New music
peter.quinn
As star pianist Gwilym Simcock amusingly recalled during his solo set last night, German efficiency almost scuppered the making of his latest and universally acclaimed release, Good Days at Schloss Elmau. Recorded at the deluxe Alpine spa in just a single day last September, the pianist's Herculean keyboard feats were made against a subliminal backing track of meadows being mown and kitchen deliveries being made. The results, tractors and bratwurst notwithstanding, suggest that the crisp mountain air clearly agreed with him.Launching the album in the slightly less tony environs of Camden Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
James Blake's "Limit to Your Love" was a bolt out of the blue at the end of last year, perhaps even a quantum leap in soul'n'bass culture in the same way that Massive Attack or Roni Size once were. This fact was swiftly acknowledged in various New Face of 2011 polls which Blake started cropping up in.The 22-year-old from Enfield had quietly built a respectable reputation with some of dubstep's deepest heads (such as Ramadanman and Mount Kimbie) but his way with a keyboard on "Limit to Your Love" had a Spartan Classicism that was strikingly stark, different and effective, particularly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“When you write for film, the dialogue is like the voice, if you like, and I always consider that as part of the music,” said John Barry, who died on 30 January. “Certain orchestral textures have to match the texture of the scene. You deal with the lightness and darkness of the scene when you write music for cinema. The film is a part of the score, and you can't get away from that.A comprehensive list of soundtrack composers would run into several volumes, but among the elite handful which includes names like John Williams, Ennio Morricone or Maurice Jarre, John Barry stands as tall as any. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The idea of "selling out" has clung to popular music, and indeed most art forms, for a long, long time. In our postmodern techno-consumerist society it's an increasingly outdated and irrelevant concept. The book Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor shrewdly takes the whole notion of selling out to pieces, from the blues of the early 20th century to Moby's deconstruction of those blues decades later. Or rather, it simply points out there was never such a thing as a core purity from which anyone could sell out in the first place. Really, Barker Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bleu Venise might be recorded in LA with figures familiar from Joni Mitchell, Madeleine Peyroux and Melody Gardot albums, but this French music takes from the Anglophone world without sacrificing its identity. Daphné’s Bleu Venise is modern, literate, chanson-based pop.Daphné’s break came in 2003 after she met Benjamin Biolay, France’s all-purpose and ubiquitous musical mover and shaker. He also kick-started the career of Keren Ann. But Biolay casts no shadows; his collaborators and protégés move on and flourish without him. Unlike Keren Ann and despite previous collaborations with The Divine Read more ...
Russ Coffey
P J Harvey has been shouty, and she has been tremulous. She has crunched guitars and caressed pianos. She has explored almost every emotion experienced on an ever-evolving musical journey. But on Let England Shake, her first solo album for almost four years, she’s turned away from the world within to give her take on the island on which she lives. And this bittersweet reflection feels like the culmination of everything she's been before.There’s nothing as radio-friendly here as 2000’s "Good Fortune", but it’s still her most immediate and accessible album yet. And that’s down to the beauty of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A midwinter night’s dream at the Barbican. Those who like their pop music performed by chaps with jeans, preferably gazing at their shoes, and are attached to certain ideas of authenticity would have run screaming for the exit. The Irrepressibles were pop as icy spectacle, as dizzying melodrama, while Gabby Young & Other Animals were raiding the musical dressing-up box and emerging with bits of French chanson, German cabaret and slinky tangos, and having a ball doing it.Gabby Young’s band created their own party atmosphere and invited the audience along. Their brand of recession chic Read more ...
graeme.thomson
When the spotlight caught Teddy Thompson in profile last night it seemed to capture the physiology of an old-school country icon: tall and lean, his pale, angular face appeared all the more classically archetypal jutting out from his jet-black clothes. He certainly looked the part. By the end he had proved – to a degree far beyond any evidence presented on his recorded work - that he could sing it, too.This concert proved that if the son of Richard and Linda Thompson has inherited anything at all from his parents it is his father’s sense of crafted professionalism and his mother’s vocal Read more ...
Russ Coffey
There’s a story doing the rounds that, while good, Joan Wasser’s latest fails to hit the highs of her other albums as Police Woman. Don’t believe it; it’s pure snobbery. In a world of MP3s this is a gorgeous warm album that will sound forever vinyl. When first she ditched her violin in favour of becoming a singer-songwriter, Wasser claimed she wanted to create the sound of old Al Green records. Instead, she gave us fragile torch songs that sounded like PJ Harvey and Cat Power learning songwriting from Laurie Anderson. Here, finally, however, is the fruit of that earlier ambition.It is not an Read more ...
joe.muggs
While the world of indie bands is, with a very few exceptions, colonised by posh kids with well-conditioned hair and earnest agendas, this country's pop is feeling more like the voice of those who actually consume it than it has for many years. The Tinchys, the Tinies and the N-Dubzes might make music of variable quality, but they provide something that ordinary young people can aspire to that is not far removed from their own lives, and have added a dose of youthful vim to the charts to boot.Which brings us to Aggro Santos.com – the sound of a cheeky, cheery young rapper grabbing life with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Forty-five years ago today, Nancy Sinatra’s risqué “These Boots Are Made For Walking” entered the British charts, beginning its rise to Number One. This country-slanted ode to sex and domination, sung by Frank’s daughter, hasn’t had its impact blunted by repeated exposure on nostalgia radio. The man behind it was Lee Hazlewood, an auteur lauded and covered by hipsters such as Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, Sonic Youth, Richard Hawley and The Horrors’ Faris Badwan. Before he moved to Sweden at the end of the Sixties, Hazlewood navigated his way through the peaks of showbiz while seemingly doing as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The summer 1976 hit “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” was Kiki Dee’s chart highlight. The duet with Elton John was inescapable, happy, upbeat, irresistible. A Number One, it peaked a chart run on his Rocket Records that began with her 1973 cover of Veronique Sansons’s “Amoureuse”. “I’ve Got the Music in Me” then hit the Top 20 in 1974. Kiki still plays live and records, but the treasure-filled and essential I’m Kiki Dee - The Fontana Years 1963-1968 – out this week – reveals her musical prehistory for the first time. There’s more to Kiki than the hits.Bradford-born Pauline Matthews signed with Read more ...