New music
peter.quinn
This Edition Records debut from pianist Andrew McCormack and saxophonist Jason Yarde is a powerful marriage of brilliant musicianship and composition of the first rank. While this is only their second release in the duo format, a follow-up to the 2009 album My Duo, their attention to the smallest detail of phrasing and dynamic has been steadily honed since the days of playing together in seminal groups J-Life and Tomorrow's Warriors, dating back to the 1990s.The new album ranges from the rolling, Jarrettesque vamp of album opener "D-Town" to the duo's elaborate unpacking of "Embraceable You Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Some countries have a particular talent for choral music. Georgia, for example, has wonderful choirs, as does South Africa and, it seems, Bulgaria. Unfortunately, due to the expense of touring, we hardly get to see them. So when Le Mystère de Voix Bulgares, the female choir who embody the strange and powerful music of their homeland, came to town last night, lovers of global choral music were out in force.How they came to be here is a curious tale. The music, while based on folk singing, was actually a Soviet-era idea of creating a national musical language. In 1952 Philip Koutev created the Read more ...
joe.muggs
I never really dug Suede. I could hear great pop songwriting in some of their work, but their rampant adoption of Bowie-as-Ziggy-Stardust sonics and vocal tics seemed to be just as representative of Britpop's necrophiliac tendencies as did Oasis's tired Beatle-isms. So I'm slightly puzzled as to why I'm enjoying this record by their singer as much as I am, given that it is almost as retro – albeit in a different way.The soundscape of Black Rainbows is a return to rock after the orchestral stylings of previous solo records, but it belongs to the mid-1980s. In particular there is a Goth Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Cosmo Jarvis’s welter of ideas is sometimes too much for him. He explodes in multiple directions at once, ebullient, madcap, raucous, goofy, the very antithesis of cool (hence a 1/10 score for this in NME). He simply cannot rein it in, thus beautiful melodic orchestration fights it out with sea shanty stomping, dodgy, heartfelt rapping, rugby club choruses and Jarvis’s inability to be serious for very long. Nothing, however, can disguise the fact that there’s raw talent here, discovering itself.The Devonshire 22-year-old’s second album is demented fun. His first was a blink-and-you-missed-it Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“Are there any freshers in the audience?" asked Emma-Lee Moss halfway through last night’s set. Two voices raised a muted cheer. Whatever else your average 18-year-old might have been doing, cut loose from the apron strings for the first time in the capital city on a Friday night, they were unlikely to be listening to music this polite and well behaved. Or so you’d hope.She may be less widely heralded than Laura Marling, but both women have recently been doing their utmost to transcend the creative straitjacket of middle-class nu-folk girls-with-guitars. This, oddly, has left Moss's music Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
First off Spank Rock, has nailed the second best album title of the year. It’s sweary, bleeds punk attitude and nails a point - rather than the usual focus-grouped opaquely resonant crap bands come up with (best album title of 2011, by the way: Mogwai’s Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will – brilliant!).Secondly Baltimore MC Naem Juwan once again lives up to the hype, not easy to do when Tweet-trending futuroid numpties have been frothing over him non-stop for the five years since his debut album made them cream their jeans. Spank Rock brought a broken computer to the hip hop party in 2006 Read more ...
peter.quinn
Take the sounds of New Orleans brass, Prince-style funk, hip-hop beats and power chord axe-riffing. Stir them all together, add in an assortment of high-profile guests, and you produce the genre-defying greatness that is For True.At an age when most kids are developing a taste for solid food, Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews was lugging his horn around the Tremé district of New Orleans, where he was born and raised. This follow-up to last year's Grammy-nominated Backatown from the horn player and his wonderfully monikered Orleans Avenue band – Michael “Bass” Ballard (on, er, bass), Pete “Freaky Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Fresh from a fortnight of disappointments, Adele showed she was back on top form in London this evening. Having missed out on the Mercury Music Prize and cancelled a string of dates on her nationwide tour suffering from a chest infection, today heralded better things for the Tottenham-born warbler after she was nominated for three MTV music awards. Not that a bit of sadness is a bad thing for this pair of lungs, mind. Her albums 21 and 19, sung lustily in an emotively crackling contralto, has earned the 23-year-old a reputation for depth and maturity well beyond her years.Explaining that she’ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A reverb-swathed guitar picks out a rudimentary surf riff. Drums whack out the Bo Diddley shuffle. The four-to-the-floor bass throbs. Vocals drag the vowels out. As whole, the sound spirals, pulses. At eye-rattling volume, The Black Angels serve up a psychedelia that’s mind expanding, but more about the darkness within than the light without. Their trip isn’t the worst ride you’ve ever been on, but it sure doesn’t take you to the third bardo.We all know the Sixties dream was confirmed AWOL with Altamont, 1969 and Chuck Manson. Although Austin Texas’s Black Angels’s vibe is smack bang with all Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Once upon a time there was a boy/girl band who hailed from Sheffield. They made a debut album called Yeah So which married whimsical indie-folk and a kind of post-punk rockabilly to words seemingly torn from the diaries of a pair of teenage sweethearts, holding hands in the rain one minute, crying into their snakebite the next, all the time hoping that this might last forever rather than just until the end of Fresher’s Week. Cute, knowing, twee as toffee, it was all very sweet but not hugely substantial.If this was the opening act in the tale of Slow Club, the duo formed in 2006 by Read more ...
joe.muggs
In an age of ever-better soundsystems and chain venues built and kitted out to replicate the same standard gig experience in different cities and areas, it's nice to be reminded of the challenges and rewards of a non-standard venue. I've intended many times in the past to go to shows at the Union Chapel in North London, but somehow Friday was my first time – and I was stunned. The space inside the octagonal chapel is welcoming and airy, and where some church interiors sternly command hush and attention this simply seemed to relax people into a contemplative state.That wide open space also has Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Scandinavia’s music is the gift that keeps on giving. Journeying through new releases from our friends in the north, this round-up encounters irresistible Danish electropop, absorbing Norwegian weirdness, hypnotic Finns, charming singer-songwriting from Sweden and Icelandic/Swedish jazz pop.Denmark’s Tiger Baby grab the pop crown here. They’ve been heard on the US reality show The Real L Word and are – inexplicably – popular in Indonesia, where they’ve charted and appeared on a film soundtrack. Open Windows Open Hills is the Copenhagen trio’s terrific third album. Its brilliant opening cut “ Read more ...