pop music
Kieron Tyler
Mehdi Zannad isn’t a familiar name, but he’s issued a raft of albums as Fugu and has been championed by Stereolab. His profile in Japan is good, and he’s composed soundtracks in his native France. Fugue, the first album released under his own name, is co-produced by Tahiti 80’s Xavier Boyer. "Fugue" translates as "break away" – which he has from the Fugu guise. He’s also broken away from English. Fugue is Zannad's first French-language album. Language, though, is no barrier to basking in this summery pop.Zannad was inspired to sing in French after working on the film La France in 2007. Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Brothers Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill and their cousin Matthew Followill, better known as Kings of Leon, have come a long, long way from their humble Tennessee roots in the last 12 years. In London last night playing to a 65,000-strong crowd in the same week that a documentary charting their rise hits cinemas, the contrast between the life they were born into and the one they have carved out couldn’t be more marked.Opening with the Aha Shake Heartbreak hit "Four Kicks", people screamed and danced about to the roaring of electric guitars and the growling twang of Caleb’s voice. But Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Jon Allen and his support Josh Bray are two sides of a coin. Of the two folk-rockers, the smoother, more polished Allen’s the heads. Bray is rougher, more unknown. But last night they both showed the depth of quality that exists in contemporary commercial roots-influenced music. Allen is touring his second album, Sweet Defeat. Its beautifully crafted songs and refined production have impressed the likes of Jools Holland, and last night he took it to a new level. But Bray, whose debut Whisky and Wool wowed theartsdesk, fought past poor sound to show he’s not far behind.Both Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Tickets were like gold dust for this one and the stage was lit as if some of that dust had been sprinkled on the Festival Hall in a midsummer dream of a concert. The massed ranks of the Crouch End Festival Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra and a backing rock band magicked up on the Southbank to pay handsome tribute to the presiding Puck and genius loci Raymond Douglas Davies, alumnus of the William Grimshaw Secondary Modern School, in the manor of Muswell Hill. As the last night of the Meltdown series, curated by Davies, was it all hopelessly OTT? Short answer: yes. But it was also Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The Meltdown Festival's tribute to Tony Wilson was a lot like the charismatic post-punk legend himself: funny, eccentric, obscure, populist; all over the place but never dull. Wilson died in August 2007 and this event was a reminder of his reputation as one of music's most fascinating post-punk provocateurs, giving the world Joy Division, Happy Mondays and more. It was also a reminder of his reputation, as poet Mike Garry put it, as a "knobhead". As someone who appeared on regional news programmes quoting Wordsworth while hang-gliding, Wilson could be spectacularly uncool.Proceedings, hosted Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Following in the stilettoed footsteps of Lady Gaga’s extended-play reissue of her platinum-selling The Fame, Take That’s Progressed is a two-disc repackaging of the November 2010 Progress album featuring eight additional tracks. With its menacing disco beats and penetrating falsetto vocals, it is an evolution to be proud of.Released to coincide with the band’s first tour with Robbie Williams since 1995, the eight new songs are a happy extended narrative of Progress which acknowledges the well-publicised falling outs, carefully mixed in with a hefty dollop of science fiction. Not a combination Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I'm tired of Emmy the Great being lumped in with crappy singer-songwriters who've had way too much hype but couldn't write a decent lyric if they were tied to a chair and had a pistol pointed at their temple. Emma-Lee Moss bloomed from a singer-songwritery London milieu but she's a cut above the pack.I speak as one who's sick to death of acoustic guitar-strumming whiners. Like Malcolm Middleton, another fine underrated British singer-songwriter, she doesn't throw out one-size-fits-all palliatives for mopers; her songs are grounded yet enigmatic, allegorical, and as precisely constructed Read more ...
joe.muggs
The house music of Chicago, led by producers and DJs, has long had a tendency to feature the greatest vocals of any genre yet not make stars of its singers. And for most of his working life, Darryl Pandy, who died yesterday aged 48, was not the star his huge presence and elemental, gospel-schooled voice warranted – instead working the club circuit and soul revival shows, and featuring on dance tracks scattered across dozens of 12" singles on many labels worldwide.However, Pandy did have one moment of glorious exposure to the mainstream, one which will ensure his immortality, and which also Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Early on, Vetiver were apparently a freak folk band. Associations and collaborations with Joanna Newsom and Devandra Banhardt helped that tag stick. But constraints don’t concern Vetiver main man Andy Cabac. Fifth album The Errant Charm is accessible and none too freaky. Although introspective and tinged with psychedelia, this is old-school West Coast pop.The Errant Charm is very tasteful. Shimmeringly produced, there’s a gloss that’s hard to get past. Cabac’s voice is softly resigned, close miked and often set back into the mix. The smoothness of The Errant Charm’s surface means that as it Read more ...
howard.male
Sometimes you hear something new and your perspective on music shifts seismically, making everything you were listening to previously sound safe and predictable by comparison. Inevitably, as one gets older and more musically knowledgeable, such moments are fewer and further between; either the shock of the new isn’t as high-voltage as it used to be, or it just irritates rather than stimulates. And so it was a pleasant surprise when, one morning – heralded by a storm of tape hiss and an enthusiastically bashed tribal drum – a new band called tUnE-yArDs (aka Merrill Garbus) came at me from the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dubstep has now permeated pop. Drum and bass was the last British underground bass music to rub up against the mainstream but back in the mid-Nineties the major labels didn't know what to do with it. Apart from launching Goldie's career and leading David Bowie up another excruciating dead end, it failed commercially. Dubstep, on the other hand, has been eagerly embraced by US stars - Jay-Z, Rihanna and Britney Spears, to name three - and UK acts such as Chase and Status, Skream, and Magnetic Man have stormed the charts. This assimilation is invigorating but sometimes, when the latest Read more ...
david.cheal
How much did I like this show? Well, here’s a clue: at the end, the only really bad thing I could think of was that the bass guitar could have been a bit louder. I’ve seen David Gray on stage quite a few times now, and this was easily the most satisfying show, the one that did justice to his voice, his music, his songs, and especially his lyrics, which were, almost uniquely for such an event, audible and understandable almost word for word.Ever since he had a hit 12 years ago with the folktronic “Babylon”, David Gray has become the man that the pop cognoscenti like to sneer at; a singer- Read more ...