guitar
Guy Oddy
It’s over 30 years since Michael Franti entered the public arena, howling “Television – drug of the nation” backed by harsh, industrial sounds and explosive beats, as frontman for the Beatnigs. He then produced the Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales album with William Burroughs, as part of the visionary hip hop duo the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, before embracing funk, soul and reggae sounds, both as a solo artist and while fronting Spearhead. It is, therefore, something of a shock that the musical influences for his latest album, Work Hard & Be Nice, seem to come from the same place as Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Echo in the Canyon is a lamentably thin documentary about the vibrant folk-rock music scene that flourished in the bohemian Los Angeles neighbourhood of Laurel Canyon from 1965 to 1967. Though it features priceless vintage footage of the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Mamas and the Papas and interviews with some surviving members, it weirdly comes across as a vehicle for Jakob Dylan.The singer-songwriter was born in 1969, the year in which Jacques Demy’s only American film Model Shop was released. Inspired by the mood of Demy’s semi-documentary love-letter to Los Angeles Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Larkin Poe are an American blues-rock band fronted by the Lovell sisters, Rebecca and Megan, both mainstays of the US Americana scene since their teens, at the start of this century. Best known in Europe for their fired-up gigs and festival appearances, their fifth album starts off accessibly yet the immediate thought is that it’s overly derivative. Once it settles into its stride, however, the listener forgets all that, as the band offer up a plethora of solid songs in various riffin' southern styles.The immediate reference point for this writer is Deap Vally, the female Californian duo who Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Back in the day, the weekend started with Ready Steady Go. Now Friday evenings are once more essential viewing, and not just because we’re all locked down. While the endless ToTP reruns are often no more than bad-taste wallpaper, the music documentaries are consistently high quality.This week the camera, or perhaps the spotlight, fell on The Shadows, “the British guitar band that sparked a revolution” as Gina McKee’s voiceover to The Shadows at Sixty informed us with little or no exaggeration. Spoken of in the same breath as Cliff Richard, the original British rock idol whom they backed, The Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Abyss is the second disc by Osaka’s self-proclaimed “dark witch doom” duo BlackLab, but their first album proper, and it certainly delivers the monster sounds that were only hinted at by the compilation of impossible to find, early releases, Under the Strawberry Moon 2.0. In fact, BlackLab’s latest is a feral beast that bulldozes all before it like a true force of nature. Loud and distorted guitars, thunderous drumming and howling, banshee-like vocals burst out of the speakers like a caged animal set free and encourage the volume to be turned up to 11 right from the first notes. For this is Read more ...
David Nice
"All true spiritual art has always been RADICAL art": thus spake the oracular Georges Lentz, composer of the pitch-black odyssey for electric guitar that took everyone by surprise last night. In that vein, why not add that all the greatest performers always push the boundaries, and that 28-year-old Sean Shibe, though included by the sponsors of this concert among "emerging talent", is already in their select company. This amazing Wigmore concert took us from a first half of fragrant miniatures by David Fennessy and minimal magic from Sofia Gubaidulina elided into radical Bach to the " Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
From This Place (Nonesuch) is a complex, meticulously produced and many-layered album which demands concentrated and repeated listening. In many ways, it is all the better for it. Pat Metheny himself has written an essay or “Album Notes” of no fewer than 2,020 words to explain how the concept of the album evolved, as it went through a several-stage process of conception, recording, arranging, production. He also explains its significance in his oeuvre: he calls it “a kind of musical culmination, reflecting a wide range of expressions that have interested me over the years.”There Read more ...
mark.kidel
There is something deliciously normal about Tennis, the Denver husband and wife team of Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley. Steeped in the best pop of a bygone age, the couple’s lyrics seem so simple and yet unpack hidden depths on repeated listening. Moore and Riley met as analytical philosophy majors - with a shared love of great and often little-known music - and they bring to their crystalline songs of love a sophistication that never gets too clever.This is their fifth album, and they never let up. As time goes by, Tennis seem to refine their art, leaving most traces of indie rock behind. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Trance boogie,” states My Baby frontwoman Cato van Dijck before submersing herself in the rising tribal rhythm of “Sunflower Sutra". Trance boogie is, indeed, what My Baby do. The song is decked with floating flecks of glissando guitar from virtuosic New Zealand bandmate Daniel Johnston on the other side of the stage. “Sing with me, brother,” Cato demands with a smile and behind his drum kit her sibling Joost leans into his microphone and harmonises. Behind it all is a housey four-to-the-floor beat, but their sound is all organic groove.The van Dijcks are Dutch and the band hails from Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This week, one of the finest gems in the entire Hendrix catalogue finally sees the light of day in its full unedited glory – Songs for Groovy Children comprises all four sets from the Band of Gypsys New Year’s Eve 1969-70 residency at the Fillmore East in New York City.Originally recorded to free up Hendrix from a contract he’d signed earlier in his career, while transitioning from the R&B circuit towards his first psychedelic flowering, Band of Gypsys, released in April 1970 was the only full live album he ever sanctioned under his own name. It is one of rock’s great live albums. An Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
The onstage arrival of Two Door Cinema Club was heralded by a tongue-in-cheek video countdown that reached zero and then flashed up an error message, before asking the crowd to “try again”. In truth, the band’s own performance was never likely to hit any hitches, being the sort of well-honed and slick display that you would expect from a group who have been touring steadily for the past several months. That is both a positive and a negative.The trio, augmented by synths man Jacob Berry and drummer Benjamin Thompson, started fast, though. They write songs well suited to the weekend, to Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There’s something in the dichotomy of Babymetal that I just can’t fathom. Cutesy J-pop meets heavy metal. Sheeny bubblegum-bounce dance routines to thrash. Sweet teen vocals over shredding.It’s like something that would get the audience vote on X Factor just because the entire nation wanted to piss off Simon Cowell. It shouldn’t work. And yet, bamboozlingly, they seem to have won over at least some of the hard core metal heads (Corey Taylor from Slipknot, Rob Zombie, Anthrax, Judas Priest) that should, by definition, think they’re a load of shite.My own mindset adds to the conglomeration of Read more ...