Congratulations Alison Moyet
Huge congratulations to Alison Moyet. ‘the minutes’ entered the charts at number 5 at the weekend. We’re all absolutely delighted!
Huge congratulations to Alison Moyet. ‘the minutes’ entered the charts at number 5 at the weekend. We’re all absolutely delighted!
Out this week on Cooking Vinyl, The D.O.T. release their 2nd album ‘Diary’ featuring the single Blood, Sweat & Tears and How We All Lie
“How we all lie was written in a very traditional way, apart from the MPC drum machine that started it all off. There are a lot of references to the football section of the newspaper’s that day, because it fit with the theme of the way we have to lie to reassure ourselves that we are part of society” – Mike Skinner
The D.O.T. is made up of former Streets mastermind Mike Skinner and Rob Harvey, lead singer of Leeds based dance rock mavens The Music. ‘Diary’ is the sound of two musicians reveling in the freedom to make music for it’s own sake. With no need to conform to a specific style, or satisfy a record label’s scheduling demands, there gradually evolved the sound you hear now in their second album.
Buy ‘Diary’ from the following stores:
Alison Moyet’s fantastic new album ‘the minutes’ is out now on Cooking Vinyl. The album is currently riding high in the UK midweek charts.
Check out the reviews and get yourself a copy.
“Moyet’s finest album in twenty years” Clash Magazine
“a total triumph” Classic Pop
“one of the finest studio releases of her career to date” Renowned for Sound
“her best LP in decades” Q Magazine
“A musical resurrection in the making” The Huffington Post
“An extraordinary, modern-sounding and effortlessly stylish comeback” Pop Justice
“Moyet is an artist not for mellowing – and for that we are very much thankful.” Digital Spy
Buy from Amazon (Digital Deal Of The Week £4.99)
One to please vinyl-enthusiasts: Alison’s album ‘the minutes’ is also being released as a Limited Deluxe 180gram Red Vinyl Edition (plus a free download card) for just £12.99. This LP format will be available in two weeks time, but you can pre-order now…
Last year’s stellar collaboration between The Orb and long-time inspiration Lee Scratch Perry unsurprisingly produced more music than one album could handle, so Scratch, Alex Paterson and Thomas Fehlmann are returning in fine style with ‘More Tales From The Orbservatory’.
The Orb feat. Lee Scratch Perry – Fussball on MUZU.TV.
Released June 3rd on Cooking Vinyl, the set features further excursions from last year’s sessions at the Starhouse studio in Berlin, plus new instrumental versions.
Pre-Order from Amazon
Pre-Order from iTunes
If that wasn’t reason enough to get excited, as a warm up to their forthcoming 25th anniversary celebrations, The Orb return to the location of their first ever gig to perform their seminal first two albums; ‘The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld’ and ‘UFOrb’ in their entirety. Expect Electric Brixton to be transformed into a mind- expanding, other- worldly visual realm, coupled with thunderous levels of low-end sonic science.
2012’s ‘The ORBSERVER In The Starhouse’ was rightfully acclaimed as a colossal meeting of like minds and souls, sparking with rare magic as Alex Paterson and long-time Orb member Thomas Fehlmann provided the perfect backdrops for the Upsetter’s inimitable pronouncements, righteous declarations and sweet vocals. If anything, the follow-up stretches further into the cosmos, the backings more heavily rooted in the basic but infinite principles of rhythm and dub.
The new tracks continue the full-blooded immersion in reggae‘s infinite studio universe which characterised the first set; shards of old songs loom like aural ghosts while rhythms resurface, morphing into something fresh and new. For decades, all three artists have shared a common quest to push out the sound barriers. Each one also knows that journey is never over, which makes the appearance of this fresh batch of tunes and dubs all the more exciting.
The Orb have long been known for their assimilation of deepest dub into their stratospheric sonic innovations, while Thomas has been at the forefront of Germany’s electronic music scene since his avant foraging with Palais Schaumburg in the early 1980s, becoming part of Berlin’s seminal techno underground, working with Sun Electric
and many of the city’s major artists and operations, including the Kompakt label. Starting in the late 60s with the Upsetters, Perry wrote the book on Jamaican mixing desk trickery, then constantly ripped it up to create new aural blueprints for the music via his Black Ark productions. Since then he has charted his own waywardly idiosyncratic path including instigating the punky reggae crossover, working with The Clash and the Slits. With Alex’s punk roots and Thomas‘ position as one of Germany’s foremost electronic pioneers, this was a union which worked on the street just as well as in the stars.
Thomas’ electronic knowledge and intuition had two disparate lightning rods to bounce between, recalling, “I met Lee for the first time during this session and it was pretty touching to see how an unexpected connection and inspirational exchange could so awaken our creative juices. Alex and I had never made so much new music on the spot before. It was soon pretty clear that we wouldn’t get far with the four backing tracks we pre-produced for the session. Lee was so overwhelmingly creative that it took an afternoon for those to be finished. From then on we were forced to come up with new beats on the spot, to keep Lee in the flow.”
“He was constantly active, referring to the tunes we were working on and hitting on bits of wood or stone to create percussion patterns and sounds, so we ended up using field recordings of him banging on bits and pieces”, adds Thomas.
