rock
Russ Coffey
Rock-folkies can sure be snobs. Even though New Hampshire-born Ray LaMontagne is still relatively unknown over here, there are still purists who view his records with suspicion. They feel the voice is just too huge, the sound too commercial. The irony is that no-one courts attention less than LaMontagne. Last night he delivered the entire concert from a static spot just to the left of the band. And apparently he’s as withdrawn offstage as he is on. But the RFH saw him focussed. Focussed on finding the right way to channel that part-bluebird, part-bear he has for a voice.And on the strength of Read more ...
howard.male
No, not “trance” in the sense of galloping four-to-the-floor electronic music made by people on Ecstasy for people on Ecstasy. This trance is the original ritualised half-conscious state produced by fast, intensely repetitive, rhythmic tribal music… OK, now I’m thinking about it, we are kind of on the same page here, you just have to appreciate that what this French/Italian/Algerian/Kabyle singer-songwriter is interested in is the spiritual origins of the braindead quantised noise favoured today by the average clubber.She is aided and abetted on this, her third album, by sometime Robert Plant Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There's been a lot of waffle lately about rock'n'roll being dead. This is down to mainstream radio turning its back on guitar music in favour of a stew of electro-pop and R&B, and the fact that just three spots in the Top 100 UK bestselling singles (ie downloads) of 2010 were held by rock songs (for the record, Journey's "Don't Stop Believing", Train's "Hey, Soul Sister" and "Dog Days are Over" by Florence + the Machine). Whenever this sort of media babble starts, it's time to run for cover because there's undoubtedly another tedious wave of guitar bands waiting gleefully in the wings. Read more ...
Russ Coffey
To mark the release of their new single "Dilly" theartsdesk has limited-edition box sets of Band of Horses album Infinite Arms to give away. The box sets have a CD version, a vinyl version and artwork unique to the set. All potential winners have to do is to answer the four questions below, and just to make it easy the answers will be found by following the embedded links.
Band of Horses' latest album is called Infinite Arms, but what is the first song on the album?
Band of Horses' lead singer Ben Bridwell is sometimes compared to Neil Young. What was the title of the last Neil Young album? Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
BBC Four's Britannia series keeps it simple - it tells the story in a straight line, illustrates it with as much archive material as the budget will allow, and interviews as many key protagonists as it can find. If the subject is strong enough, you'll get a good film out of it.And so it was with the reggae edition (part of the Reggae Britannia season), which took a brisk 90-minute march from reggae's arrival in Britain from Jamaica in the Sixties to the point where it disappeared into Soul II Soul's dub/soul/R&B mixture. They'd rounded up pretty well everybody who ever had a stake in Brit Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I didn't realise how much I liked dirt. Especially New York dirt. I was going to do a rant about boutique designer hotels, which seem ubiquitous in Manhattan. Major case in point: the Gramercy Park Hotel, where I used to stay in the Nineties and Noughties. It was independent, a bit scruffy, with a great bar full of artists and rock'n'roll types and other degenerates, a perfect location and cost about a hundred dollars a night. Last time I looked it had been ponced up – fish tank in the reception, a Buddha, fancy doorknobs and good-looking but no doubt useless staff. Clean as a whistle. This Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's quite funny to hear a rock band with a reputation for sounding like the inside of an aeroplane engine making something that's just gorgeous. But, even with its grimly jokey title, and silly offhand track titles like “You're Lionel Richie”, that's exactly what this album is. Mogwai's uncompromising reputation is not entirely undeserved: they've certainly had their moments of creating music which delivered its pleasures only after something of an endurance test, and the Glaswegians remain a spikily independent, politically committed force within the music world.However, even at their Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems amazing that this is Thompson Junior's fifth album, and it's evidence that perseverance pays. Earlier in his career, Thompson radiated a sort of flaccid indecisiveness, but that has been replaced here by a quiet confidence, perhaps because he's coming to understand where his real strengths lie.Maybe hanging around with his clever mates the Wainwrights filled his head with too many wacky chord progressions, but the fact is that Ted is no musical revolutionary. What he can boast is a classic folk-country pedigree, and the best songs here blend well-seasoned musical structures with Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Gang of Four vocalist Jon King remembers the last time he was in Heaven – the venue, not the celestial aftershow party. It was the night of the Great Hurricane of 1987 and as he walked down nearby Villiers Street later that evening two trees blew past him. "It was a gusty night," he recalled onstage with a smile last night. The question was could the latest Gang of Four line-up blow up their very own storm in WC2?The answer is a defiant yes. With a decent first original album in 16 years, Content, under their belts, original members, King and guitarist Andy Gill, plus new boys Mark Heaney on 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...