albums
The repetitiveness made me cry with boredom: Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke’s Tall Tales reviewed
Grade: B+ You are in the wrong hands here for what is a homage to this duo’s favourite electronic music.…
The disturbing ambient music of William Tyler
One could argue that all musical forms are essentially incomplete until the listener joins the party, but ambient music seems…
An astonishingly good new album from Black Country, New Road
Grade: A Is that a kind of nod to Oasis in the album title? I can’t think of a band…
Sunny Schubert and iridescent Ravel: album of the week
Grade: A Maurice Ravel was tougher than he looked. True, he dressed like a dandy and wrote an opera about…
Silly, moving and imaginative: Steven Wilson’s The Overview reviewed
Progressive rock never died. Whenever some grizzled punk soldier next appears on a BBC4 documentary relaying their version of that…
How to write a piano concerto
My Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday, began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic:…
A new solo album by a former Beatle that – astonishingly – demands repeated plays
For artists lacking any obvious feel for the style, ‘going country’, similar to mainstream white artists dabbling in reggae in…
The real best album of last year
Grade: A+ In a desperate wish to avoid the appellation of a derided genre, this young man from Asheville, North…
Dazzling: Marc-André Hamelin’s Hammerklavier
Grade: A When Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata was published in 1818, pianists were confronted with a mixture of ‘demonic energy and…
Goodbye to MC5, the holiest of rock’s holy cows
Grade: D+ Ah, the original Linkin Park, except even more spavined. MC5 came outta Detroit in the mid 1960s and…
Terrifically good value: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds reviewed
A few years ago, I received an early morning phone call from Nick Cave’s former PR, berating me for not…
A box set for those on the spectrum: Markus Poschner’s Bruckner Symphonies reviewed
Grade: B+ Anton Bruckner wrote 11 symphonies – Numbers One to Nine plus a student exercise and the formidable rejected…
How some of the most derided bands of all time are making a comeback
The fate of the pop musician – at least the pop musician below the top tier of stardom – has…
The ethics of posthumous pop albums
‘At the record company meeting/ On their hands – at last! – a dead star!’ Back when Morrissey was more…
Too bombastic to be country music: Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion reviewed
Grade: B Country music has become the acceptable route through which American pop stars resuscitate their floundering careers: sales are…
Jack White’s new album will be of close interest to Led Zeppelin’s legal team
The ploy of releasing an album without any advance warning comes into play when an artist feels they are being…
Camila Cabello’s new album presents an existential threat to songwriting
It is always interesting to observe the ways in which pop stars try to negotiate first growing up, and then…
Editor’s picks
