19 h. ago Wet Leg: Moisturizer review – Doritos, Davina McCall and dumb fun from British indie’s big breakout band

(Domino)After winning multiple Grammys and Brits, the Isle of Wight band explore love and sexuality on their second LP – but there’s still room for some barbed put-downsMoisturizer concludes with a track called U and Me at Home. In it, Rhian Teasdale sings about the pleasures of doing nothing over guitars that bend in and out of tune in the style patented by My Bloody Valentine. Nothing much happens in the song – there’s some discussion about possibly getting a takeaway, and a brief nod to the “happy comatose” effects of weed – but it does feature a few lines that function as a kind of Wet Leg origin story. “Maybe we could start a band as some kind of joke,” sings Teasdale. “Well, that didn’t quite go to plan now we’ve been stretched across the world”.You don’t need to be a member of Wet Leg and aware of the circumstances of their formation – apparently the result of a conversation between Teasdale and guitarist Hester Chambers while on a ferris wheel – to feel slightly surprised at...

Events

5 d. ago Adès, Leith, Marsey: Orchestral Works album review – an impressive collection marks a productive association

Hallé Orchestra/Adès(Hallé)This brings together new works of his own and by composers he admires that Thomas Adès has conducted at Bridgewater Hall during his residency with the HalléSince 2023 Thomas Adès has been artist-in-residence with the Hallé Orchestra. He has featured as composer, conductor and pianist in his appearances with the orchestra, and all his concerts have included new or nearly new works, both his own and by composers he admires. As the residency comes to an end, this collection brings together pieces he has conducted in Manchester; there are four by Adès himself, alongside William Marsey’s Man With Limp Wrist and Oliver Leith’s Cartoon Sun.Of the four pieces by Adès, only one is substantial. Aquifer, which he wrote last year for Simon Rattle and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, is a densely packed 17-minute movement, which contains enough ideas to power a symphony at least twice as long, before being brought to a halt by the most common-or-garden of cadence...

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5 d. ago Daytimers: Alterations review | Ammar Kalia's global album of the month

(Relentless Records)The UK collective have been reimagining south Asian music since 2020, and their new compilation splices junglism and Afro-house onto gems in Sony India’s catalogueSince their formation in 2020, the Daytimers collective have been trying to establish a new imagining of British south-Asian music. Taking their name from the daytime parties held by second-generation immigrants in the late 80s and 90s, Daytimers have spent the past five years throwing raucous parties of their own, with residents such as Yung Singh, Rohan Rakhit and Mahnoor mixing everything from jungle and Bollywood vocals with dubstep, grime instrumentals and Punjabi folk for a new generation born and raised in the UK.Following in the footsteps of their Asian underground forebears such as Nitin Sawhney and Talvin Singh, who mixed the sounds of 90s Britain with the south-Asian music they grew up listening to, Daytimers’ latest compilation has 13 south-Asian producers remixing Bollywood hits from the So...

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6 d. ago Kesha: . (Period) review – a smart, funny return to her hedonistic hot

(Kesha Records)After a long legal battle, the pop star’s sixth album harks back to her 2010s era, with a buffet of pop styles and only rare hints of her highly-publicised traumaKesha Sebert has described her sixth album . (referred to hereafter as Period) as “the first album I’ve made where I felt truly free”. It comes accompanied by a lengthy world tour, advertised by a photo in which the singer expresses her freedom – in what you have to say is a very Kesha-like manner – by riding a jetski while topless. Long-term observers of her turbulent career may note that this doesn’t seem so different from the way she framed her third album, 2017’s Rainbow, which she described at the time as “truly saving my life”, and featured her on the cover naked and was accompanied by a tour called Fuck the World.But it would be remiss to deny her the ability to make a similar point again. Rainbow was released at the height of her legal battle with her former producer “Dr” Luke Gottwald. Kesha had accu...

