On Raven, Kelela builds her nest from cascading synthesisers and tight drums. ‘Washed Away’ immediately submerges us. Slow, repeating melodies against reverbed vocal riffing set a clear, tidal direction for the album. Throughout, this style is revisited to varying degrees of success. On tracks such as ‘Holier’, Kelela’s attempt leaves little lasting impression on the […]
Edinburgh-based trio, Hastings, Massoquoi and Bankole forming Young Fathers, have released their latest album Heavy Heavy, an exceptional celebration of community and connection, inviting the listener to feel a sense of release and experience the feeling of unity that can come with music and dance. The album’s pop, R&B and electronic sound is flavoured with […]
Phones are great fun until you live near the Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex and its smouldering lake of “toxic sludge”. Rare-earth metals are the key ingredient in all the devices which connect us, but they come at a cost. Extraction and refinement processes often require a fantastic amount of energy and vast vats […]
Four Stars Bright synths welcome the listener to Dan Snaith’s new single, the third since returning to his Caribou project towards the end of 2019 after a four-year break. From the introduction the track simply becomes more vibrant as it’s infectious melody gets the listener into a groove. The warm and organic sound which has […]
On the night of 26 October, it felt as though the entire youth population of Edinburgh had descended upon the Royal Highland Centre. Terminal V is chaotic in every single sense of the word. The day was punctuated with the regular sighting of adolescents in Halloween attire being wheeled about the place by the onsite paramedics. […]
Rating: 5/5 It’s been six years of radio silence from The Streets. After dominating the UK music scene during the early noughties, the influence of Mike Skinner and his eclectic collection of musicians on UK garage and pop slowly faded until The Streets officially disbanded in 2011. But now they’re back with a 2018 tour […]
The fundamental duality of electronic music lies in the fact that while being crowd-orientated in nature, it still insists on being artistically expressive. A consequence of this is that higher-brow ‘IDM,’ or ‘Intelligent Dance Music,’ doesn’t always resemble House or Techno; the two seem almost antithetical to each other. It takes talented producers to reveal […]