New music
Kieron Tyler
Marina Allen’s singing voice fluctuates between the conversational and the flutingly melodic. In one song, she can be asking “Why do I sing my song for you” in a no-nonsense Randy Newman manner and then shift into a series of spiralling, ascending arpeggios. Centrifics, her second album, is about contrasts.While the LA-based Allen is most probably aware of Judee Sill and Laura Nyro, there’s a jazziness (especially on “New Song Rising” and “Foul Weather Jacket Drawing's" vocal vamping) and a fondness for songs with multiple counter melodies which places her as more than a Seventies-influenced Read more ...
Guy Oddy
If anyone was going to produce a raucous musical response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it was always likely to be Gogol Bordello. After all, the band has both Ukrainian and Russian members (among other nationalities), they have a tendency to champion the underdog and aren’t timid about flagging up injustice.New album, Solidaritine is indeed Eugene Hutz and his gang’s take on the things that are presently taking place in Eastern Europe. However, while it’s clear where Gogol Bordello’s sympathies lie, they don’t resort to sloganeering or explicitly calling out the Butcher of Moscow Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Suede were both prototypes and outliers of the Britpop pack, and their 2010 reunion managed a rare, creatively substantial second act; given their resurrection after guitarist Bernard Butler’s fractious 1994 exit, this may even be the band’s epic, open-ended Act 3.Where their first three reunion albums restored Suede’s sense of conceptual art, Autofiction brings back the pop, the glamour and fizz of their early singles and feverish gigs. Rather than rehash that past, it looks to post-punk for its attitude and sound, imagining a Suede born into the hard monochrome of 1979, not the hedonism and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We played the Rolling Stones concert at Long Beach Arena. The Stones came on, and it was the first time that any band had ever done better than us. I was very angry about that.” Randy Holden was The Sons of Adam’s guitarist. He was pretty certain of his own band’s impact in November 1964.The quote comes from the booklet accompanying Saturday’s Sons: The Complete Recordings 1964-1966, a definitive, long-overdue collection of his band’s work. The Sons Of Adam issued just three relatively obscure singles over 1965 to 1966 but their reputation was certified when “Feathered Fish,” the Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Star Feminine Band are from Benin, all of them under 18, the youngest only 12. They hail from a village in the north of their small country tucked between Togo and Nigeria. Their pop-inflected mix of high life, Congolese rhumba and other trans-African styles is as ebullient as it comes, and probably very infectious on the dance floor.Their second album features once again guitars, electronic keyboards and percussion. It’s mostly up-tempo, and as with so much African music, as well as in the musics of the African diaspora, the fun of the dance is inseparable from messages about how to live Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Those talented internationally-renowned musicians are just like the rest of us, you know? They had a rubbish time during lockdown too – turns out it was the great leveller after all. Santigold’s latest album (her sixth, the first for four years) is the direct result of being stuck at home with three kids under six. But rather than sending her crawling up the walls (although there is a bit of that) it’s made her reassess her creative direction.Quite why Santigold hasn’t broken through more universally is a mystery to many. Perhaps the mix of her punk ethos, echoes of dancehall, slightly “arty Read more ...
Tom Carr
Away from the spotlight of mainstream music the metal scene thrives, unbothered with how much attention it picks up. When bands like Architects reach number one in the UK charts, it is huge, but unimportant. Instead the scene is preoccupied with its own endlessly shifting subgenres and sounds.Enter Parkway Drive, an Australian metal band who spent the first part of their career firmly within the "metalcore" subgenre. Born from an aggressive merging of metal with hardcore punk, it melds the ferocious energy of hardcore with the intricate riffs and musicianship of metal – a heavy match made in Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
“We love you, Neil!” came the shout from the back of the circle. “Well, you’d have to,” he replied. Five nights, ten albums, 113 songs and 30-plus years of releases: The Divine Comedy’s residency at the Barbican was an opportunity to savour the artistry of Neil Hannon, as his creative life unfolded in fast forward for our pleasure.He began the first concert saying – and acting like – he was worried it was all a grand folly and he was about to fall flat on his face. In fact, the opposite was the case. First – and no mean achievement – Hannon filled the Barbican for all five nights, both with Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Is Ozzy Osbourne finally over the hill and ready to knock this rock’n’roll thing on the head? It’s a question that has been asked many times since he was unceremoniously dumped by Black Sabbath in 1979.Ozzy seems physically and artistically indestructible, even though few will remember albums like Under Cover with great affection. He’s even become an international treasure along the way and recently helped close the Commonwealth Games with “Iron Man” and “Paranoid” – and ex-Black Sabbath confederate Tony Iommi laying down the riffs.Fortunately, his first album since 2020’s Ordinary Man is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Eddie and the Hot Rods played London’s Rainbow on 19 February 1977. A big deal, the Saturday headliner was at the largest venue they’d been booked into to date. Their debut album Teenage Depression had been issued in November 1976 and this confirmed them as an on-the-up band just as punk was asserting itself.At The Rainbow, the pub rockers debuted a new line-up – former Kursaal Flyers guitarist Graeme Douglas joined them for the first time. Crucial to their future, he would co-write their summer 1977 smash single “Do Anything you Wanna Do.” Their label, Island Records, recognised this as a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Hedonism and romance still drive Greg Dulli’s rock’n’roll on his main band’s ninth album.Relationship traumas have always simmered just beneath the Whigs’ surface, most notably on Gentlemen’s 1993 autopsy of an affair. Whatever the real life skeleton of How Do You Burn?, it mostly shows love for the rock form itself, and the life it traditionally offered. The ghosts of the Nineties, when the Whigs bloomed and American rock last defined an era, haunt this record. So too the Seventies, when the Stones dropped clues to an apparently seedily splendid existence through albums of implicit Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t, there’s no way for Julian Lennon to escape the longest of shadows – his parentage – so by naming this album Jude, he’s tackling it head on. Or is he? The haunting cover image and name are the only direct reference. But, of course it’s literally in his DNA. Jude is his seventh album and first since 2011. To be honest, I thought it was all over after "Too Late for Goodbyes" (1984), so this is a pleasant surprise (and I didn’t know he’d been Grammy nominated). Firstly, his voice is much less "John-like" than in those days when he troubled the charts. He’s Read more ...