New music
Thomas H. Green
Brighton is writhing with music biz sorts. The Great Escape is here, the multi-venue festival that’s taken place here for over a decade-and-a-half, presenting bands from all over the world, most of them little known, at least in the UK. It takes place over four days, Wednesday to Saturday, although not much happens on Wednesday, so the real Day One is Thursday, and here we are. We’ll be back Saturday for a full day-long mash-up but, to start off, here's a quick dive into the first evening, starting at the Latest Music Bar, on a central street perpendicular to the seafront. Upstairs is an airy Read more ...
mark.kidel
“Yerimayo Celebration”, which opens Baaba Maal’s brilliant and superbly paced new album, sets the tone: it starts in the mists of time, as it were, drawing deep on the minimal soul of traditional West African music: a plucked ngoni, and a haunting voice. The spirits have been summoned.Then, the song explodes, driven by the rhythmic clatter of the sabar drums, so characteristic of the region, with subtle voice distortions and electronic effects. This is fusion of the ancient and new that works wonderfully.The song celebrates fishermen, the clan from which Baabal Maal comes, rather than from a Read more ...
India Lewis
As my editor noted, this was the first gig in his 30 years of music journalism that had guided meditation as its support act. This set the tone for a beautiful, peaceful evening at the ICA for Lucinda Chua, a homecoming gig and a welcome listen to pieces from her new and older albums.Sitting cross legged on the floor, reading my book, drying out from the spring rain, and waiting for the support, I heard someone comment that this was the most chilled gig that they had ever been to. Ten minutes later, lying down and staring at the ceiling, I would have had to agree. The meditation was led by a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s been five years since the release of Malian musician and actor Fatoumata Diawara’s breakout album, Fento, and just short of a year since her magnificent headline appearance on the first day of 2022’s Womad Festival. So, it is with some anticipation that her star-studied follow-up has finally appeared – as expected though, it is an absolute peach. Contributions from Damon Albarn (who also produced half of the tunes here), Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca, Ghanaian rapper M.anifest, Angie Stone and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, to only name a few of her collaborators, result in a set Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
When is the right moment for a musician to step out of the shadows and release an album in her/his own name? Vicente Archer, one of the most in-demand NYC bassists around, has certainly taken his time. In his late forties, and with appearances on over 150 albums by others to his name, he explains: “I wanted to find something that’s more myself.” Short Stories will be released on the Canadian Cellar Live label. Bassist Archer grew up in upstate New York. His first instrument was the guitar, both in a teenage rock band, and sitting as a local jazz gig which happened to include Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Jah Jah Jah blah blah blah. We’ll get to that.I meet Everest at Worthing station at 3.20pm. He’s clad in a light brown corduroy jacket and a cap. He looks dapper. Like a Len Deighton spy. We board the train to Brighton. I hand him a chilled bottle of Henney’s Herefordshire cider (6%) and tuck into my own bottle of St Austell Proper Job Cornish IPA (4.5%). We open a small box of Morrisons All Butter Mature Cheddar Cheese Crumbles, and talk about the harshness that life can deal out to the old.It's a sunny Sunday. In Brighton, we walk down to The Gladstone pub on Lewes Road. It’s bright yellow Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Duran Duran were back in their hometown of Birmingham this weekend for the first time since performing as part of the open ceremony of the 2022 Commonwealth Games and were justly forthright in trumpeting their local history. Even Pinner-born Simon Le Bon was keen to claim his stake, telling the audience a long and convoluted tale about being dubbed an honorary Brummie by UB40’s Ali Campbell 25 years ago.“Ordinary World”, for instance, was introduced by Le Bon stating, “It’s been quite a year. For Duran Duran and Birmingham. The high point was playing the opening of the Commonwealth Games and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s flabbergasting. OK, there’s the power of the internet as a propagation tool but here’s a German band playing their first UK show to a jumping-up-and-down audience punching the air while shouting along with the chorus of “X-Ray Vision” – which, indeed, is “X-Ray Vision”. The reception is extraordinary.Die Verlierer are from Berlin and have made one album. Their mix-and-match look takes in suit trousers, T-shirts, work boots and the odd formal jacket. Hair is short, a little bit glam-rock feathery. The sound is punk rock without being rooted in The Ramones, Sex Pistols or anything Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On Brian Christinzio’s sixth album as BC Camplight, he wants listeners to know about his recent experiences and their effect on him. Herewith, a mostly unembroidered account of how he sees things. When allusiveness arrives, the metaphors are easy to interpret. The last three tracks are titled “Going Out on a Low Note”, “I'm Ugly” and “The Mourning”.The Last Rotation of Earth follows-up 2020’s Shortly After Takeoff. That also drew from his then-recent past: being removed by immigration authorities from his adopted home of Manchester – he’s from Philadelphia; his father’s death, and the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Amongst the stranger recordings surfacing in 1977’s summer of punk was the version of Sex Pistols’s “Pretty Vacant” appearing on the budget Hallmark label album Top Of The Pops Volume 60 – the latest in a long-running series collecting ostensibly sound-alike versions of current hits recorded by anonymous session musicians and singers in a Wembley studio.This “Pretty Vacant” just-about caught the heft of the original but was in no way a convincing facsimile. The singer tried though. He adopted a voice along the Old Man Steptoe lines which might have caused the then Johnny Rotten to chuckle. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
“YOUR NEW ALBUM IS FUCKING DEADLY!” hollers a voice from the depths of a full house at the Barbican on Thursday night, the first date on the north Dublin band’s UK tour for their stunning new album, False Lankum.Queue it up for your listening pleasure, and you’re going to be submerged in a sonic netherworld raised up by the four-piece’s panoply of organic drones seemingly captured in an echo chamber of epic proportions, with funereal drum taps, singer Radie Peat’s voice at its most haunted and disembodied, and more reminiscent of Heathen Earth-era Throbbing Gristle than anything heard before Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
New Orleans “is not a music business city, it’s a music culture city,” says David Shaw of The Revivalists, one of the interviewees in Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story.This documentary sets out to describe that multiracial culture and heritage through the particular prism of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, known as “Jazz Fest”, which is held on the last weekend in April and the first weekend in May. It had a celebratory fiftieth anniversary edition in 2019 before being forced to close for two years by the pandemic.The film does a good job of explaining the festival’s Read more ...