Northern Winter Beat 2025, Aalborg review - The Courettes, Dungen and Lubomyr Melnyk confront ideas of how to play

NORTHERN WINTER BEAT 2025, AALBORG Danish city hosts the festival imbued with a cool which doesn’t need expressing

Danish city hosts the festival imbued with a cool which doesn’t need expressing

The exhortations don’t seem necessary as the audience is already letting off the steam which has built up in anticipation of a full-bore show. Nonetheless, The Courettes’ Flávia Couri knows higher levels of excitement are there to be tapped, that it’s possible to get the crowd to liberate themselves from any restraint they may have left. Limits are there to be pushed.

Music Reissues Weekly: The Twilights - Twilights Time The Complete 60s Recordings

Australian pop group which recorded at Abbey Road but remained a local sensation

On 26 September 1966, The Twilights set-off from Australia to Britain. The journey, on the liner the Castel Felice, took six weeks. A day after boarding they learned their sixth single, “Needle in a Haystack,” was an Australian number one. There was nothing they could do to promote the hit, so after disembarking at Southampton they looked for work.

Music Reissues Weekly: Celebrate Yourself! The Sonic Cathedral Story 2004-2024

With the help of a sympathetic label, shoegazing once again confirms its resonance

Yeti Lane’s second album The Echo Show was released in March 2012. The Paris-based duo’s LP was stunning: holding together overall, as well as on a track-by-track basis. There were obvious influences: Kraftwerk, late-period Spacemen 3, motorik, My Bloody Valentine. But it didn’t sound like anyone else. Charlie Boyer and Ben Pleng had created a wonder.

Music Reissues Weekly: American Baroque - Chamber Pop and Beyond 1967-1971

AMERICAN BAROQUE - CHAMBER POP AND BEYOND 1967-1971 Harpsichords, string quartets, woodwind and a summer-into-autumn melancholy

Harpsichords, string quartets, woodwind and a summer-into-autumn melancholy

The descending refrain opening the song isn’t unusual but attention is instantly attracted as it’s played on a harpsichord. Equally instantly, an elegiac atmosphere is set. The voice, coming in just-short of the 10-second mark, is similarly yearning in tone. The song’s opening lyrics convey dislocation: “You and I travel to the beat of a different drum.”

Music Reissues Weekly: Hawkwind - X In Search Of Space, Doremi Fasol Latido

Must-have box-set editions of two of British rock’s most important albums

One of last year’s major joys was the box set version of Hawkwind's Space Ritual, an 11-disc extravaganza which made the great live album, originally issued in May 1973, even more great. Now the two studio albums which preceded it – X In Search Of Space and Doremi Fasol Latido – have become similarly packaged, though less colossal, box sets.

Music Reissues Weekly: Vanilla Fudge - Where Is My Mind The ATCO Recordings 1967-1969

A wild ride with the ‘You Keep me Hanging on’ hitmakers

Vanilla Fudge could provoke a strong reaction. Writing about them in 1982, Tom Hibbert – then best-known for his contributions to Smash Hits – said of their February 1968 second album, The Beat Goes On, that “on one side of the bombastic concept LP, Vanilla Fudge summed up the history of music from Mozart, through Cole Porter and Elvis, to The Beatles concluding that it was all worthless.”

Music Reissues Weekly: The Yardbirds - The Ultimate Live at the BBC

THE YARDBIRDS - THE ULTIMATE LIVE AT THE BBC New ways to see British band

New ways to see this most significant of British bands

“The last we had was a bit of a flop. I own up about it, it was quite bad.” Speaking to the BBC’s Brian Matthew on 4 April 1967, Yardbirds’ frontman Keith Relf is candid about the chart fate of his band’s last single, October 1966’s “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.”

Album: The Cure - Songs of a Lost World

Sadness and finality have rarely felt so life-affirming

Could melancholia be an elixir of creative youth? Or is it that sad people were never really that youthful, so age suits them? Certainly it seems that there was something in the water for so many of the foundational 80s indie bands who dealt in sadness, pain and existential angst that makes longevity suit them: The Jesus & Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr., Throwing Muses, Ride, Slowdive just for starters have all somehow ambled into the 2020s on the creative form of their lives.

Album: Tess Parks - Pomegranate

★★★ TESS PARKS - POMEGRANATE With the Brian Jonestown Massacre association concluded, psychedelic auteur reintegrates with the wider world

With the Brian Jonestown Massacre association concluded, psychedelic auteur reintegrates with the wider world

Tess Parks’ fourth solo album is suffused with otherness. When lyrics are direct, they are destabilised by the etiolated, freeze-dried voice delivering them. “Sometimes it feels like everyone should be dancing, maybe I should be dancing,” she sings during “Koalas.” It does not sound as if Parks has the energy to dance.

Music Reissues Weekly: Rain - Tomorrow Never Comes: The NYC Sessions 1967-1968

RAIN: TOMORROW NEVER COMES: THE NYC SESSIONS 1967-1968 The final chapter in the story of Merseybeat pioneers The Undertakers

The final chapter in the story of Merseybeat pioneers The Undertakers

The Undertakers were central to the Merseybeat boom. The best of what they issued on single in 1963 and 1964 captured the raw, stomping sound adored by Liverpool’s audiences. But hits were elusive and they dropped off the musical map at the end of 1964. The Beatles never forget The Undertakers though. In 1968, former Undertaker Jackie Lomax was signed to their label Apple.