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1 week ago Lewis Capaldi’s Glastonbury comeback tells us everything we need to know about him

After he was forced to cut his 2023 set short, the Scottish singer-songwriter returned to the Pyramid Stage in the most triumphant manner. If there’s such a thing as a fairytale beginning, writes Louis Chilton, we just saw it

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1 week ago Lorde secret set at Glastonbury review – new album playthrough is bold but a little foolhardy

WoodsiesLorde resembled Patti Smith as she introduced her entire new album, but the lack of well-known hits let the energy dropIt would be misleading to call Lorde’s performance at Glastonbury a “secret set”. Though listed on the schedule only as the mysterious “TBA”, playing the Woodsie stage for an hour shortly after the festival’s kick-off on Friday morning, the anonymous artist’s identity was seemingly widely known weeks before. Ella Yelich-O’Connor herself had not been exactly subtle, meaningfully flashing her eyes at Radio 1’s Greg James when he pointed out that the release of her fourth album, Virgin, coincided with Glastonbury’s first day. On Thursday, ahead of Virgin’s release, she provided confirmation by posting an aerial photo of the Woodsies tent on Instagram. It’s a bold move, to debut a new album to a crowd who won’t yet have had a chance to listen to it, let alone form any impressions – but Lorde has that kind of clout. Since her precocious debut, Pure Heroine, she h...

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1 week ago Lorde at Glastonbury review – new album playthrough is bold but a little foolhardy

WoodsiesLorde resembles Patti Smith as she introduces her entire new album, Virgin, but the lack of well-known hits lets the energy dropIt would be misleading to call Lorde’s performance at Glastonbury a “secret set”. Though listed on the schedule only as the mysterious “TBA”, playing the Woodsie stage for an hour shortly after the festival’s kick-off on Friday morning, the anonymous artist’s identity was seemingly widely known weeks before. Ella Yelich-O’Connor herself had not been exactly subtle, meaningfully flashing her eyes at Radio 1’s Greg James when he pointed out that the release of her fourth album, Virgin, coincided with Glastonbury’s first day. On Thursday, ahead of Virgin’s release, she provided confirmation by posting an aerial photo of the Woodsies tent on Instagram. It’s a bold move, to debut a new album to a crowd who won’t yet have had a chance to listen to it, let alone form any impressions – but Lorde has that kind of clout. Since her precocious debut, Pure Heroi...

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1 week ago Joshua Redman: Words Fall Short review | John Fordham's jazz album of the month

(Blue Note)The US saxophonist pulls back the vocals of his last record to present a new ensemble and all-original repertoire, resulting in an ideal balance of ingenuity and rapportJoshua Redman has been such a brilliant saxophone improviser for more than three decades that his unerring flawlessness at a spontaneous art almost becomes a tic. But his playful delight in music-making, a quality that swept from his eponymous debut release in 1993, has never faded. Redman’s 2023 first album for Blue Note was the covers-packed Where Are We, his first predominantly vocal venture, featuring the frail, borderline-tearful voice of young New Orleans-based singer Gabrielle Cavassa, herself a new Blue Note signing.Perhaps to deflect this from looking like a label-steered career reset, Redman has cannily entitled its successor Words Fall Short, and included only one Cavassa vocal. Even more smartly, he has introduced a terrific new young road band on an all-original repertoire, and added acclaimed...

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1 week ago BC Camplight: A Sober Conversation review – an eccentric rock opera confronting childhood abuse

(Bella Union)The US singer’s seventh album takes his meta-theatrical style almost into showtune territory, with songs about repression, depression and anger‘Some people face the music,” Brian Christinzio sings on The Tent. “Some people face the floor.” On this outlandish seventh album, the Manchester-based US singer-songwriter makes a bold bid for the former. That song alone excavates childhood memories, with Christinzio crunching leaves and finding caterpillars, cutely illustrated by twinkling piano, only for abrupt tonal shifts (siren-like drones, distorted vocals, heavenly choirs) to crash in like intrusive thoughts. It’s a queasy, visceral introduction to a record which confronts the summer he was abused, as a child, by an adult camp counsellor.A Sober Conversation is an eccentric rock opera about repression, depression and anger told with the meta-theatrical, tragicomic style that has won Christinzio a cult following. The title track veers into showtune territory, shimmying in ...

