Tampere Nights: Lost in Music Festival 2012

TAMPERE NIGHTS: LOST IN MUSIC FESTIVAL 2012 The annual showcase of Finland’s music, hosted by a city which recalls a benign Twin Peaks

The annual showcase of Finland’s music, hosted by a city which recalls a benign Twin Peaks

Nightclub Tähti is on the seventh floor of an anonymous-looking building along Tampere’s main shopping street, Hämeenkatu. Black-suited security wave you into a lift which zips straight up there. After surrendering your coat at the cloakroom – obligatory in Finland - a walk around the bar reveals the dance floor. The couples occupying it are doing the Finnish tango, a measured, understated version of the dance. Finnish schlager is the soundtrack, a sort of native-language Eighties’ electropop with emotive crescendos. It rarely strays from the mid-paced.

Just in From Scandinavia: Nordic Music Round-Up 5

JUST IN FROM SCANDINAVIA: NORDIC MUSIC ROUND-UP 5 Nightmarish Norwegians, Francophile Danes, regal Swedes, in-your-face Icelanders and Finns voyaging to inner space

Nightmarish Norwegians, Francophile Danes, regal Swedes, in-your-face Icelanders and Finns voyaging to inner space

A lot has blown in since the last Scandinavian round-up. The most recent releases sifted here include singer-songwriter intimacy, various forms of electropop, several shades of jazz experimenta, joyous dance-pop and some distinctly non-Scandinavian flavours. High points are many. Satisfaction is a certainty.

CD: Tame Impala – Lonerism

Psychedelia takes another bow

Despite the fact that this month marks the 50th anniversary of the release of The Beatles’ first single, the focus on the Fabs right now is as much on their 1967 psychedelic folly Magical Mystery Tour. The arrival of Tame Impala’s second album seems appropriate as it’s a modern psychedelia which knows all about the detachment brought by mind expansion – the distant vocals on opening cut “Be Above it” echo John Lennon’s on “Strawberry Fields Forever”.

CD: Grizzly Bear – Shields

A new beginning for the Brooklyn outfit on their most confident album yet

Shields leaves standing everything Grizzly Bear have done previously. Four albums in, the Brooklyn quartet move forward with their most focused, most cohesive album yet. The folk influence remains, as do traces of their love of The Beach Boys, but Shields is – mostly – so confident it could be a debut album. It’s also the first time all the songwriting has been credited to the entire band.

theartsdesk at the Berlin Festival and Music Week

THE BERLIN FESTIVAL AND MUSIC WEEK Sigur Rós, Franz Ferdinand and the world come to Berlin and Speer's monolithic airport

Sigur Rós, Franz Ferdinand and the world come to Berlin and Speer's monolithic airport

Sometimes, it doesn’t matter who you are. You might be a charismatic performer, or the most energetic band in the world. But some settings can’t be outperformed. Holding Berlin Festival at the city’s astonishing out-of-commission Tempelhof airport sets a challenge that’s almost impossible to rise to. Although it began working in the late 1920s, the surviving buildings were completed in 1941 and form a single block over a kilometre long, wrapped around an open quadrangle. The gleaming, pale buildings dwarf anything.

Grandaddy, O2 ABC, Glasgow

GRANDADDY, O2 ABC California indie rockers' Welcome Back Tour hints at more to follow

California indie rockers' Welcome Back Tour hits Glasgow

Jason Lytle has a “fervent appreciation”, he says, “for bands that don’t exist anymore”. It’s why he’s playing the cover of “Here”, by Pavement, that has become a staple of his band Grandaddy’s live sets on this open-ended reunion tour, although it doesn’t explain why the time is right for a Grandaddy reunion in the first place.