New music
theartsdesk
I have been an admirer of Mike Doughty as a singer and songwriter since picking up Soul Coughing’s first two CDs at a car boot sale for 50p each. I was drawn by the sinister, Lynchian art work and dryly witty song titles such as "Sugar Free Jazz” and “White Girl”. You can’t always judge a CD by its cover or its song titles, but in this instance I hit gold. Here’s the opening line of "Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago", the first song on their debut Ruby Vroom: “A man drives a plane/ Into the/ Chrysler Building”. I was hearing this post 9/11, but it was recorded in 1994. Soul Coughing, rather Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
One of last year’s finest surprises was the debut album from Rayographs, a fractured, psychedelic excursion that remains enthralling. Paper Dollhouse is the solo guise of Rayographs’s Astrud Steehouder. While A Box Painted Black isn’t quite the shock Rayographs was, it beguiles.As Paper Dollhouse, Steehouder (pictured right) sustains Rayographs’s spookiness. A Box Painted Black‘s “I Dreamt You More Than Ever” uses the cross-talking effect of vocals cutting in and out that's so effective with Rayographs. Their Amy Hurst contributes a photo to the album's booklet. Nina Bosnic is, on a couple of Read more ...
bruce.dessau
It is a ridiculous idea but also a strangely appealing one. Five Australians recreate the music of composer Ennio Morricone's 80-piece troupe on a variety of traditional instruments as well as an instrument made out of string and a tin can, plus some bubble wrap, an alarm clock, two asthma inhalers and numerous other household items. Imagine a cross between Tom Waits in his junkyard phase and John Noakes building something on Blue Peter three decades ago. As I said, ridiculous, but strangely appealing.From the cod-Clint Eastwood whispered intro onwards this band successfully treads a parmesan Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I’m a fan of a child-like musical sub-genre which some call toytronica. It’s the sound of retro-futuristic electronic music mashing into playroom sounds, sometimes using actual gimmicky children’s toy instruments. In its broadest definition, it could take in anything from the bizarre surrealist Moog cheese of easy listening doyen Klaus Wunderlich to the more outré outings from Warp Records acts such as Plone, although possibly the ever best album in this vein is Anglo-Norwegian duo Toy’s self-titled 2006 debut on Smalltown Supersound. A regular and great contributor to this micro-genre, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Record producer Steve Lillywhite has been awarded a CBE in the 2012 New Year Honours list. Born in 1955, Lillywhite started his career in the late 1970s working with new wave and post-punk bands such as XTC and Siouxsie & The Banshees. He went on to produce everyone from Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads to Morrissey and Kirsty MacColl, to whom he was once married. His most enduring relationship, however, is with U2. It began with Lillywhite producing their 1980 debut album, Boy, and has continued to the present day. Here he recalls being in the studio as their 2004 hit, “Vertigo”, came Read more ...
joe.muggs
Tunng are not as kooky as they might appear. Yes there is a preponderance of beards in their extensive lineup, and a rather byzantine tale to how that lineup has evolved over the years. And yes, their songs include bone percussion, electronic glitches, melodicas, clarinets, snippets of sampled beat poetry, collaborations with Saharan desert musicians and lyrics from the perspective of a dead man forgiving the brother that killed him (“Jenny Again”). OK, they're a bit kooky. But behind all that, behind the “folktronica” tag, exists a band that revolve around the writing and singing of really, Read more ...
mark.kidel
In a year of mounting turmoil and uncertainty, it was easy to fall back on safe bets and comfort-zone reassurance. Addictive TV series offered a welcome haven from the angst of financial meltdown: Sarah Lund’s melancholy airs in The Killing offered a homeopathic cure for the gloom of double-dip recession. Breaking Bad, the saga of the cancer-struck physics teacher who takes to a life of crime was dark, funny and endlessly surprising. Downton Abbey, by way of a contrast, was well made and watchable, in a warmly soporific kind of way.TV continued to thrive on the cult of celebrity, spewing out Read more ...
graeme.thomson
A slightly late arrival, this, but the fourth album from Richie Egan’s highly rated Irish electro-rockers has a calm, clear beauty well worth savouring in the early days of a new year. It's pop, but with a lemony twist, similar in its slightly skewed craftmanship to Egan's compatriots Villagers, although Jape - despite winning the Irish Choice Music Award in 2008 for third album Ritual - remain a much less celebrated proposition in the UK.It's hard to quite explain why, because Ocean Of Frequency is as lovely as it is accomplished. Aptly for an album fascinated by the connections between Read more ...
Russ Coffey
For about an hour in Hammersmith last October it seemed that all 2011's new music had coagulated into some kind of supernova and was exploding on stage. There were two drum kits, nine musicians, and a nerdy, lanky man singing like an alien. The support act had told us to expect something special and was it ever: Bon Iver’s extraordinary live reimagining of their bucolic, eponymous album took in folk, prog, soul, metal and avant garde. It also pretty much embodied my review year.Decibel for decibel Justin Vernon's folkies were now up there with Queens of the Stone Age who'd brought the Read more ...
peter.quinn
2011 can only be described as a banner year for vocal jazz. Gretchen Parlato is blessed with one of the most mellifluous timbres in jazz, but it's her highly developed rhythmic concept that really marks her out. Like some of the great Brazilian singers, Parlato can make the bar line disappear. It helps that she's got a killing band, and together on The Lost and Found they perform the subtlest metrical shifts in the blink of an eye.Gretchen Parlato performs "How We Love" (excerpt) from The Lost and FoundTwo world-class UK singers, Ian Shaw and Liane Carroll, both released career-best Read more ...
mark.kidel
PJ Harvey is undoubtedly Britain’s most original and consistent rock musician and poet, an artist with a natural passion for transgression that fuels her ceaselessly self-renewing creativity.War is the toughest subject of all: the realm of senseless bloodlust and violence to which humanity seems fatally addicted. Let England Shake walks straight in there, fearlessly grappling with the contradictions of patriotism, the tragic fate of the helpless foot-soldier sacrificed in his youth, and the memory of death from which there is no honest escape. As our unofficial war artist, steeped Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's the effortlessness that does it. So many singer-songwriters strain like billy-oh to make obvious their artistry, their auteurship, their emotional authenticity, when behind it all they're doing something really quite ordinary. This album, on the other hand, veritably glides out of the speakers, full of light, air, easy wit and endless hooks so perfectly and simply realised you'd swear you'd been whistling them to yourself half your life – yet the emotional weight and musical depths hidden behind its inviting surfaces are devastating. After all, the opening lines of the album are "I used Read more ...