New music
howard.male
Gagner l’argent Francais (which translates as “to earn French money”) begins, like any other West-targeted West African album, with the pitter-patter of tiny congas and some delicately picked kora. But then, two minutes in, a bright stab of reverb-heavy keyboard heralds the entrance of grungy rock guitar and drums. It’s a bold way to open an album in that it may alienate some of the Radio 3 Late Junction world music demographic. But it isn’t the first time Mamani Keita has put before her audience challenging and innovative music. I have particularly fond memories of Electro Bamako, her 2001 Read more ...
Russ Coffey
His daughter may be Hannah Montana and he may have set country music sales records but, worldwide, Billy Ray Cyrus will never escape his mega-hit “Achy Breaky Heart”. Although that was a novelty record, it epitomised everything people find preposterous about America’s red states. Which is why, outside of America’s heartlands, most people find it difficult to take Cyrus seriously. It's something he finds very frustrating.I’m American is Cyrus’s “patriot” album. It’s all about troops and home and stars and stripes. It’s full of girls left behind, and parents’ war records. Just the sort of Read more ...
Russ Coffey
His daughter may be Hannah Montana and he may have set country music sales records but, worldwide, Billy Ray Cyrus will never escape his mega-hit “Achy Breaky Heart”. Although that was a novelty record, it epitomised everything people find preposterous about America’s red states. Which is why, outside of America’s heartlands, most people find it difficult to take Cyrus seriously. It's something he finds very frustrating. I’m American is Cyrus’s “patriot” album. It’s all about troops and home and stars and stripes. It’s full girls left behind, and parents’ war records. Just the Read more ...
howard.male
I never thought I’d find myself saying that a French female vocalist reminded me of Howard Devoto. But there we are, what can you do? There’s just something in the way she sings the verses of “Hell be Damned and Look Out”: the pauses between words (“Let’s face it… you may only live… once”); the way the last note (word) of the line just kind of hangs there, emotionally ambiguous and philosophically inscrutable. But Florence Joelle also has the sensuous purr of a French Marilyn Monroe. So whichever way you look at it, you’ve got to sit up and take notice.Recorded straight to analogue tape, the Read more ...
howard.male
So how did you survive the 1980s? I don’t mean money-wise; I’m sure you had plenty of that. I mean musically and therefore spiritually. It was a diet of Thomas Mapfumo and old Nina Simone albums that got me through the first half, until the Red Cross parcel of Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs arrived in 1985. Who knows how many times that treasured piece of vinyl got lowered onto my 30-quid hi-fi in my desperate attempt to ward off the encroaching thunder of Phil Collins’s drum kit and myriad other musical abominations of the period?Swordfishtrombones was the album that marked Tom Waits’s dramatic move Read more ...
joe.muggs
“It's like an advert for American Apparel,” said my companion a song into the set – and she had a point. The elegantly poised electropop of Little Dragon is so sharp, so cool, so impeccably internationalist in its outlook and presentation that, taken in small doses, it would be perfect for any brand targeted at affluent hipsters. But while their antics on stage, and especially those of singer Yukimi Nagano were admittedly a brand manager's dream at any given moment, over time they proved to be something much more interesting.'Pleasingly for a crowd so dressed up, they appeared extremely Read more ...
howard.male
Several of my favourite tracks of 2010 were on Tradi-Mods vs Rockers. This was a musically audacious project in which a bunch of Western pop and rock musicians dared to unpick the intricate fabric of some Congolese bands who were already making some definitively funky music of their own. The question that arose while I was reacquainting myself with this double CD yesterday, was how were these mostly cut'n'paste studio confections - made in the absence of the musicians that inspired them - going to be recreated live with the involvement of those very same musicians?I expected it would be a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As subtlety in popular music becomes increasingly worshipped by heritage-led taste arbiters, we should relish proper shouty moron tunes. Few come more shouty and moronic than LMFAO, a Los Angeles duo named after the text abbreviation for "Laughing my fucking arse off". They comprise Berry Gordy's youngest son Skyler (AKA Skyblu) and his grandson Stefan Gordy (AKA Redfoo), renowned for goon club anthem "I'm in Miami, Bitch". They claim their second album is "more refined" - but it isn't unless your idea of refined is pole dancing to Limp Bizkit.A decade ago the hard house sound Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The weekend of 29 to 31 July will see London's Festival Hall transformed into what the venue describes as a “multi–venue vintage playground”. Vintage, founded by Wayne and Gerardine Hemingway, comes to London for the first time to celebrate the popular culture of Britain’s past. The Festival Hall is a fitting host, as it was constructed for 1951’s Festival of Britain and is, itself, a piece of living history.Vintage is a bulk-buy experience. The decades celebrated are the 1920s, Thirties, Forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. There will be eight nightclubs, each dedicated to one Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kew the Music - the umbrella name for a series of outdoor concerts - did not look promising upon first arrival and, indeed, for quite some time afterwards. It was clear as soon as I walked through the gates that this was a day out for monied London, not the usual gig environment. Before the stage, in front of Kew Gardens' Victorian Temperate House, a large section of grass had been sealed off for those with pre-booked picnicking space and everywhere about people sat with hampers swigging half bottles of Veuve Clicquot and using cocktail sticks to pluck exotic varities of marinated Read more ...
peter.quinn
“In jazz music you have the freedom, you have the expression. You have the visceral and you have the intellectual. Everything can be expressed through jazz, and is expressed through jazz and through the medium of improvisation. This is the highest form of being able to create music.” Speaking at the opening press conference of this year's Copenhagen Jazz Festival, that definition of jazz from the 80-year-old saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins seems as self-contained and eloquent as any other I've heard.Presenting the music in an amazing array of settings – from coffee houses, churches and city Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The musical identity of Midlands town Stourbridge is largely defined by Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Pop Will Eat Itself and The Wonder Stuff, a trio that charted with varying degrees of wackiness in the late Eighties to mid-Nineties. The Voluntary Butler Scheme, the recording identity of fellow Stourbridgian Rob Jones, shares their leaning towards wackiness, but it’s more surreal, less surface. He’s also way more interesting musically. Second album The Grandad Galaxy is a musical rummage through a jumble-sale mind.Jones is closer to Davyhulme absurdist Jim Noir than any of his local predecessors. Read more ...