Events

1 week ago Bantock: The Seal Woman album review – Celtic folk opera that never quite gets its head above water

Howard/Carby/Scottish Opera/Andrews(Retrospect Opera, two CDs)Granville Bantock’s story of a Selkie emerging from the sea is a century-old curio whose beauty has faded over the yearsExcept perhaps in Birmingham, where his memory is still cherished for what he did for the city’s music, including co-founding the CBSO, Granville Bantock (1868-1946) has slipped quietly into the margins of 20th-century British music. But as well as being an academic and conductor, Bantock was a prolific composer, with a work list including four symphonies, five concertos and nine operas, of which the last, the “Celtic folk opera” The Seal Woman, is easily the best remembered now.The premiere of The Seal Woman in 1924 was the Birmingham Repertory theatre’s first production; librettist Marjory Kennedy-Fraser took the main role of the Cailleach, whose dreams and visions tell the story of the Selkie, seal-people who emerge from the sea every seven years to live on land, shedding their skins to take human for...

Culture

1 week ago Just Biber album review – Podger rises brilliantly to these sonatas’ extreme challenges

Rachel Podger/Brecon Baroque(Channel Classics)The baroque violinist remains true to the spirit of Biber’s music on a new recording of six extremely difficult sonatas, animal noises et alTen years ago, Rachel Podger made a fine recording of Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s Rosary Sonatas for solo violin and continuo, each of which portrays an episode in the life of Christ. Now she adds a disc of more sonatas by arguably the most important baroque composer for the violin after JS Bach – five of the collection of eight that Biber published in 1681, as well as the quasi-theatrical Sonata Representivo, which may or may not have been composed by Biber and probably dates from 1669.The pieces are all characterised by their extreme technical difficulty, and especially by their extensive use of scordatura, when individual violin strings are tuned differently from usual. Podger copes with all these challenges quite brilliantly, including imitating the sounds of animals in the Sonata Representi...

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2 w. ago Haim have evolved on muscular summer album I Quit, but could have dared to abandon more

The three sisters from the Valley reclaim quitting as an empowered act – and that includes shedding past sounds, not just exes

Culture

2 w. ago La Mer: French Piano Trios album review – expansive, beguiling and unexpected

Neave Trio(Chandos)Works by Saint-Saëns, Mel Bonis and Sally Beamish’s imaginative reinterpretation of Debussy’s La Mer make for a disparate but rounded programmeThree French works make a disparate but rounded programme on this release from the Neave Trio. Saint-Saëns took years to write his Trio No 2, and the result was a sprawling five-movement work that gets an appropriately wide-ranging and meaty performance here. The first movement roils and surges, the players catching both the push and pull of the restless theme and the brief passage of stillness later on. The slow third movement sings .with wistful nostalgia, and the fourth flows by in a waltz-like whirl pitched somewhere between Chopin and Dvořák. But the second movement, with its obsessively repeated rhythmic motif, perhaps needs a little more imagination to make it work.The two movements of Mel Bonis’s Soir et Matin, written in 1907, are the opposite way round in atmosphere from how you might expect: Soir (Evening) is sou...

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2 w. ago Berlioz and Ravel album review – his orchestra is responsive to Mäkelä’s every move

Orchestre de Paris/Mäkelä(Decca)It may be missing that edge-of-your-seat excitement it had at last summer’s Proms, but Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique is full of colour and impact, and the energy keeps fizzing on Ravel’s La ValseKlaus Mäkelä and the Orchestre de Paris gave an unforgettable performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique at the BBC Proms last September, the electric atmosphere of which is not quite replicated on this recording, made in Paris a few months later.It’s all played with consummate skill by an orchestra who are clearly responsive to their conductor’s every move, as they were in Royal Albert Hall, and Mäkelä’s shaping of Berlioz’s music, from the gentle, vibratoless violins at the beginning to the careering witches’ dance of the finale, remains highly coloured and full of impact. Yet it all feels a little clinical; the edge-of-the-seat excitement is missing. Perhaps it has been engineered out: the sound feels over-tweaked, and although the spatial effects at ...

