‘Fletch was meant to outlive us all’: Depeche Mode on death, rebirth and defying the odds

Hit hard by the death of keyboardist Andy Fletcher, Dave Gahan questioned whether he wanted to continue – until Martin Gore’s new songs revived him. Making the most of their lives has never been more important, they say

As Dave Gahan happily admits, there was a moment when he thought there would never be another Depeche Mode album. Actually, he says, there were two. The first came as a result of the pandemic, when he underwent a rock star equivalent of the Great Resignation, the phenomenon in which people stuck at home started reconsidering their priorities. He had tried to gig with his other band, Soulsavers, at the end of 2020, between the first and second lockdowns (“Wonderful shows, but the whole thing was a constant state of anxiety – are you fit to fly? What’s happening tomorrow?”), but spent most of the time at home in the US. It was the longest he had ever spent off the road.

“Not making a record; spending time with my family, friends, my fucking cat,” he says. “I thought: I want to stay here. I was quite happy listening to records, watching the Knicks lose at basketball, plugging in my guitar and playing along to someone else’s music, not really interested in making new music.” He smiles. “I was 18 when Depeche Mode started. I thought: it’s enough. I’ve had a good run. So when our manager called and said ‘It’s time’, I honestly said: ‘Jonathan, I don’t know if I want to do this any more.’”

Continue reading...
by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Gorillaz: Cracker Island review – smaller, subtler, and better for it

(Parlophone)
Damon Albarn has reined in the excess – though there are still cameos from the likes of Bad Bunny and Stevie Nicks – for a trim album that is one of the band’s best

Here’s a sobering thought for anyone old enough to recall the early 00s first-hand: Cracker Island arrives 22 years on from Gorillaz’s debut single, Clint Eastwood. Founded by Damon Albarn, an alt-rock star apparently dabbling in pop, and his former flatmate Jamie Hewlett, who supplied the cartoons, it was a project you might have assumed would be a short-lived joke. But nearly a quarter of a century on, Gorillaz have made as many studio albums as Albarn’s primary band and, in the process, have achieved things Blur haven’t: a string of US Top 10 albums, one of them double-platinum; a Grammy; and entente cordiale with Oasis – or at least Noel Gallagher, who appeared on 2017’s We Got the Power.

They’ve also proved oddly prescient. You don’t hear many bands who sound like Blur these days, but we live in an era when pop is fuelled by the kind of cross-genre collaborations that started popping up on Gorillaz’s eponymous debut album and had more or less consumed their output entirely by the release of 2010’s Plastic Beach. In truth, their current prevalence probably has more to do with trying to game the streaming services’ genre-specific playlists than Gorillaz’s influence, but still. You can see the mark their tracks Feel Good Inc and Dirty Harry left on Gen Z’s nascent musical taste by the fact that Gorillaz are still playing arenas and headlining festivals years after their albums stopped shifting in the kind of quantities they once sold; last year, Billie Eilish said Albarn “changed my life” when she invited him to sing Feel Good Inc with her at Coachella.

Continue reading...
by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Goth’s undead! The dark return of Britain’s spookiest subculture

From Wednesday Addams to Gen Z’s body-modified clubbers, the black-eyeliner brigade is back – and wearing its deathhawk hair higher than ever. But did it ever go away?

Last November, the Tim Burton-directed, Netflix Addams Family reboot, Wednesday, saw a dance scene go viral on TikTok: Wednesday herself, played by Jenna Ortega, flailing beautifully in black organza to the Cramps’ goth-schlock-psychobilly 1981 cover, Goo Goo Muck. It came after Burberry showed a dramatic, extreme-goth collection; soon after, the Cure sold out three nights at Wembley Arena. Now, two hefty books are about to arrive documenting goth’s endurably undead history, John Robb’s The Art of Darkness: the History of Goth and Cathi Unsworth’s Season of the Witch: the Book of Goth. And summer sees the return of the long elusive goth sphinx herself, as Siouxsie Sioux headlines Latitude festival.

This month brings the definitive original soundtrack, Young Limbs Rise Again: the story of the Batcave Nightclub 1982-1985. A stunningly comprehensive, 90-track compilation, it features the iconic ghouls heard at London’s early-80s goth mecca and includes a lusciously illustrated, 80-page history book, featuring the scratchy, B-movie, Batcave artwork that defines the goth aesthetic to this day.

