New music
Kieron Tyler
Remember the big music? Eighties big. Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” big. Simple Minds’ “Waterfront” big. Anthony Gonzalez does. He might say his fifth album as M83 is inspired by The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1995 double set Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, but it’s built on foundations from a decade earlier.Ten years on from the first M83 album, Antibes’s Gonzalez hasn’t travelled quite as far as Messier 83, the galaxy whose name he’s adopted, but he has arrived at a point where intimacy has become distant. His reconfigured shoegazing – which prefigured much of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s almost dark. Frescoes depicting the cycle of life are barely visible. They could be shadows. Waves of sound pulse through the mausoleum of Norwegian artist Emanuel Vigeland. Fiddle player Nils Økland is feeding the 15-second delay with peals that reverberate around the space, folding back into themselves. It’s a spooky, unforgettable introduction to FolkeLarm, Oslo’s annual festival of Nordic folk music.FolkeLarm is a jolt. Not only because of it being a deep-dish serving of Nordic folk music, but also because previous visits to Oslo have found the city under half a metre of snow. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Wayne Shorter's current band do strange things with time - it seems to stretch and bend like in some subatomic experiment featuring rogue neutrinos. Their nifty time signatures would fuse any computer. The nature of the music itself seems outside time, both echoing that modern jazz annus mirabilis 1959 and being futuristic at the same time.Shorter enjoys quoting his old cohort Miles Davis’s more enigmatic comments like, “Do you ever get fed up of making music that sounds like music?” What Shorter and his band do is at any rate not like anyone else’s music – they use a huge palette of colours Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A few years ago – peaking in 2007 - “cosmic disco” was a brief clubland rage. It came mostly from Oslo and consisted of calm, bearded Norwegian dudes creating a fabulous psychedelic stew of groovy house, Italo-disco, and their own ineffable proggy weirdness. Where filter disco, the unkillable dance-pop sub-genre kick-started by Stardust’s “The Music Sounds Better With You”, has mostly been hugely unadventurous, relying on basic retro pilfering, cosmic disco was always marinated in the deep, druggy pulse of the best nightlife. Names such as Lindstrom, Prins Thomas and Todd Terje rightly Read more ...
ash.smyth
In the 19 years of his million-selling gangsta-bragging pimp-shizzling hip-hop-rapping career, the man born Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr has gone to some lengths to inform us that his name is, in fact, Snoop Dogg. He has appeared as himself - or a transparent alter ego - in several films, "starred" in a raft of low-grade at-home-with-Snoop TV shows, referred to himself endlessly during interviews in the third person (and in his own weird third tense), and has about a thousand lyrics, songs and album titles with all or part of his moniker Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It’s been a long-standing source of surprise to me how Nerina Pallot continues to operate a whisker under the radar. From the get-go, 10 years back, she’s had the voice, songs and looks to be a star. Maybe a decade ago was the wrong time for her. But now, with her musical style residing somewhere between Laura Marling and Adele, surely she’s perfect for today’s market. The critics sure think so. In the last few months, column inches have argued that her new album’s the one to really break her into the mainstream. I agree. But when she walked out on stage at the Shepherds Bush Empire I couldn’ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Lexington on Pentonville Road is a pub with an easy-going Deep South style. The main bar looks like the sort of place where cattle barons might relax with basque-clad floozies after a hard week kicking homesteaders off their land. Instead, however, the place has a smattering of people, mostly in their twenties, a number with large sideburns and Stooges T-shirts, listening to a New Zealander called Delaney Davidson playing solo blues.Davidson is a cross between one-man-band Son of Dave and The Cramps. He samples himself, plays off a rhythm track and drops drily amusing remarks in-between Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
With Cliff Richard it’s tempting for commentators and critics to pull a conceptual double bluff. Cliff is regarded as naff, safe and beloved of grannies, so restating that angle and sneering is tired - it was tired 40 years ago. So what to do? Dig around his back catalogue for a corner to be fought? (I’m Nearly Famous and Wired for Sound are the usual contenders.) Make the valid case that he was the British stepping stone between rock’n’roll and The Beatles? Or simply quote the stats – upwards of 200 million records sold, a national treasure, etc?It doesn’t wash, any of it. Cliff and the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The great folk guitarist Bert Jansch died early this morning, aged 67. Whether as a prime mover in London's 1960s folk scene, or as part of pioneering folk-jazzers Pentangle, or as a songwriter and solo artist, his influence on everyone from Paul Simon, Donovan, Led Zeppelin and Neil Young to, later, Johnny Marr, Graham Coxon and Beth Orton is simply immeasurable. Young compared Jansch's impact on the possibilities of the acoustic guitar as comparable to that of Jimi Hendrix's on the electric. Right up until his illness (he died after a struggle with lung cancer) Jansch remained one of music' Read more ...
mark.kidel
In the generation of twentysomething rock musicians bottle-fed on world music, the Bristol band Zun Zun Egui really stand out. They make some of the most exciting music to have emerged in the last 12 months.The Afro-tinged sophistication of Vampire Weekend and Foals borrowed a sound in which distinctions between lead and rhythm guitar were blurred, in the style of classic soukous from Zaire and the East and Southern African dance music it inspired, but Zun Zun Egui take it one step further, ploughing African beats back into a rich and breathtaking mix which draws from heavy metal, avant-garde Read more ...
david.cheal
Who needs songs, when you have song titles that are as good as those written by Luke Haines? The man who, we’re told, could have been a Britpop contender (though I’m not convinced myself; he’s far too clever, and much too odd) has previously, under his own name or in bands such as The Auteurs and Black Box Recorder, penned tunes with titles such as “Unsolved Child Murder”, “Girl Singing in the Wreckage”, “The English Motorway System”, and of course “Luke Haines is Dead”, now brings us this cornucopia of magnificently titled tat. Gems here include “Inside the Restless Mind of Rollerball Rocco Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tony Bennett receives a standing ovation just for walking on stage. His band arrive first, then Bennett in loose black suit, white shirt, black tie (not bow), and red handkerchief in breast pocket. He saunters into a spotlight stage right. It’s enough. He laps it up. There’s a real sense of occasion. The worry is that, at 85, he will not be able to deliver, that his voice will be a feeble shadow of its former self. His opening song, “Watch What Happens”, only exacerbates such thoughts as he talk-sings his way through it. Next, though, as he cracks into the Gershwin classic “They All Laughed Read more ...