It would be easy to look at the cover to the Death Valley Girls’ latest album and get a mistaken impression. A Sgt. Pepper style multi-coloured collage featuring the band centred around a cast of anim...

The prize for most productive recording artists is hotting up. There are long standing contenders such as Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices and John Dwyer with his various OSEES iterations. They rare...

Celebrating their thirtieth anniversary, Baba Zula continue to seek out new approaches to music making that is marked by a refreshing unwillingness to repeat themselves. Describing themselves as sound...

Biita (pronounced Bee-tah) means “unique” in the Farsi language. The name was gifted by her aunt to Lisa Houdei who has chosen to record her debut album under this moniker to feel closer to her Persia...

The music of Dur-Dur Band captures the energy and optimism of 1980s Mogadishu. They were the prime exponents of a sound which blended Somali melodies with disco, funk, jazz, soul and reggae. As Dur-Du...

Gigs are commonly places of communion, sweat, uncomfortable proximity to strangers, ringing ears and spilt beer. However, with Maya Ongaku’s most recent album Nothing Space Music representing their at...

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For Rodrigo y Gabriela, home is not necessarily a physical place, more a sense of having purpose and inner peace instead of seeking external approval. The seventh album from the Grammy award winning (...

Enemies of spellcheck, Stoke-on-Trent’s Formal Sppeedwear, parade a dazzling debut decked out with a lorryload of ideas. It is easy to recognise influences (Devo, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Fashion-era B...

The inevitable question arising from reading this title is, “who are the human assholes?” There are plenty of candidates. Is it anyone specific, the entire human race or Willem Smit, the band’s frontm...

There is an appealingly ramshackle quality to ‘American Pyramid’ that brings to mind Personal Trainer and early Pavement. It marks a whole new approach for Graham Hunt. His previous five albums have b...

As defined by Jim James, being Wowed Out is a contemporary malaise, a state of overstimulation, constantly searching for the latest sensation. It underpins the first solo album in eight years from the...

Find out the in depth batting and bowling figures for Hampshire v Derbyshire Falcons in the Metro Bank One Day Cup Men on BBC Sport.

As a title, ‘You Say I Romanticize’ gives a misleading impression of what to expect from Sweeping Promises’ third album. No floppy-fringed, lovelorn poetry spouting offering, it is instead an adrenali...

In 1980, black youths find freedom and romance at London house parties and in the sweet sound of a reggae genre known as lovers rock.

Even if I knew nothing about The Mountain Goats, a glance at the track listing for ‘Days’ would instantly pique my interest. ‘Charlie Sheen Reaches Out to the Feds’, ‘Annie Haslam Imperial Phase’ and ...

“In any industry, success is measured by climbing as high as you possibly can, but these days I think of music as something more like a public service. You show up in city after city and you bring the...

There are numerous records in my collection that include the command “Play Loud” on their sleeve. It does not appear far-fetched to imagine Maya Ongaku’s latest conveying the suggestion that it should...

Eagerly scanning the Silent Radio mailbox, ever searching for exciting new releases does create a transient, goldfish-like relationship with music. In March 2022, I favourably reviewed ‘World Contact ...

Spearmint serves as a great example of the value of fierce independence. All eleven albums from their 1999 debut LP onwards have been released on their own hitBACK label, allowing the band to develop ...

Former England captain and manager Kevin Keegan dies at the age of 75, seven weeks after he revealed he had been diagnosed with stage four cancer.

It is 31 years since the release of ‘Maxinquaye’, Tricky’s debut album. Although it was bunched as part of the trip-hop wave, there was something more elemental, almost brutal about the record that ma...

Like many others, my introduction to Cinder Well came courtesy of the soundtrack and theme tune to this year’s best television series so far, Small Prophets. In common with Mackenzie Crook’s previous ...

YouTube video by Jonathan Barnett

It sounds like something out of a romantic novel. Ray Sonder and Saxon Gable were brought up in sleepy Australian beach towns to parents who were hippies and rockers. Spoon fed Nirvana and The Beatles...

Norman Cook, DJ and musician, shares the soundtrack of his life with Lauren Laverne.

As Elvis Costello observed in 1981’s ‘Big Sister’s Clothes’, “passion went out of fashion.” It is a complaint that has been commonly raised since but, judging by ‘No Names’, no one has told Ian Prowse...

YouTube video by Folk On Foot

On the day that Sparks announce their forthcoming Live on the Moon album, the intrepid explorers roll into the less exalted but still unique terrain of Blackpool for the first time. It is also my firs...

The latest offering from Analog Africa continues their recent fascination with music from Peru. Following on from Ranil y Su Conjunto Tropical’s ‘Galaxia Tropical’ release in February 2026 comes this ...

There is an impressively austere quality to Alison Cotton’s music. Set within the self-imposed parameters of only using instrumentation that she owns, that policy initially saw her limited to viola, v...

As would be expected, ‘The Trumpets of Michel-Ange Volume 2’ is a natural continuation and development of the first instalment released in 2024. Central to the album is the quarter-tone trumpet develo...