New music
Kieron Tyler
It seems an ambivalent statement, perhaps estranging Ride’s Mark Gardener from what’s happening on stage. “I always loved this track off Going Blank Again, it’s called ‘Chrome Waves’.” He could be a DJ or a fan talking about what’s about to be played, rather than a member of the band itself – a member poised to launch into a live recreation of the fourth track from their 1992 second album.Maybe this is what so explicitly revisiting your own past feels like – looking back through the distancing mechanism of time. If that’s the case, it becomes fitting that something not played live back then Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Other Voices is, according to its founder Philip King, a festival which celebrates what’s about to happen. Indeed, artists like Hozier, Fontaines DC and Amy Winehouse cut their teeth at this unique musical event which, although it has its home in the west of Ireland, has iterations across the world. Other Voices is currently two years into a five year residency in Cardigan, Wales, as part of a partnership supported by the Welsh and Irish governments. With a heavy focus on artists from Wales and ireland, Other Voices Cardigan 2022 had three main strands: headline sets at St Mary’s Church Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“For life to exist, we need rhythm” announces Ian Parmel on the opening track of rising UK jazz saxophonist Xhosa Cole’s sophomore album. This is a view that Xhosa has taken to heart – for while his debut album was awash with echoes of John Coltrane’s classic hard bop sounds, Ibeji comprises a collection of saxophone and percussion collaborations with seven separate drummers, which explore West African beats and musical flavours through a jazz lens.“Andy’s Shuffle” features Jason Brown’s jumpy beats twisting and turning around Cole’s riffing, Adriano Adewale brings a hip-swinging groove to “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
John Lennon does not appear on “Love You Too” and “For No One”. With “Taxman”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “Here, There and Everywhere”, “Good Day Sunshine” and “I Want to Tell You”, his contributions are limited to backing vocals and, on odd occasions, some percussion too. He appears semi-detached from seven of Revolver’s 14 tracks.This realisation comes after reading the handsome book accompanying the Revolver box set. The pages with the track-by-track commentary have headings above each section of text, listing dates of recording, the studios used, the personnel and who played what. Leaf through, and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
London’s Morton Valence are one of those bands music journos love, not that it’s done their career much good. I’ve bigged them up a few times, myself, starting at least a decade ago, but widespread critical acclaim has not added up to countrywide recognition. They are now up to album eight, still based around core duo Anne Gilpin and ex-Alabama 3 dude Robert “Hacker” Jessett, and their latest album is as consistently pin-sharp as everything else they’ve done. If only more would hear it!As ever, their default setting is doomed Leonard Cohen-meets-Raymond Carver narratives, deliberately English Read more ...
Tim Cumming
A minute before coming on stage, the audience is asked to observe a minute’s silence for the victims of the Halloween tragedy in the central Itaewon district of the South Korean capital of Seoul. The stage is dark, clouds of dry ice forming a vignette around the three sets of instruments – Ham Minhwi’s bass guitar and pedals, Jang Dohyuk’s drums and Yun Eunhwa’s personalised yanggeum, or hammered dulcimer – and when they walk on stage and set themselves up, we in the audience remain silent until Yun Eunhwa starts to play.It’s a sombre and focused start to a striking and arresting journey in Read more ...
Katie Colombus
First Aid Kit have grown up and moved on. So says the cheerful conglomeration of lockdown-emergent pop sounds that makes up their fifth studio album.The record has the movement of a road trip around the USA with kitschy Americana, echoes of Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty, folk and acoustic country. It makes you feel as though you’re driving down open highways under warm starry skies with the roof down. But Palomino is actually the first album Swedish sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg have recorded in Sweden since their debut, The Big Black & The Blue 12 years ago.Written during the Read more ...
mark.kidel
A tall African man stands alone in a pool of light. He has a cello and an immensely versatile voice. In a matter seconds, he holds the audience enchanted. He inhabits the stage as if it were by a campfire in the bush.The Bouffes du Nord, the Paris base for Peter Brook’s ritual-rich theatre for many years, the beautifully worn shell of a former music hall, with decaying walls in different tones of orange and red, has seen so many extraordinary performances. I, for one, will never forget Brook’s fulgurant Hamlet with Adrian Lester in the title role, and Isabelle Huppert, raw and present in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Much of Amateurs is observational. “Folk Festival” ponders appearing at said event: is the place on the bill right; would fitting in be easier if the lyric’s subject were a different age? During “Market on the Sand”, it’s wondered while browsing whether there is “something here that is meant just for me”.Amateurs, by Australia’s Laura Jean Englert, feels as if it’s the result of a period of contemplation. The album begins with “Teenage Again”, an acoustic guitar-driven mid-tempo folk-rocker with a Neil Young feel. “When I was 17, my mama couldn’t handle me” are the opening lyrics. Approaching Read more ...
Robert Beale
Is Artificial Intelligence pointing the way to musical composition in the future? The BBC Philharmonic, conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni and colleagues at the Royal Northern College of Music made a case for it in this concert.The highlight of the college’s Future Music festival, the programme celebrated the fifth anniversary of PRiSM (the centre for Practice and Research in Science and Music) at the RNCM, and also the supposed centennial of the orchestra itself. It presented two works by Emily Howard, PRiSM’s director: Antisphere (from 2019) and Elliptics, a setting of a poem by Michael Read more ...
joe.muggs
There is now a kind of “leftfield mainstream” in electronic music. It’s populated by people a decade or more younger than the original acid house generation, but who take their core inspiration from post-rave experimentation of the early-mid Nineties. Dusky, Bicep and to an extent people like DJ Seinfeld, Four Tet and Jon Hopkins all channel the rich melodies and textures of Future Sound of London, Orbital, early Aphex Twin, Underworld and co to arena-filling effect. And Daniel Avery has been chief among these. Running through his work from the beginning have been tones and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“You Turned my Bitter Into Sweet” sounds like a hit. The 1965 Mary Love single was issued by the Los Angeles-based Kent label and had a Motown flavour and a hint of The Supremes’s “Come See About me”, from the previous year. “You Turned my Bitter Into Sweet” was a killer 45.However, the single escaped widespread attention until 1982 when it became the opening cut of For Dancers Only, a top-drawer compilation of dancefloor-friendly soul sides. Its inclusion recognised that “You Turned my Bitter Into Sweet” had become a UK club staple when played out. In 1983, it reached even more ears by Read more ...