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2 w. ago Loyle Carner: Hopefully! review – rap sweetheart faces family, fear and the feels | Album of the week

(Island EMI)The Londoner’s trademark sentimental sweetness is balanced by a new unaffected singing style – his fourth album is his most impressive work yetLoyle Carner raps like he has a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes. Wonder, nostalgia, love, hurt, excitement, hard-won peace: these are the emotions his voice tends to catch on. When combined with his typically blissed-out sonics – feathery breakbeats, dreamy piano figures, delicate synth washes, gently plucked guitars – the results are often very nice. Sometimes a bit too nice. So it is on Feel at Home, the sentimental love song that opens the 30-year-old’s fourth album, Hopefully!Carner – whose moniker is a spoonerism of his real name, Benjamin Coyle-Larner – never makes music that is boring or basic. As well as the slushy lyrics and comfortingly toasty chords, Feel at Home is buttressed by madly skittering percussion and what sounds like a blurry reproduction of young children’s playground chatter. But much like the outp...

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3 w. ago Dâdalus & Bikarus: Off the Shelf review | Safi Bugel's experimental album of the month

(Lío Press)Zurich-based musicians Benedikt Merz and David Hänni meld krautrock, punk and big beat into tripped-out, swampy grooves that reach dizzying heightsAfter almost three decades of friendship, Zurich-based musicians Benedikt Merz and David Hänni moved into a studio together in 2019. They found common ground over their shared love of psychedelic music and spent long, woozy nights jamming together. But while one wanted to focus on live electronics, the other secretly wanted to start a band. The outcome was Dâdalus & Bikarus, a project which sits somewhere between these two worlds, welding elements of krautrock, punk and big beat into tripped-out dancefloor rhythms.Their second album, Off the Shelf, captures the obsessive energy of those early nocturnal experiments, which they’ve since built a reputation for in their live shows. Anchored by drawn-out loops, each track slowly builds tension to dizzying, near-erotic heights. On Erebros, this takes place across a hefty 11 minut...

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3 w. ago Van Morrison’s new album Remembering Now is a sensational return to adequacy

The legendary Northern Irish singer’s recent output has been so bad, for so long, that the entirely decent ‘Remembering Now’ makes it seem like he’s made the new ‘Moondance’

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3 w. ago The Lost Tapes, Beethoven sonatas 18,27, 28 & 31 album review – Richter always found something fresh to say

Sviatoslav Richter(Deutsche Grammophon)Sviatoslav Richter’s already huge catalogue is enriched by these rediscovered recordings of recitals of Beethoven’s piano sonatas from 1965Though he claimed to dislike performing in a studio, Sviatoslav Richter became perhaps the most intensively recorded pianist of the 20th century. But while his studio work was extensive, it was the huge volume of recordings made officially and unofficially at his recitals across more than 40 years that really bulked out his discography, with multiple versions available of many of the core works in his repertory. For those reasons the rediscovery of “Lost Tapes” might not initially seem so remarkable. The performances, of four Beethoven piano sonatas, Opp 31 no 3, 90, 101 and 110, are taken from recitals that Richter gave in 1965. Op 110 comes from a performance at the piano festival he had founded the previous year at La Grange de Meslay near Tours, the others are taken from a concert in Lucerne three months...

Politics

3 w. ago Haim: I Quit review – the messiest breakup album of recent times, in every sense

(Polydor)The three LA sisters dwell on the bitter end of a relationship in tracks that range from replayable valley-girl rap to plodding country-popHaim’s 2013 breakthrough single The Wire was a swaggering, high-spirited breakup anthem. The slick, twanging pop-rock was correctly identified at the time by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow as echoing the oeuvre of Shania Twain (though this wasn’t the sick burn he thought it was), over which the LA trio copped to commitment phobia, communication issues and having their heads turned, before skipping into the California sunset with their hearts intact. Well, to commandeer the title of Haim’s debut album: those days are very much gone.I Quit, the sisters’ fourth album, still has plenty of breakup songs, but these are no cheerful odes to dumping dudes in your 20s. Instead, the record fixates on the bitter end of a deeply flawed long-term relationship; at least some of these songs are informed by the love lost between lead vocalist Danielle Haim an...

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