Continue reading...
by Sylvia Patterson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Hannah Peel review – elegiac synths weave a dreamy electronic spell

Kings Place, London
Paying tribute to her hero Delia Derbyshire, the electronica artist took us through her album Fir Wave and beyond in a triumphant show

Such is the long shadow of Covid that this is effectively the live launch of Hannah Peel’s acclaimed album Fir Wave, even if it comes nearly two years after it was released, and long after it was shortlisted for the 2021 Mercury prize. She explains tonight that it wasn’t even meant to be a proper LP: she was initially asked to remix a 1972 KPM album of library music called Electrosonic, created by BBC Radiophonic Workshop luminaries, but Peel became so immersed in the project that she ended up creating seven completely new pieces of music.

Many of the sounds she works with tonight are samples from that 1972 album – unique analogue synth voicings that were programmed by the likes of Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson and Don Harper – all played live by Peel and fellow synth wizard Hazel Mills. Peel is an acclaimed string arranger for the likes of Paul Weller, John Foxx and Erland Cooper (all of whom are in the audience tonight), and she occasionally switches to violin and piano, but the emphasis tonight is on the electronic.

Continue reading...
by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Orbital: Optical Delusion review – plague songs and hyper-pop

(London)
A flurry of guest vocalists all have things to say on the duo’s potent 10th album, and yet the real magic happens when they’re left to their own devices

Purism has many drawbacks, but electronic music can sometimes seem diminished by vocalists cooing up top, as though some core fealty to the radical possibilities of electronics has been diluted. Not even Orbital – titans of the genre – are immune to the human-angle siren song. Optical Delusion, their 10th, is a powerful record, another sterling comeback on which brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll provide sylph-like forward momentum, creepy noises, old-school drum’n’bass and cathedral-like synth sounds.

The human guests all serve some purpose: the normally excellent Sleaford Mods to rant, unsubtly, about how turkeys vote for Christmas (Dirty Rat); the Mediaeval Baebes to floatily join the dots between the plague nursery rhyme Ringa Ringa and how many of our loved ones “fell down” in 2020-21. On Home, Anna B Savage trenchantly details how we could “tear it all down, brick by brick, town by town”, and on the intriguingly gnarly Moon Princess, Orbital enlist veteran Japanese electronicist Coppé. They both earn their place.

Continue reading...
by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Skrillex: Quest for Fire review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Owsla/Atlantic)
The connoisseur’s EDM artist crams every production trick in the book on to his second full-length LP: guest-laden eclecticism that walks the line between catchy and annoying

It is nine years since Sonny Moore – AKA Skrillex – last released an album. His 2014 debut, Recess, opened with a track called All Is Fair in Love and Brostep – a knowing nod to the derogatory term for the dubstep-derived sound that made him famous. More importantly the track featured a guest appearance from the Ragga Twins, east London authors of the early 90s singles Spliffhead, Hooligan 69 and Wipe the Needle – much-prized examples of their fellow Hackney natives Shut Up and Dance’s idiosyncratic, copyright-busting approach to old-school hardcore rave. The combination of title and collaborators was clearly aimed at Skrillex’s detractors, who viewed him as the godfather of a subtlety-free, Las Vegas-friendly, confetti-cannon-heavy subgenre that finally broke dance music to a mainstream US audience and seemed to bear as much of a relationship to house music as hair metal did to the blues. It felt designed to send a message regarding his bona fides: Don’t confuse me with my cake-throwing, trumpet-playing EDM peers – I know more than you think I do.

In the near-decade since Recess’s release, said message seems to have been taken on board. Skrillex is unique among big EDM names. His services as a producer have been courted not only by mainstream stars – Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran included – but by hip pop figures renowned for their epicurean tastes in collaborators, such as Beyoncé, the Weeknd, PinkPantheress and FKA twigs.

Continue reading...
by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Ukrainian composer Heinali on preserving the sound of Kyiv: ‘I wanted to protect my city from harm’

The field recordings on Kyiv Eternal, released exactly a year on from Russia’s invasion, document ‘a world that has disappeared’, the artist explains

The latest album by Heinali is a rather beautiful piece created from field recordings made around his home city – recordings from rail stations, the sound of traffic and birdsong, the dripping of water in a tunnel, the rumbling of trains on a track, the babble of voices in a shopping mall – all sliced up, manipulated, accompanied by synthesisers and transformed into a piece of compelling ambient music. What transforms this niche arthouse project into an urgent piece of work is the fact that the city in question is Kyiv. “These are recordings of a world that has disappeared,” says Heinali, AKA Ukrainian musician Oleh Shpudeiko. “The album documents a city that has changed for ever.”

