New music
david.cheal
Paul Simon is now nearly 70 years old and as he walked onto the Hammersmith Apollo stage last night it struck me that he is beginning to look like the little old man he will eventually become: still nimble, enviably trim, but nevertheless, he was noticeably older and more fragile-looking than when I last saw him five years ago. The second thing that struck me was a certain weariness in the opening songs - a mechanical quality to the playing, and a concomitantly flat atmosphere. The opening song, “Crazy Love Vol II”, was ploddy, while “Dazzling Blue”, from his new So Beautiful or So Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The prospect of seeing a band seemingly in thrall to peak-popularity Fleetwood Mac in a Shoreditch basement intrigued. Could San Francisco's Vetiver reproduce the glossy sheen of new album The Errant Charm live? The answer was no, and last night’s London show was all the better for that. As the guitars intertwined, the sonic swirl was more akin to a Seventies LA version of shoegazing than a recreation of the seductive West Coast sound.The time shift aspect of Vetiver is distracting in a live setting. It’s impossible to look at North Carolina transplant Andy Cabic and his band without being Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gothenburg electro-moodists Little Dragon aren’t short of high-profile cheerleaders. All four members appeared on a couple of tracks on Gorillaz' Plastic Beach, and the band supported Damon Albarn's gang on the subsequent tour. TV on the Radio’s David Sitek borrowed their singer Yukimi Nagano for his solo album, also from last year. Ritual Union, their third album, escapes from the shadows cast by the collaborations to reassert that this is a band, rather than a box of sticking plasters for other people’s careers.The collaborations – Big Boi has also co-opted them and Nagano appears on Rafael Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Emmylou Harris once described to me the sibling harmonies of the Louvin Brothers as sounding like they were “washed in the blood”. The voices of Laura and Lydia Rogers, two twentysomething sisters from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, have that same haunting quality. When they sing they lock together so effortlessly it’s almost impossible to discern where one ends and the other begins.Cultural preservation is key to The Secret Sisters. Their debut album, released at the beginning of the year and executive produced by the kingmaker of US roots music, T-Bone Burnett, showcased their love of the old-time Read more ...
howard.male
Most of the arrangements on this collection of covers of Eighties and early-Nineties UK soul tunes actually have more of a mid-Seventies live band feel to them. This proves to be an excellent way of rescuing the material from the often stultifying effect of programmed drums and cheesy keyboards which has rendered so much music from this period unlistenable to. Largely the approach works very well, although on one or two tracks the end result doesn’t quite measure up to its template.For example, “Apparently Nothing” by the Young Disciples still sounds cooler and more edgily contemporary in its Read more ...
Russ Coffey
This site has never acknowledged a distinction between high and popular culture. Nor, it seems, does the city of Birmingham. Currently bidding for UK City of Culture 2013, it is also promoting itself as the "Home of (Heavy) Metal". This summer, at various locations across the Black Country, a four-month festival looks at the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and celebrates the people who inspired him to “bark at the moon”. Surrounded by guitars, leather and fans' metalobilia in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, theartsdesk caught up with Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi to find out what it’s all Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Mick Jagger is heading up a band named SuperHeavy. Also in on the project are Joss Stone, AR Rahman (composer of the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack), Dave Stewart (the former Eurythmic) and Damian Marley. It seems outlandish and the product of an overheated PR person’s imagination, but many things in life can be both. Yet, this is real, not an April Fool-type joke.A single, titled “Millionaire”, is supposed to come out in September. The producers are Jagger and Stewart. Rahman has written a song called "Satyameva Jayate”, which Jagger is to sing in Urdu. Presumably, he does speak Urdu. Read more ...
mark.kidel
While Michael Eavis’s fields were colonised by the solstice hordes, transforming a tranquil farmstead into a vibrant (and muddy) drop city, a very different and much smaller crowd assembled in the enchanting grounds of Dartington Hall in south Devon, for the second edition of Home, "a Festival with Acoustic Music at its Heart".Now spread over Friday and Saturday, Home offers a family-friendly, laid-back and warmly intimate alternative to the star-heavy events of the summer season. Small, in this case, is definitely the measure of beauty: the largest stages have an audience of 400 each and Read more ...
matilda.battersby
It has been eight years since Gillian Welch last released an album and her loyal fans – not to mention critics - have been waiting with bated breath. Will she have spent the years honing the delicious Americana and Appalachian-influenced folk that once set her and musical partner David Rawlings apart? Or will she have kept the hit-and-miss drums, the electric guitar and the chirpier outlook of her last album Soul Journey? Thankfully, the answer is the former: The Harrow and the Harvest might well be her best record yet.Welch and Rawlings have pared down their sound to produce a purity of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
New Orleans, that most musical city, is back, back, back, everyone told me. The tourist board said that visitor numbers are over eight million again, back to levels before “The Storm” as they refer to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina here. The hippest new TV series Treme is a gritty epic set in the Big Easy, created by David Simon of The Wire fame, and the city’s music has been riding high in the pop charts by the unlikely means of Bertie Wooster (or Hugh Laurie as he is in real life, also, apparently the best-paid actor on American TV as the grumpy medic in House). And there’s an Read more ...
joe.muggs
Well, there's a nice surprise. Jill Scott was feared lost to music industry machinations, more likely to succeed in her acting career than make a fourth album (she's probably best known now to mainstream British audiences as Mma Ramotswe in The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency TV series). But it seems a four-year musical hiatus and change of label has done her the power of good, as this is the Philadelphia singer and spoken-word artist's best album since her debut Who is Jill Scott?It kicks off in fairly straightforward “nu soul” fashion, with “Blessed”, featuring the kind of I'm-a-strong-woman- Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Beyoncé took a break to recharge her funk batteries after the lacklustre I Am... Sasha Fierce, and there is much riding on this new album. The Amazonian soulstress had 72 songs to choose from, so it is no surprise that 4 is eclectic. What is surprising is that it starts with two pedestrian power ballads. "1 + 1" and "I Care" find Mrs Jay-Z in R'n'B classicist mode, all dull I-will-survive lyrics and dynamic lungs. Next up "I Miss You" is a little better, with its blips and bleeps flying the flag for electronica.Then things get more interesting, thanks to a colourful range of influences and Read more ...