New music
Kieron Tyler
Keren Ann’s new album, 101, might showcase her new-found pop smarts but last night’s hour-and-a-half set ranged through her whole catalogue taking in country-flavoured balladry, early Velvet Underground chugging and introspective singer-songwriting. A single French-language song acknowledged where she first attracted attention. Her American-accented English betrayed little of her Franco-Israeli roots. Truly multinational, her show at the Jazz Café was similarly diverse.It was a peculiarly paced set. The up-tempo “Je fume pour oublier que tu bois” followed a harmonica-racked take of 101’s “ Read more ...
Russ Coffey
For weeks there have been rumours that the new Metronomy release would be electronica that would appeal to people who don’t really listen to it. The last bit, at least, is true. I don’t listen to much of that genre and yet every time I get to the end of The English Riviera I can’t resist hitting repeat. But here’s the thing - it’s not really that electronic. It’s what Metronomy man main, Joseph Mount, describes as “electronic music played using as many real instruments as possible”. And what that adds up to is a glorious mix of lo-fi, indie, pop and dance, with a fair few synths thrown in. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Drummers that sing lead are rare. Ones that sing while pounding away like Keith Moon are even rarer. Denmark’s Treefight for Sunlight are a talented lot, a four-piece who all sing, with three taking the lead. These are the vocals that drive the band and their melodies. Chuck in a wodge of psychedelic nous and you have an art-pop combo that can raise smiles and even the odd scream in hyper-cool Shoreditch. There’s little back story. From Copenhagen, Treefight for Sunlight formed in 2007. Their first single "Facing the Sun" was issued last May by Tambourhinoceros, the label run by a couple Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Post-rock shares more with prog rock than six letters. Both are rock music that doesn’t want to rock, be rock and are beyond quotidian rock. Of course, these labels are never self-defined. But post-rock is what Austin Texas’s Explosions in the Sky are lumped in with. Unlike prog rock, it’s not about flash technique. A guitars-and-drums four-piece, their instrumental music is about texture, rather than melody or verse-chorus-break structures. Sixth album Take Care Take Care Take Care doesn’t take them to new places though. It restates who and what they are.The last Explosions in the Sky album Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This month, what's on offer in theartsdesk's Singles and Downloads veers towards the fresh and new rather than the tried and tested. We'll always chew over whatever's out there and right now these nine tunes speak loudest. Starting with carefree New York electronic punk frollicking, we also take on violent grime, Sixties-style guitar pop, Brit-pop hip hop, uncategorisable grunge cabaret and multifarious flavours of dubstep. Dive in.The Death Set, We Are Going Anywhere Man (Counter)
How could anyone not love the motherfuckin' Death Set, as they gratuitously refer to themselves in song on a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brooklyn band TV on the Radio have been critical favourites since they first appeared almost a decade ago. Always an intriguing proposition, they also seemed from their inception to be shrewdly aware of their musical Catholicism, as if they'd followed Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies before they'd even had their first jam. Brilliant, then, but tinged with Wire-friendly cerebralism.Their last album, Dear Science, followed this pattern and was among the best, most intriguing releases of 2008. Nine Types of Light, however, is a whole new glorious ball game. Where previous outings were recorded in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alison Krauss hasn't made an album of new material with turbo-bluegrass combo Union Station since Lonely Runs Both Ways, from 2004. Having filled some of the time in between by co-starring with Robert Plant on the mesmerising (and Grammy-guzzling) Raising Sand, she returns here to her familiar pastures of hard country and raw bluegrass, with a sprinkling of winsome balladry to sugar the pill.The four-man Union Station are peerless in their field, each of them trailing a clutch of industry awards to go with their lists of performing credentials, but they always find a distinctive mood when Read more ...
howard.male
Although the phrase “world music” was first coined by American ethnomusicologist Robert Brown in the 1960s, it didn’t become a brand, as it were, until 1987, when a bunch of London-based DJs, musicians and record company folk (including the late Charlie Gillett) met in an Islington pub and landed on the idea of putting all this foreign music under one commercially viable umbrella. So you could say that world music was spawned so that record shops would know where to put world music records.The name almost immediately became both a blessing and a curse. But today, I would argue, it’s mostly a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
After a couple of false starts, former Beautiful South frontman Paul Heaton’s last solo album finally received the high critical praise of the old days. But at 49 you can’t imagine him really caring too much about anyone else’s approval. This is the ex-alcoholic, after all, whose last tour was conducted by bicycle around the pubs of the North of England, who unashamedly told the world he was once a football hooligan, and who once set up a community bike park in Hull. When they made Heaton, they sure as hell broke the mould.Stylistically, Acid Country, the new(ish) album, finally echoes much Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Human League are one of the brightest lights in the history of electro-pop. They have had many incarnations over the years but since late 1980 the core of the group has been frontman Philip Oakey (b 1955) and singers Joanne Catherall (b 1962) and Susan Sulley (b 1963).The Human League bloomed out of Sheffield’s electronic underground in the mid-Seventies, releasing the seminal electro-pop single “Being Boiled” in 1978. They signed to Virgin but success was not quick in coming and by 1980, with two albums under their belt, they split. Synthesizer wizards Martin Ware and Ian Craig Read more ...
bruce.dessau
One of my most enjoyable gig-going experiences last year was seeing Mick Jones guesting with Gorillaz at the Roundhouse. The former Clash guitarist was clearly loving every minute of it. So much, in fact, that shortly afterwards he decided to reform his second-best band, Big Audio Dynamite, for a short UK tour, including the first of two London dates last night. But after two decades since this original line-up played together, the burning question was would this be a cynical, pension-funding slog, an arthritis-fuelled embarrassment, or something special?Within the first few beats and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Often at gigs by bands of a certain vintage, the fans can look like they're on a special awayday: like they've dug their T-shirts out of the back of the drawer and geared themselves up for one last canter round the paddock. Not so for Killing Joke. At the Royal Festival Hall last night, a very large section of the crowd had the look of still actively living very rock'n'roll lives, and of having done so for at least the last 30 years. “How many times have you seen them?” asked a shaven-headed gent in the seat next to me. “This'll be my 46th Joke gig,” he continued with obvious pride. This is Read more ...