The album, Kyiv Eternal, was completed after the Russian invasion, but the project dates back more than a decade. “I bought myself a handheld digital tape recorder in 2012 and started to record sounds around Kyiv,” says Shpudeiko. “I had hundreds of these sound sketches on my hard drive when I had to flee the city in February last year.”

Continue reading...
by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Steve Coogan on making 24 Hour Party People: ‘I did my climactic speech – then took half an E’

‘We re-created the Haçienda nightclub in a Manchester warehouse,’ says the film’s director, Michael Winterbottom. ‘It was chaos – people were crying because they were so nostalgic’

This film was an allergic reaction to being in Canada on a depressing recce and getting snowed in at a logging town. We wanted to do something closer to home so we decided: “Let’s do something about Manchester, Tony Wilson, the Haçienda nightclub and the music of Factory Records from the late 70s onwards.”

Continue reading...
by Interviews by Phil Hoad via Electronic music | The Guardian

Rokia Koné review – Malian star’s ragged, diva-ish charm is unstoppable

Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow
Former Les Amazones d’Afrique singer and Jackknife Lee collaborator Koné fuses psychedelia and electro-house with her beautiful, Bambara-sung words

It was as a member of West African feminist supergroup Les Amazones d’Afrique that Rokia Koné’s name and extraordinary voice first began to ring out far beyond the borders of her native Mali. Among those captivated was Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee, the Irish producer best known for his work with U2 and Taylor Swift. He collaborated remotely from California with Koné during lockdown on her debut album Bamanan – 10 electronica-dipped, gossamer groovy songs of joy, pain and fury sung in Bambara, the most widely spoken language in Mali.

Lee was originally billed to appear with Koné at this Celtic Connections date but had to pull out due to a scheduling conflict. Accustomed to performing in Bamako’s clubs for hours on end, Koné has more than enough star power and stamina to enchant a crowd without him. Sashaying around the stage in a flowing white dress, flanked by guitarist Thierry Fournel and keys player and beatmaker Manu Lechat plus a pair of perma-dancing female backing vocalists, her ragged vocals rip through the dry ice-clouded air during dreamy opener Bi Ye Tulonba Ye with a tremendous power and presence verging on the unnerving. Even without a microphone she’d probably still be the loudest thing in the room.

Continue reading...
by Malcolm Jack via Electronic music | The Guardian

Hifi Sean & David McAlmont: Happy Ending review – a dream voice that’s lost in the mix

(Last Night from Glasgow)
The producer-singer duo reunite for more dance-leaning soul that ignites only when McAlmont’s gorgeous vocals are allowed to take flight

David McAlmont is one of the great British singers, and “Hifi Sean” Dickson an experienced producer who formed forward-thinking 90s indie bands the Soup Dragons and the High Fidelity. They first collaborated on Dickson’s 2016 solo album Ft, where every track was steered by a different star, from Yoko Ono to Crystal Waters. McAlmont took the wheel on Like Josephine Baker, a satisfyingly solid mirrorball stomper shadowed by a little sadness, like all the best disco. The duo’s first full-length project stays close to the club, proving Dickson’s canny ear for foot-twitching rhythms accompanied by exuberant Bollywood strings.

However, on songs such as Hurricanes the spiky drums and candied orchestration submerge McAlmont, leaving him politely fighting for attention down in the mix. It’s mostly fine – Happy Ending, Otherwise and The Fever are fun – but that succulent voice, lighter than a fly on a feather, needs more space, more time. When Dickson grants him room to roam on glorious, affecting single The Skin I’m In, McAlmont interrogates key lines such as “Black lives matter” with the falsetto ferocity that fans of his symphonic-pop classic Yes will remember all too well. More of this next time, please.

Continue reading...
by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Cub Sport, Mo’Ju and Huntly: Australia’s best new music for February

Each month our critics pick 20 new songs for our Spotify playlist. Read about 10 of our favourites here – and subscribe on Spotify, which updates with the full list at the start of each month

• Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

For fans of: Julia Jacklin, Lucy Dacus, Angie McMahon

Continue reading...
by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, Andrew Stafford, Shaad D'Souza, Michael Sun and Isabella Trimboli via Electronic music | The Guardian