Album

As the first night of Club Uncut’s annual seaside trip to Brighton’s Great Escape festival comes to an end, a girl passes me yelling “My ears! My ears!”. New York’s Gang Gang Dance have just come off stage at the Pavilion Theatre, where they’ve cranked up the decibels to ear-splitting levels. Really, it was loud. Earlier this week, I’d been listening to their latest album, Eye Contact, recorded in relaxed circumstances near rural Woodstock, and been impressed by the ambient textures of tracks like “Glass Jar”. Live, they’re clearly a very different proposition: the sheer intense forcefulness of their sound physically impacts on the body. It had all been so very different three hours earlier…

The big man’s final, posthumous album...

Kate redux! Intriguing edits of her ’80s/’90s output...

Will Sheff’s apocalypse! Raucous, anthemic and their best album yet...

Sweet folk, baroque pop and free jazz! Robin Pecknold weighs his emotional baggage on beautiful second...

Away, again, from Animal Collective – and into a world of rapture, reveries, and great washes of beautiful sound...

Bleak, doubtful and largely self-penned. Back to the music that made her...

David Sitek and co decamp to LA, hot-rodding their arch art-rock with sunny celebration and West Coast weirdness...

Long-lost document of the pre-fame Bob: even then, a mercurial live performer...

Mean, whimsical, portentous, playful… It’s complicated...