New music
Nick Hasted
Roy Haynes, who had begun to seem immortal, has died aged 99. In this extensive Arts Desk interview from 2011, one of the greatest jazz drummers ranges across his remarkable life with sharp intelligence and generous feeling.The man who played with everyone, Roy Haynes earned his Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s Grammys, in a career even his 86 years hardly make credible. He was 21 when he got the call to drum for Louis Armstrong in 1946. He was at the drum stool as Billie Holiday played her last club gig, crying at the pain of her dying body. Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Thelonius Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is almost too much to bear. This sprawling 37-track collection begins with the sainted 78-year-old Dolly Parton providing a jaunty spoken narration of her family’s history in music and the church. It’s old-school Disney documentary in tone, but because it’s Dolly you listen, and with her endless countrified charm she tells a story of generations of banjo players and preachers of the Appalachians – and reminds us that these, her forebears, were immigrants.She doesn’t use the word, but just how she talks about the landscapes reminding them of home in England and Wales – in a time when Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Amy Taylor and the rest of the Sniffers ambled onto the stage of Birmingham’s O2 Academy to a huge roar of approval from a packed and diverse audience on Sunday evening. With her Farrah Fawcett hairstyle, toothy smile, sparkly bikini, knee length boots and shorts she didn’t look the firebrand that her image suggests – but looks are frequently deceptive, as Birmingham was to find out.In fact, Taylor laid down the simple but iron rules of the night before Declan Mehrtens had even strapped on his guitar: “If anyone falls down, pick ‘em up. Don’t touch anyone that doesn’t want to be touched.” Read more ...
peter.quinn
South Korean quintet TXT's latest mini-album delivers six meticulously crafted tracks that showcase the group's evolving artistry through everything from dreamy pop to reggaeton to classic R&B.With its stripped back arrangement – some ethereal guitar chords here, an unforgettably chirpy three-note descending synth riff there, plus vocal lines that flow and blend mellifluously – album opener “Heaven” delivers the mini-album's first and perhaps most memorable earworm.Lead single "Over The Moon" begins in similarly dreamy fashion, and while soulful electric piano and string pads initially Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The last we had was a bit of a flop. I own up about it, it was quite bad.” Speaking to the BBC’s Brian Matthew on 4 April 1967, Yardbirds’ frontman Keith Relf is candid about the chart fate of his band’s last single, October 1966’s “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.”Hearing a major figure in British pop being so frank is made doubly surprising as “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” was an epoch-defining single, one of the earliest signals that psychedelia was looming. Despite having broken ground, Relf was speaking in terms of chart positions rather than innovation. Relatively, though, it had Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Among the many things that make the folk community such a warm and welcoming “family” is that you know which side you’re all on, to paraphrase the title of the song written by Florence Reece, wife of a United Mineworkers official during the bitter struggle known as “the Harlan County War”, almost a century ago. Collected by Pete Seeger and sung by the Almanac Singers, it is kept alive by Billy Bragg any many others.I doubt it’s in the repertoire of Le Vent du Nord though there’s surely a French-Canadian equivalent, but the same feeling of camaraderie and solidarity prevailed at Cecil Sharp Read more ...
Liz Thomson
A father and son union – the first joint collaboration by Garfunkel père et fils. Art Junior it seems has already released two solo albums, Wie Du and Evergreen, Simon & Garfunkel covers, both of which charted in Germany, from where the Garfunkel antecedents hail.Father and Son celebrates “a unique connection” (obviously) and is “an expression of our bond”. Certainly, their voices have a good deal in common though Junior’s is less pure than Senior’s in its best-selling Simon & Garfunkel heyday. Though Art Senior suffered vocal cord paresis in 2010, the result of choking on a chunk of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tucker Zimmerman is singing a number called “Don’t Go Crazy (Go in Peace)”. At 83, he performs sitting down. Surrounded by support band Iji, who act as his pick-up, he approaches the song in a whispery, affable voice. At the start of his set he was assisted to his seat but, knees aside, he’s not frail. He’s just laid back, a Sixties original, strumming gently. “Don’t go crazy,” he sings, “Go with the flow, go in peace.” Although he’s advised us to not think about politics, it’s hard not to. Yet his hour-long show soothes, offers a window into some of what’s best about America.Tucker is one of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In many ways, Primal Scream have had a strikingly similar career path to the Rolling Stones – despite them forming some 20 years after Mick and Keith’s odyssey began and it not throwing up quite the same level of financial rewards. That said, while drugs and death may have haunted both bands, they never seemed to sap Primal Scream’s creatively in quite the same way as it did the Stones.Nevertheless, both outfits are generally recognised to have knocked out a string of quite spectacular albums some fair few years into their careers – in the Scream’s case, spanning the 1990s from Screamadelica Read more ...
joe.muggs
If the names Pinch, Vex’d, Burial, Digital Mystikz, The Bug mean anything to you, stop reading now and buy or stream this album. Seriously, go. Go get it. That honestly is all you need to know: if you like the imperial phase when British dubstep was first establishing lasting artistic careers and extending its tendrils into the wider musical world – completely separately from its branching into a fizzy, EDM / rave form in big arenas – then you will love this record.Which is not to say it’s a throwback. Alicia Bauer aka Alley Cat has been in the bass music realm for a long time – starting in Read more ...
Guy Oddy
More than once during their barnstorming performance this weekend, Bobby Vylan, vocalist with Bob Vylan proclaimed from the stage of Birmingham’s O2 Institute that “We are the cutest band in punk rock. The friendliest band in rock’n’roll. The most important band in Great Britain”. He might just have been right.Bobby and his drumming buddy, Bobbie Vylan (in a world of celebrity-botherers Bobby and Bobbie like to keep things anonymous) certainly have the songs; they’ve definitely built up a rapport with their fans and stay long after the house lights come up to chat, sign merchandise and have Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Springs begins cooking with “Spaced Out Invaders - Part I Quirks,” its fourth track. A spindly, rotating guitar figure interweaves with clattering percussion and pulsating electric bass. Around three minutes in, a sax – which, until this point, has kept in the background – begins whipping up a maelstrom. Overall, the effect conjured is that of a space rock-inclined exotica, Martin Denny had he been an early Seventies freak.Elsewhere, Springs turns corners into pure kosmiche-adjacent spaciness (“Spaced Out Invaders - Part II Vessels”), Canterbury scene jazz rock were it informed by a Gang Of Read more ...