New music
Adam Sweeting
This film, promised Imagine's host Alan Yentob, would be "the nearest we'll get to the real Freddie Mercury, a shy man in search of love and a driven artist living behind the protection of his stage persona". Probably true, but the shyness and the protective persona, coupled with vigorous policing by the Queen organisation, meant that film-maker Rhys Thomas couldn't add a great deal to what's already known about Mercury.This looked very much like an addendum to last year's Queen - Days of our Lives, a two-part history of the band which was inevitably dominated by Mercury, yet which also Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The songs are instantly recognisable. Bacharach & David’s “Don’t Make Me Over” “There's Always Something There to Remind me”, “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Make it Easy on Yourself” will always be evocative. So will Dionne Warwick’s voice, though it’s huskier these days. Now sits the old alongside a brace of new songs, two by Burt Bacharach and one with a lyric by Hal David, the last he wrote.Another of the 50th anniversaries washing up right now was the impetus for Now. In this case, it’s been a half-century since the release of Warwick’s first single, “Don’t Make Me Over”. It must have Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Royal Albert Hall is pretty big. It's a prestige venue, but everything is relative. For the overwhelmingly French audience, the first British headlining show by Johnny Hallyday was the equivalent of seeing Paul McCartney, Tom Jones and Cliff Richard sharing a bill at the back room of the Dog & Duck.Hallyday is a stadium-packer in France and the French-registered cars and coaches parked around Kensington Gore testified that this was an international draw. He sang mostly in French, spoke in French and was, well, French, even though his music is very firmly a blues, soul and rock'n’roll Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Natasha “Bat for Lashes” Khan is a 32-year-old indie singer-songwriter who, mysteriously, often gets compared to Florence Welch. But unlike Welch’s sledgehammer Eighties-pop Khan makes subtle and rather magical albums with connoisseur appeal. Today she releases her third album in six years. Her previous Fur and Gold (2006) and Two Suns (2009) have also drawn comparisons with PJ Harvey, Björk and Siouxie Sioux, and that's still a stretch (if less so than Florence). Khan’s is music that eludes categories: in places it may be danceable but, for the most part, it's dreamy art-pop.I am Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Almost a month after the end of the iTunes Download festival its artier cousin, The Barclaycard Mercury Prize Albums of the Year Live gig series is going strong. A special concert on Wednesday 24 October will see performances from The Maccabees, Michael Kiwanuka and Alt-J. The event will take place at at LSO St Luke’s in London and will help raise money for War Child, which helps children affected by conflict around the world.Tickets for the event, other than those won through competitions, will become available from a special ballot open for 48 hours from 10am today, Monday 15 October. Entry Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Poetry has a habit of colliding with rock'n'roll. Mick Jagger read some Shelley when the Stones played in Hyde Park in 1969. John Cooper Clarke's speedball delivery lit up the late Seventies and helped to inspire comedy poet John Hegley and the ranting punk scene of the Eighties. Lest we forget there was also the cod-Byronic Murray Lachlan Young who, legend has it, signed to EMI for a million-pound advance in 1996, but if he did he hardly shifted the units to justify the cheque. Poetry and rock can clearly be cosy bedfellows, but unmitigated successes are rarer than rhymes for the word " Read more ...
howard.male
For several years now this Swiss trio have been combining their love of old Cajun and Zydeco tunes with an arthouse-meets-punk aesthetic strongly influenced by the Velvet Underground and The Clash. But it’s only with their new album Bye Bye Bayou (released this week) that they’ve landed upon a sound that fully celebrates both their love of scratchy, trashy old records and their need also to be adventurously 21st-century. But the album is a sonic balancing act that relies somewhat on production by the Blues Explosion’s Jon Spencer to make sure that, although envelopes are stretched, they are Read more ...
peter.quinn
Surprising transitions, unusual segues, a myriad of I-wasn't-expecting-that moments. Saluting some of the iconic figures in Caribbean history and paying tribute to the tentacular reach of its culture, with House of Legends Courtney Pine has delivered one of the finest albums in his already well-stuffed discography.While his previous album Europa focused on the woody timbre of the bass clarinet, his fifteenth studio album features the plangent tones of the soprano sax exclusively, heard at the outset in a virtuosic flourish that announces a heart-wrenching ballad composed in memory of Stephen Read more ...
theartsdesk
John Carpenter: Halloween II/Halloween IIIKieron TylerPeople celebrate Halloween in different ways, but the arrival of these reissues of the soundtrack music to two John Carpenter horror films is enough to put pumpkins, cut-out bats and capes in the shade. Both are landmarks in using electronic music for cinema, and both are a great, spooky listens. Even when divorced from the imagery.Carpenter had already worked with composer Alan Howarth on the music for Escape From New York (1978) and the pair reunited in 1981 to create a score for Halloween II. Howarth built the new music around Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Leona Lewis has a whole new look: all mouse-brown hair, sullen expression and the oddest-looking facial jewellery since Kate Nash misappropriated the bindi in the video she made to accompany “Underestimate The Girl”. It really doesn’t suit her.Forgive me. I too find it pretty disrespectful when writers comment on an artist’s appearance before they start to consider what a work sounds like. But as I listened to Glassheart, the third album from one-time X Factor winner and ridiculously successful Lewis, it was the artwork I kept coming back to. The head-and-shoulder shot makes her look washed- Read more ...
bruce.dessau
To paraphrase Shakespeare, when albums featuring strident, post-feminist "I am woman hear me roar" naked cover sleeves come, they come not in single spies but in battalions. I'm not so sure about the motives of Christina Aguilera, but the recent album imagery from Martha Wainwright and Natasha Khan aka Bat for Lashes has offered an opportunity for prodigiously talented, modern singer/songwriters to lay themselves bare, literally as well as emotionally.Khan cites Patti Smith's early uncompromising incarnation, famously captured by Robert Mapplethorpe, as an inspiration. One just wishes there Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Donald Fagen's fourth solo album arrives 30 years after his first one, The Nightfly, though there can be no doubting that it's the work of the same artist. The quizzical chord sequences, supple instrumental interplay and teasingly cryptic lyrics will be instantly familiar to students of his work, and indeed of the later days of Steely Dan.Fagen and his partner Walter Becker have successfully rejuvenated the Steely Dan legacy by assembling a touring version of the group bristling with hyper-capable musical gunslingers, and Fagen has used several of them here, notably guitarist Jon Herington, Read more ...