quite veer towards the soaps in style (if anything there’s a hint of parody?); and the sense of a period of time lovingly given its special details and intonations, that makes this latest instalment of This Is England feel almost like a reunion with old friends (plus a few sidekicks we haven’t quite got to know yet).The delay in the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Here's a funny one: used as an adjective, “lifestyle” has lately become a popular pejorative term for music (see, most recently, the kerfuffle over Jamie xx's debut solo album). It's taken the place of “coffee table”, which was the Nineties phrase of choice to deride trip-hop and other styles that were considered too smooth or sedentary to meet required criteria of rebelliousness or authenticity or whatever.This tends, of course, to be a thin veil for inevitably middle-class commentators' neuroses and noble savage view of musicians – and it never involves any examination of who listens to the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
After three albums the question remains: is Die Antwoord more than a just a clever joke or is the act simply a caricature of South Africa’s trashy “Zef”-side? The guys and gal behind "Ninja and Yo-landi Vi$$er" are in no doubt – they claim to be “conceptual artists”. And many fans agree, saying that besides the posturing lie some real cultural truths. Last night three or so thousand descended on Brixton to make up their own minds.As I arrive the crowd is evenly split between hipsters, ravers and students. Fragments of conversation reveal the thought they have given to the band. The lad next Read more ...