After an unavoidable delay theartsdesk on Vinyl returns with over 9000 words on new and recent releases, ranging across the entire spectrum of known music. Dive in!

VINYL OF THE MONTH

Edrix Puzzle Coming of the Moon Dogs (On the Corner)

The Oslo World organisers are at pains to point out that, despite the name, they are not a “world music” festival. And with good reason, really. There may have been a few familiar WOMAD veterans headlining over the week-long event – Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour, Malie's Fatoumata Diawara, the queen of Cuba Omara Portuondo – but the emphasis was emphatically not on any kind of beads-and-bongoes authenticity.

Witch Fever are a seething punk outfit from Manchester whose debut album rampages at the patriarchy with unbridled fury. The tone throughout is summed up in “Sour”, wherein grimy, gloomy riffin’ is accompanied by oblique references to Christianity, before the whole slams into a chorus of shrieked outrage, “They won’t take no for an answer/As if they ever fucking ask/Yeah, we incite this violence/Nothing ever changed in silence.”

If ever a moment summed up the spirit of a gig perfectly, then it is the segment in this arena showcase where Machine Gun Kelly is confronted by the internet, represented by what appears to be a blow up statue with a monitor for a head. As it demands the American rap rocker should be pigeonholed into one genre, he strikes on a solution which involves a helicopter flying in to shoot it. That was a defining trait of this relentlessly bombastic show, of going loud and direct as often as possible.

Make no mistake about it, Slipknot are massive. 23 years after their recording debut, they’ve had 8.5 billion streams, their sixth album, 2019’s We Are Not Your Kind, hit the top of the charts in 12 countries, including the US and the UK, and their spectacular shows are a global phenomenon. In fact, it’s live that this writer really embraces Slipknot but their last album demonstrated they still had the chutzpah to knock a longplayer out of the park. The new one almost hits the same peaks.

It’s a minor tragedy that Yeah Yeah Yeahs arrived just in time to be bundled in with a spurious “new rock revolution,” because they were so much more than rock. The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Libertines all may have had decent enough songs, but all were ultimately extremely trad rock, sonically living in mythical pasts.

If anyone was going to produce a raucous musical response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it was always likely to be Gogol Bordello. After all, the band has both Ukrainian and Russian members (among other nationalities), they have a tendency to champion the underdog and aren’t timid about flagging up injustice.

Eddie and the Hot Rods played London’s Rainbow on 19 February 1977. A big deal, the Saturday headliner was at the largest venue they’d been booked into to date. Their debut album Teenage Depression had been issued in November 1976 and this confirmed them as an on-the-up band just as punk was asserting itself.

Bankruptcy, rubble, rape and murder: Manhattan in the Seventies could be grim, as multiple New York punk memoirs make clear. The trade-off was the art, steaming and burning in the stinking, crucially cheap degradation. Punk was just one symptomatic part of a crumbling Lower East Side where old Beats, folkies, jazzers, poets, theatre, film and visual artists also lived.

A compilation album titled Pennsylvania Unknowns was issued in 1982. Its 17 tracks chronicled the US state’s Sixties garage rock and psychedelic scenes. Amongst the bands included were Pat Farrell & The Believers, The Flowerz, The Loose Enz and The Shandells. About the best known were Allentown’s The Kings Ransom, whose moody 1968 single “Shadows of Dawn” was a collector’s staple.