thu 11/09/2025

New Music Reviews

Reissue CDs Weekly: Iggy & The Stooges - You Think You’re Bad, Man? The Road Tapes 1973-74

Kieron Tyler

It didn’t take long for The Stooges to acquire an afterlife. They played their final show in February 1974. In May 1975, Nick Kent wrote a multi-page feature for NME on the ups and downs of Iggy Pop and Co.

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theartsdesk on Vinyl Christmas Special 2020: Donna Summer, Tom Sanders, The Kinks, Tru Thoughts, Spice Girls, Style Council and more

Thomas H Green

The music year draws to a close and theartsdesk on Vinyl presents its festive selection. We go easier on the cheesier at this time of year, but there are also gold nuggets in there too. Time to buy the vinyl lover in your life a little something?

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Album: Jamie Cullum - The Pianoman at Christmas

Sebastian Scotney

Island Records were apparently keen for half of Jamie Cullum’s first Christmas album to consist of covers, but the singer/songwriter thought otherwise, and simply said no.“When you think of all the people who have recorded “The Christmas Song” [...]”, he has said, “why should I do the same thing?”

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Scars - Author! Author!

Kieron Tyler

Scars’s tour de force album Author! Author! has been out of sight for too long. Originally released in 1981, it first reappeared on a swiftly withdrawn CD in 2007. Apparently, there were issues about where the rights for its reissue lay. Now, it has re-emerged.

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Mary Chapin Carpenter, One Night Lonely livestream review - down-home and perfectly paced

Liz Thomson

Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Songs from Home has been an anchor-point almost since the beginning of lockdown for many people, all of us invited into the singer’s sun-dappled Virginia farmhouse, often the kitchen, where, accompanied by Angus the most golden of retrievers, she chats and sings.

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theartsdesk on Vinyl 61: Amy Winehouse, Krust, Motörhead, Extrawelt, Sade, Chase and Status and more

Thomas H Green

Welcome to the penultimate 2020 edition of the world’s vastest, most musically wide-ranging, regularly posted, online vinyl reviews. This year vinyl boomed, especially in the wake of COVID-19, with gig-goers stuck at home but wanting new music. 2020’s sales are now heading for the £100 million mark, vinyl’s biggest year since 1990.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Trees - 50th Anniversary box set

Kieron Tyler

Fifty years after their first album The Garden Of Jane Delawney was issued in April 1970, Trees seem to be better known than when they were active. Despite Françoise Hardy’s cover version of the title track a couple of years after it hit shops, the UK band’s debut album was a poor seller. Original pressings fetch upwards of £200. It’s the same with its follow-up, January 1971’s On The Shore...

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Dua Lipa's Studio 2054 online - pop sensation locked into the spectacle

joe Muggs

As with so much in these unprecedented times, online performance is evolving, and fast: different approaches are becoming established formats. Some go ultra intimate – raw acoustic performances, live chats with fans – as if trying to strip away the digital divide. Big, serious rock bands with like Metallica and Radiohead try to keep their established fanbases sated with sheer volume of professionally recorded archive performance.

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Arena - Fela Kuti: Father of Afrobeat, BBC Two review - the music that never dies

Tim Cumming

There have been Felabrations, stage musicals, bands featuring his sons Seun and Femi that have continued the legacy. There has been the slew of re-releases from his massive catalogue, and a number of films, including Alex Gibney’s Finding Fela, and the 1982 classic, Music is the Weapon. In his afterlife, the legendary Fela Kuti and his music feels more alive than ever.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Do You Have The Force - Jon Savage’s Alternate History Of Electronica

Kieron Tyler

 “During 1975, 1976 and the first half of 1977 punk was the future but, after the highpoint of ‘God Save the Queen’, London punk already seemed spent. By the time that the Sex Pistols ‘Pretty Vacant’ was tumbling out of the charts in early September, there had been two huge hits that changed the way I heard music.

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VINYL OF THE MONTH

Black Lips Season of the Peach (Fire)

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