New music
Kieron Tyler
Manchester’s Slaughter and the Dogs were perfect for 1977. In May, their debut single “Cranked up Really High” sported bee-in-a-jar guitar, a hoarse vocal and an unstoppable forward motion. Its follow-up, September’s impeccable “Where Have All the Boot Boys Gone?”, was more muscular and prefigured the chart-bound terrace-chant punk of Sham 69. Next, in November, the brash “Dame to Blame” revealed a glam-rock undertone.All great and all essential, but not necessarily reviewed positively at the time by the weekly music papers. The first was Melody Maker’s “saddest single of the week.” The Read more ...
peter.quinn
Oh to have been in the beautiful surrounds of Cadogan Hall last night – not just to have experienced the gorgeous wall of sound, heartfelt artistry and musical camaraderie at first hand, but also to have been able to show our appreciation for a concert which takes months of preparation.Social distancing measures saw the EFG London Jazz Festival Ensemble reduced from its customary 40-plus musicians, but while the textural palette may not have been quite as luxuriant as usual, the slightly leaner charts provided their own rewards. This was a necessarily different Jazz Voice, but even a computer Read more ...
Russ Coffey
After all we've been through this year, thank God some things never seem to change. Like the music of metal monoliths, AC/DC. Forty-seven years after the boys started jamming together in a Melbourne suburb, they're still at it, pumping out their iconic amped-up, head-banging blues. Power Up, their 17th studio LP, is loud, ludicrous and, above all, uplifting. It's also a miracle it was made at all. After 2014's Rock or Bust, odds were the band would never play together again: the problems started when drummer Phil Rudd got busted for drugs and attempted homicide Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Singer/pianist/songwriter/entertainer Joe Stilgoe responded remarkably rapidly to the new circumstances of March 2020. Even before the first nationwide lockdown was declared, he had started doing a series of daily performances on YouTube: “Stilgoe In The Shed”. Back in July, 67 online shows later, gigs were starting to come in again. So to mark what felt like the end of that period, he spent just one day in producer James McMillan’s studio, and recorded an album of a selection of the songs he had performed in his online shows.SEBASTIAN SCOTNEY: What are your thoughts about the new lockdown? Read more ...
Katie Colombus
For her fifth studio album, Paloma Faith decided to boldly ctrl-alt-delete the first version, and re-do it in lockdown.The new-new one is a little bath bomb of an album – it fizzes with funky pop, 80s sheen and emotional nuance than speaks of her long term relationship and being a mother to teenies (she’s currently pregnant with no. 2).If you need any further explanation about her headspace in re-versioning Infinite Things and generally how it’s been going in lockdown, fast forward to “Me Time” which practically yells about “I need some me time, figuring out who I want to be time, saying what Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lordy, how much marijuana did we smoke in the 1990s? When people arrived home from the endless dance, jack-frazzled, 6.00 AM or later, pupils the size of 7” singles, legs twitching to invisible percussion, the time arrived for doobies, chillums, bongs, an eternal blissed NOW in foggy, curtained living rooms. The accompanying music was my generation’s unlikely conceptual fusion of prog rock and easy listening. Music journalists gave it proper names, like "trip hop" and "chill out", but it was really just wibbling, spliffed ear massage. And Austrian duo [Peter] Kruder & [Richard] Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Little Mix, currently at another profile peak with their TV talent show The Search, are one of the most successful female groups ever, their tours amongst the highest earning of recent times. Like a CGI-shiny Instagram-age Spice Girls, now newly signed to RCA after years on Simon Cowell's Syco label, they offer teeth-rattling sugar-pop with a girl power motif, although Confetti, as its title suggests, is even more of a frothy frolic than usual.The producer-songwriters on Little Mix’s sixth album are the cream of contemporary chart-pop back-roomers. They include MNEK, who first earned his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After their final records were released in 1969, that seemed to be it for Apple and Jason Crest. Releases by both psychedelic-leaning British bands had first hit shops the previous year, and neither oufit made any waves commercially. Of course, that wasn’t the end of the story.Just over a decade later, Apple’s dark, mysterious “The Otherside” featured on 1980’s seminal-for-real compilation Chocolate Soup For Diabetics. Gathered alongside it were equally extraordinary but barely known gems such as Tintern Abbey’s “Vacuum Cleaner” and Dantalian's Chariot’s “The Madman Running Through The Fields Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Following the break-up of The Jam in 1982, Mick Talbot (b 1958) was chosen by Paul Weller as his sparring partner in a new band, The Style Council. Talbot, a keyboard player from south London, had flourished amid the late-Seventies Mod revival, initially in the Merton Parkas, with his brother Danny, but also in The Chords, and even appearing on a couple of The Jam’s records.Weller’s plan was to escape the lad-friendly guitar sound of The Jam. With The Style Council, he and Talbot explored soul, funk, jazz, R&B, easy listening, and more, resulting in a golden run of Top 20 hits that lasted Read more ...
mark.kidel
Wherever we might live, the contagious energy and urgency of rock reflect the mood of our times: it’s hardly surprising that musicians from all over our super-connected world should re-invent their traditions in a way that absorbs rock’s decibels and immediacy. Balothizer are one of the latest bands that use their roots as a launching pad for something that combines psych, punk and metal music. In this case the tradition is Cretan: the mantinades, syrtoi and ritzika of an island proud of very distinctive musical style are usually played on lute and the lyra – an upright bowed string Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 50 years since Martin Simpson dropped out of college to follow his vocation as a guitarist and his intention had been to celebrate the milestone with a live album. The best-laid plans… Instead Home Recordings finds him live in his living room and on his Peak District porch, the sounds of nature captured on “Lonesome Valley Geese” and on “March 22”, the brief closing track.Despite the American accent of three key numbers, it’s a very English album, right down to the beautiful sound of Simpson’s Turnstone guitar (played in open tunings) which adds its distinctive tone colour. He is a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
We’re eight months into a global pandemic, and Kylie Minogue is serenading us from her kitchen. “We’re a million miles apart in a thousand ways,” she sings, feather-light vocals floating over a driving disco beat. “Can we all be as one again?”At least on first listen, Kylie’s 15th studio release - 12 tracks of giddy, gleaming, disco-pop escapism, appropriately titled DISCO - doesn’t fit the now-established mould of the lockdown album. The clue is in the sleeve notes where, for the first time, you’ll see an engineering credit on every track in the name of Minogue: the singer taught herself Read more ...