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Wrap your knowledge muscles around the JOE Music Quiz.
Welcome to this week s JOE Music Quiz, a quiz that will push you to the very max. Spiritually and physically, this is probably the most taxing quiz we have ever created.
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All lies, of course. As is our wont, it s another quiz which is difficult in parts and not so difficult in others. If you know, you know. It s that kind of quiz.
This week we have questions about Lou Reed, Muse, The Prodigy, and Pink all in the mix.
Hit us with your rhythm sticks!
Name the lead singer from Kings of Leon?
BBC News
By Steve Holden
image copyrightDan Medhurst
There s definitely an irony in releasing a full-on dance album right in the middle of lockdown - when no-one can go out and actually dance.
One listen of Bicep s new album Isles and you ll instantly want to be in a club with lasers overhead and bass vibrating through the floor.
Pulsating tracks like Apricots and Atlas are guaranteed to be crowd favourites when restrictions are lifted.
But - obviously - the ongoing pandemic means that won t be happening anytime soon.
So the Northern Irish duo, mates Andy Ferguson and Matt McBriar, crafted their second full length record with home listening in mind.
Plaisirs illuminés
This latest album featuring the “bare-footed violin maverick” Patricia Kopatchinskaja is named after a “perplexing” Dalí painting featuring rectangular boxes, eggs, a bleeding knife and 34 bearded cyclists, said Geoff Brown in The Times. Thankfully, what is on it – 20th and 21st century music with a folk twist – is “much easier to grasp”. There’s Sándor Veress’s
Musica concertante; the 1966
Concerto for Strings by Alberto Ginastera; and
Les Plaisirs illuminés itself, a Dalí-derived double concerto by Francisco Coll. It’s a “rewarding” programme, and “just the kind of fare to get maximum voltage” from Kopatchinskaja and the Camerata Bern chamber orchestra.
“On an album, you want loads of detail for people listening at home,” Bicep s Andy Ferguson said in a press release for the Belfast duo’s second LP,
Isles. While Bicep presciently forecast popular dance music’s return to rave years ago, it’s less likely the guys knew that home would be the only place where people could listen to their new project upon its release.
Whether through clairvoyance or luck,
Isles meets the moment. It’s intricate, moody, nostalgic, introspective and emotional, with melodies (“Atlas”) that swirl somewhere between euphoria and melancholy and fidgety synths and percussion (“Fir,” “Sundial”) that bypass the feet in favor of cerebral stimulation. The star of the album (out via Ninja Tune) is its vocals, whose sample origins span the globe from Malawi to Bulgaria to Bollywood, alongside original contributions from the UK’s Clara La San. Every contribution is united in its atmospheric unease: a looming, almost transcendent presence t
Our pick of the albums reviewed on these pages this week is Isles, new from Bicep – here’s your chance to revisit the review and check out the album via Spotify.