electropop
CD: Maya Jane Coles - ComfortMonday, 01 July 2013![]() The part-Japanese Brit Maya Jane Coles displays elaborate asymmetric hair, interesting piercings and enormous tattoos in her moody photoshoots, makes sounds that are uniformly smooth and high-gloss, and has a sonic palette that takes in populist... Read more... |
CD: British Electric Foundation - Music of Quality and Distinction Vol 3: DarkTuesday, 21 May 2013![]() It took nine years between the first and second instalments of this series, and another 22 years to make the third. And that's one of the least strange things about this record. The production team of B.E.F. (aka Human League / Heaven 17 members... Read more... |
Tomorrow's World, ICAThursday, 16 May 2013![]() The ICA was the perfect location for the UK debut of hotly tipped new duo Tomorrow’s World, consisting of Air’s Jean-Benoit Dunckel and English synth-rockers New Young Pony Club’s ivory tickler Lou Hayter. The venue added a prestigious edge to what... Read more... |
CD: Alison Moyet - the minutesWednesday, 01 May 2013![]() Alison Moyet is not just one of the great voices in pop, she's one of the most likeable figures. A brilliantly no-nonsense character, she consistently skewers music industry pomposity, laughs in the face of the expectations the world has of female... Read more... |
Just in From Scandinavia: Nordic Music Round-Up 7Tuesday, 30 April 2013![]() Continuing its voyage through Scandinavia’s music, theartsdesk opens the latest chapter in Norway with Still Life With Eggplant, the 16th album from Trondheim’s prolific, long-lived, occasionally challenging and always vital Motorpsycho.Their last... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Shuggie Otis, Peter King, Electronic, Billy MackenzieSunday, 07 April 2013![]() Shuggie Otis: Inspiration Information/Wings of LoveShuggie Otis's vanishing act after the release of his 1974 album Inspiration Information belatedly created one of pop’s great what-ifs. However, it only became so in the Nineties after the album was... Read more... |
CD: The Knife - Shaking the HabitualSaturday, 06 April 2013![]() Shaking The Habitual’s centrepiece – the seventh of its 14 tracks – is the 19-minute “Old Dreams Waiting to be Realized”. A tone which ebbs in and out, it’s occasionally underpinned by distant rhythmic colour. Although thoughts inevitably turn to... Read more... |
CD: Depeche Mode - Delta MachineWednesday, 20 March 2013![]() The portents were good. The single “Heaven” emerged with all the melodrama and crypto-religiosity hardcore Depeche Mode fans have loved – Dave Gahan hitting some notes that suggested he's spotted certain tics that Muse's Matt Bellamy has nicked from... Read more... |
Kraftwerk: The Man Machine, Tate ModernSunday, 10 February 2013![]() A giant arm sweeps across the rapt audience. The newly anointed onlookers all wear the same, white-framed, glasses. A chant is heard:“We are the robots.” Those congregating in the over-sized shoebox of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall could be at a cult... Read more... |
CD: Tegan and Sara - HeartthrobSunday, 10 February 2013![]() To hear them tell it, Tegan and Sara have always been pop stars. It was harder to see a decade ago, sure, when they were spitting out spiky guitar anthems in matching pixie haircuts, but the roots were always there. That the twins’ seventh record... Read more... |
CD: Fimber Bravo - Con-FusionThursday, 07 February 2013![]() If you listened to the last archived Arts Desk Radio Show you'll have heard me play a couple of tracks from this, and it was all I could do not to play more. As so often I'd gone into the studio with the previous couple of days' post pile and... Read more... |
Just in From Scandinavia: Nordic Music Round-Up 6Friday, 11 January 2013![]() Santa has returned home, but he wasn’t the season’s only visitor from the Nordic lands. The crop of recent music in from the region embraces genre-crossing jazz, vintage-style rock, the expected electropop, cross-border collaborations and a seven-... Read more... |
