The first of two December theartsdesk on Vinyls which will appear in quick succession. This one's mostly new artists. The next one will be our Christmas Special, filled with seasonal fare and present-suitable reissues and boxsets. For the best musical finds, dive in!

VINYL OF THE MONTH

VINYL OF THE MONTH

Being Dead When Horses Would Run (Bayonet)

The KLF are endlessly fascinating. There’s never been a “pop group” like them. From the late Eighties into the early Nineties, they treated music, especially electronic dance music, as a laboratory for lunatic experiment. Unlike most avant-garde thinkers in pop, though, they made a glorious and highly unlikely commercial success of it, via a series of globally successful singles (and, to some degree, the album, The White Room).

The Chemical Brothers are unstoppable. Their live shows are a guaranteed monster good time, redolent of proper old-school rave-ups, but with visual tech from some freaky eye-boggling future. Their last album, 2019’s No Geography, was a total belter. Their latest, their tenth, is also a total belter. They do what they do. But they do it so bloody well.

VINYL OF THE MONTH

African Head Charge A Trip to Bolgatanga (On-U Sound)

VINYL OF THE MONTH

Pere Ubu Trouble on Big Beat Street (Cherry Red)

TUESDAY 27^TH JUNE 2023

I wake up around 11.00, get outta bed around 12.00.

Some rock bands base their career around being musically fluid, an ever-changing what-will-they-do-next? conundrum. Others, such as, famously, Motörhead and The Ramones, simply go on doing their thing, honing it, repeating ad infinitum, with an almost zen devotion. The results, at their best, are vigorously on-point.

Just before the encore, the crowd is finally warmed up and dancing. It took a while, but hands are now in the air, middle-aged bodies are shifting about, muscle memory of MDMA nights in the last century.

Orbital, one of the great electronic dance acts, had a run of albums during the 1990s that encapsulate that decade in the UK (at least, for those willing to ignore the historical revisionism around tired, retro-tastic Britpop by the same media "arbiters of taste" who invented it).