New music
graeme.thomson
Formed in 2000 by thirtysomething sisters Catherine and Allison Pierce, Alabaman duo The Pierces have spent over a decade flitting from style to style and label to label, the nuggets of critical acclaim heavily outweighed by public indifference. Everything finally clicked, however, with their fourth album, You & I, which entered the UK charts at number four earlier this year. Produced by Coldplay's bass player Guy Berryman (but really, don’t let that put you off), You & I bears all the hallmarks of a band knuckling down and turning pro, but its atmospheric AOR and rootsy pop-rock Read more ...
howard.male
There’s more than one way to reinterpret or simply embrace the extraordinary wealth of Ethiopian music that Francis Falceto has given us with the still growing Ethiopiques CD series of 1970s Ethio-jazz (as the style has been inadequately labelled). For example, Dub Colossus were seduced by the dissimulating aspect of the music that they felt it shared with dub reggae. And the Heliocentrics embraced its “otherness” over which they imposed their own art-school sensibility. Somewhere between these two approaches comes Switzerland’s Imperial Tiger Orchestra.Switzerland? You query, trying but Read more ...
graeme.thomson
A companion piece to last year’s Scratch My Back, on which Gabriel restrung classic material by the likes of Radiohead, Lou Reed and Elbow, New Blood finds the arch tinkerer dismantling some of his own greatest songs, stripping them of their rockist infrastructure (bass, guitar, drums) and rearranging them for a 46-piece orchestra.The two fundamental problems rest with the wide-ranging choice of material and the mode of reinvention: the fact that Gabriel has struggled to write anything of real magnificence for a couple of decades (hence why he’s doing this, Read more ...
joe.muggs
I know nothing about Brazil, I have come to realise. A Sergio Mendes album here, a Gilles Peterson compilation there, a blurred memory of catching City of God on Film4 once – these do not add up to even the beginnings of insight into a country big and diverse enough to be more like a continent in its own right. As one person I meet early on in Brasilia says, asking someone to tell you what's happening in another of Brazil's regions or cultures “could be like asking someone in Athens to tell you about the scene in Helsinki”.That said, Brasilia itself does bring together a strange blend from Read more ...
matilda.battersby
After two years holed up in a Toronto retreat hiding from the fame and adulation that filled arenas for three solid years after her breakout album The Reminder went platinum, excitement has been mounting for Leslie Feist’s new recording, Metals. She has spoken about her struggle to write it after exhausting herself touring, but the 35-year-old’s new material doesn’t disappoint. It is rockier, more melancholy and doesn’t have the same commercial charm as her last record - which is probably quite deliberate.The Reminder was full of chirpy songs with lovelorn refrains and breathlessly whispered Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The final night of the Barbican’s adventurous if slightly awkwardly named Transcender season was a Sufi safari, with a tapas selection of four very different artists from assorted Islamic countries giving a taste of their music.First up, making their UK debut, although they had impressed at this year’s Fes Festival, were the Ensemble Syubbanul Akhyar. The band, whose name translates as “youthful praise”, are from Java, Indonesia, where they added sweet violin, painted a hallucinogenic turquoise, and wonderfully melodic flute to the traditional voice, oud, drums and tambourines. Their music Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Walls reclaim the soft-focus beats and keyboard wash that soundtracks the lounges of continental European hotels. The half-remembered chillout of their second album hazily drifts through a world where Ibiza, shoegazing and Krautrock travel on the same passport.Walls are Alessio Natalizia and Sam Willis. Outside Walls, both have musical day jobs. Natalizia is the mainstay of the fuzzy, shoegazing-leaning Banjo or Freakout. Willis is a producer, and one of the people behind Allez-Allez, a regular dance podcast. Their first contact came in 2009, when Banjo or Freakout got the Allez-Allez remix Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, all women were dressed by Frederick's of Hollywood and all men were a cross between David Lee Roth and Jon Bon Jovi. The Eighties-set Rock of Ages is so outlandish, it might as well be set on another planet. Instead, the all-singing, all-dancing action centres on a bar along LA’s Sunset Boulevard.There’s no doubt that Rock of Ages is absurd, but that hasn’t stopped it being reconfigured for a film that’s in production now. The high-octane cast includes Alec Baldwin, Mary J Blige, Tom Cruise, Paul Giamatti and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Its Broadway run Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The 14th album from Vince Clarke and Andy Bell is supposed to herald a change, or so we are told by their people. Have they gone Goth? Have they discovered dubstep? Like heck. The only thing that has changed appears to be Andy Bell's eerily robotic face. Don't be fooled by the title. There is nothing futuristic about the nine songs here. There isn't even a cameo on backing vocals from Raymond Baxter, the presenter of the BBC series that got to their title first.But before you start demanding a refund, have a listen. Tomorrow's World is classic handbag electro with knobs on. From the yearning Read more ...
ash.smyth
There can't be many excuses for a back-up band at a triple bill, but back it up they did at last night's The Good The Bad album launch at Madame Jojo's. Way up.Hot Fiction deserve a mention for their efforts. A two-man White Stripes (drums and bass) with - both literally and metaphorically - an extra set of balls, they play an old-school, sludged-up tangent somewhere between The Stripes and The Killers, with a few Hendrix-lix and hints of the Bayou thrown in. It's like something you might have seen on black-and-white Top of the Pops, only with better amps, tailor-made for a Guy Ritchie " Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Cocaine Blues” is a song whose murky origins lie at the very roots of blues, folk, country and rock’n’roll, possibly right back to the last days of minstrelsy. When Johnny Cash performs it on his riveting 1968 live album At Folsom Prison, it fairly hums with potency, just about as heartening as popular music gets. When Merle Haggard has a crack at “Cocaine Blues” on his latest album, however, the mood is the polar opposite. The clean easy-going tone conjures a country and western version of Hugh Laurie’s recent sedate, chart-bothering take on the blues.
Then again, Haggard, at 75, has Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By 1977, disco was a cliché to be mocked. But a few years earlier, before its ubiquity, disco was a liberating music uniting minorities on the dance floor. Funk, too, became a cliché, little more than a reductive musical cypher. Two new reissues celebrate these genres when both were still vital, still able to surprise. Disco Gold: Scepter Records & The Birth of Disco is exactly what its title says it is, while Darondo’s Listen to My Song: The Music City Sessions collects A-grade funk that had languished in the vaults until now.Disco wasn’t just the place to dance, but the music, too: a Read more ...