This is immediately evident on opening track ‘Africa’, where woodblock pulses and earth’s core bass establish a lustrous primeval dubscape over which Scratch intones and expounds in his inimitable style. ’Don’t Rush I’ is a fine example of the intricate aural trailblazing raging at these sessions, riding a classic Upsetter bassline with elements of the original track’s keyboards and even drum splatters subtly weaved into the easy old school groove, again underpinned with the subliminal Rasta heartbeat pulse. ‘Fussball‘ sets up booting house primitivism in the beat, splashed with Basic Channel-style synth smoke and gnarly bass, letting Scratch loose on the beautiful game. ’Making Love In Dub’ strips down to bassatronic turbo-jockeys and sparse skank, as Scratch ruminates on matters of the heart, plus the instrumental is a mini-masterpiece of cool dub-funk dynamics. ‘No Ice Age’ plants Scratch’s inimitable world-view over the set’s deepest bass vehicle, topped in ghostly electronic shimmer and distant space melodies. ‘Tight Interlude’ is a brief sonic clash between Orb’s sonic mischief and Scratch philosophy.
“I had an amazing time being that close to the great man,” enthuses Alex. “The mighty Lee Scratch Perry is a pioneer who expresses the future within the present times of anguish, hope and unity. Looking back now those spontaneous jams we did became the most successful tunes, in that they were created under the influence of the situation. They all had a powerful, magic drive we felt was owed to a truly inspiring collision of our
three planets.”
The mouth-watering potential of a legendary master working with long-time acolytes who tuned into his unique wavelength long ago continues to blossom and explodes again on ‘More Tales From The Orbservatory’.
After making a glorious return with last year’s Top 10 album ‘Cheeky For A Reason’, which received numerous glowing reviews – some of the best of the band’s career so far – and also saw them winning Best Album 2012 at the Sunday Mail’s Great Scotland Awards and Album of the Year 2012 at The Scottish Music Awards, The View have compiled some of their finest moments to date on the ‘Seven Year Setlist’ album which will be released on June 17th on Cooking Vinyl. The release of the album comes just days after they support the legendary Stone Roses in front of 50,000 people at Glasgow Green on June 15th.
“Over the years there’s been four studio albums, thousands of gigs, too much vodka and loads of memories on this crazy rock n’ roll journey,” says vocalist / guitarist Kyle Falconer. “So we wanted to create an album that was kinda like stopping and looking back over the years – with a few new tracks too. That’s the Seven Year Setlist.”
‘Seven Year Setlist’ spans The View’s journey to date from ‘Face For The Radio’ which originally featured on their self-titled debut EP which was released in 2006 up to the present day with two new songs in the shape of ‘Dirty Magazine’ and ‘Kill Kyle’. Along the way, it visits the #3 hit ‘Same Jeans’, ‘Wasted Little DJs’ which won Best Track at the NME Awards, another Top 15 hit with ‘Superstar Tradesman’, a Dirty Version of the ‘Which Bitch?’ album highlight ‘Shock Horror’ and ‘How Long’, the first single and opening track from ‘Cheeky For A Reason’ which was accompanied by a video starring Red Road / A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints actor Martin
Compston.
The album is available to pre-order from the usual retailers but as a special thank you to fans who pre-order early from www.sevenyearsetlist.com fans can have their name printed within the booklet of the album.
The new material on the album reunites the band with Owen Morris (Oasis, The Verve) who produced their Mercury Prize-nominated, #1 album ‘Hats Off To The Buskers’. The majority of the songs on the album were written by Falconer and bassist Kieren Webster, and features further production courtesy of Mike Crossey (Artic Monkeys, Foals) and Youth (Primal Scream).
The full album tracklisting is:
1. Kill Kyle
2. Grace
3. Wasted Little DJ’s
4. 5 Rebeccas
5. How Long
6. The Don
7. Skag Trendy
8. Realisation
9. Face For The Radio
10. Tacky Tattoo
11. The Clock
12. Standard
13. Underneath The Lights
14. Tragic Magic
15. Same Jeans
16. Dirty Magazine
17. Superstar Tradesman
18. Sunday
19. Shock Horror
20. Distant Doubloon
The View – completed by guitarist Pete Reilly and drummer Steven Morrison – recently completed their first full North American coast-to-coast tour which included a sold-out show at New York’s Bowdery Ballroom, a date at famous Los Angeles venue The Troubadour and a set at SXSW. In addition to the Stone Roses show, The View’s summer touring plans encompass two intimate homecoming shows at Dundee’s 20 Rocks venue (May 9th and 10th), a headline set at the Mighty Boof At The Playground festival (May 17th) and a return to T in the Park in July.
Formed in Dundee in 2005 by four former school friends, The View have hit the charts with all four of their albums – ‘Hats Off To The Buskers’ (#1), ‘Which Bitch?’ (#3), ‘Bread and Circuses’ (#14) and ‘Cheeky For A Reason’ (#9) – accumulated over 3.5 million views at YouTube and have excelled at numerous major festivals such as Glastonbury, Reading, Leeds, T in the Park and One Big Weekend. Highlights of their recent tours include headlining to almost 7000 people over three Scottish shows split between Dundee’s Caird Hall and Glasgow’s Barrowlands, as well as a raucous set at Rockness which was abandoned due to safety fears and upgraded to a bigger tent due to the phenomenal turnout from fans.