New music
Matthew Wright
Like so much inspirational endeavour, it began in a garden shed. Enya (Eithne Ní Bhraonáin in her native Irish), dissatisfied with her role in Clannad, was experimenting with Nicky Ryan, the band’s manager, and Ryan’s wife Roma, a poet. Using multi-tracking, a shimmering electronic sound, and melodies that had a similar relationship with Irish folklore as an O’Neill’s pub, they created in the 1980s a style of soft-focus electro-folk so earwormingly catchy that “Orinoco Flow”, on her second, 1988 album Watermark, parked itself at number one for three weeks, and became the song Alan Partridge Read more ...
peter.quinn
Featuring the usual, divertingly eclectic mix of singers from the worlds of jazz, pop and soul, last night’s Jazz Voice announced the opening of the 2015 EFG London Jazz Festival with a programme that satisfied both aficionado and newbie alike. Arranged, scored and conducted by the unceasingly inventive Guy Barker, the epoch-spanning celebration of jazz-related anniversaries, birthdays and milestones stretching back from 2015 was hosted by the mellifluously voiced BBC Radio 3 presenter, Sara Mohr Pietsch.Joe Stilgoe was supported by a top-notch big band when he launched his outstanding album Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Justin Bieber’s undoubtedly had a tricky time of it, living in the full glare of the world’s media. While it’s demonstrably not “the toughest thing in the world”, as he recently suggested in Billboard magazine, it can’t be much fun having your every misdemeanour writ large. His fourth album, Purpose, purports to be his mea culpa, but I’m left wondering what he’s supposed to be apologising for. Surely a teenager who has been gifted unimaginable wealth should be forgiven for occasionally acting like an impatient dick and driving badly? We let pensioners get away with it all the time.At the time Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
For an art form that has been quite often written off over the last half century, Jazz seems in extraordinarily rude health. Today sees the opening of the biggest ever EFG London Jazz Festival featuring scores of venues and hundreds of groups throughout the capital.Back in the Sixties, the likes of Philip Larkin in All What Jazz? were saying the form died off when it left New Orleans. “Jazz is dead now, as dead as madrigal singing. We can only treasure the records. And I do,” he said mournfully in an interview in 1982. A run of articles in the last year or two with with titles like “Is Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Ellie Goulding's new album is one to be experienced rather than merely heard. With a bit of drum and bass, a touch of techno, a little bit of house and a flirtation with dubstep rhythms, it’s a full-on roster of proper pop tunes.It’s not the kind of album to enjoy on vinyl with a nice glass of red; Delirium is to be lived, like a soundtrack to your Saturday night. "Army" is like queuing up for a nightclub, a solid, powerful number, amassing strength of feeling and clubbing compadres before strolling to the bar, taking in the lyrics, basking in the song’s bassy beat. "Outside" is like a warm- Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Allen Toussaint, who died last night aged 77, apparently just minutes after coming off stage in Madrid, was the soul of New Orleans. Irma Thomas, The Neville Brothers, Dr Longhair, The Meters, and of course the Nighttripper himself Dr John: all of them benefitted from his magic touch, whether as producer, arranger, songwriter or pianist of enormous talent.Outside of Louisiana, he worked with a cavalcade of huge and brilliant names: Solomon Burke, Robert Palmer, John Mayall, Elvis Costello, The Band, Labelle, Paul McCartney and many, many more – and his songs were covered even more widely. His Read more ...
Matthew Wright
There were no shouts of “You’re a genius!” from the Hammersmith crowd last night, as there have been earlier in Newsom’s tour. But there were the shrill gasps of astonishment and adulation you would usually find at a One Direction gig, or during a tense rally at Wimbledon, not from a mature, West London audience attending a recital of harp and song. Live, her voice is fresh, and the accompaniments clearer than on record, which allows the incredible range and ambition of her compositions to stand out.Newsom played mostly from the new album Divers, but there was enough from earlier releases to Read more ...
peter.quinn
Maria Schneider is one of the luminaries of contemporary jazz. The composer, arranger and bandleader, together with her 18-piece orchestra, first came to prominence in 1994 with the release of their debut recording, Evanescence. Blazing the crowdfunding trail as ArtistShare’s first release, Concert in the Garden (2004) made history as the first recording to win a Grammy with online-only sales, while "Cerulean Skies" from Sky Blue (2007) picked up another Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition. Featuring the soprano Dawn Upshaw, Schneider's song Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
CeeLo Green is a real character, a personality in an age when pop is dominated by a homogenous mush of “sexy”, gym-bodied, media-trained nothingness. Hits such as "Crazy", with Gnarls Barkley, and his own “Fuck You” propelled him from a quirky southern US hip hop outsider into the pantheon of proper stars. More recently, his career has been mired in a court case wherein he was accused of spiking a dinner date with Ecstasy. Last summer he acceded to the drug aspect but was cleared of non-consensual sex. His fifth album, then, can be seen, especially in America where the case received more Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s one of the greatest rock songs of the Seventies. The production is dense and the churning guitars are thick with tension. Beginning with a minor-key riff suggesting a familiarity with The Stooges’ “No Fun”, the whole band lock into a groove which isn’t strayed from. The tempo does not shift. Rhythmically, this forward motion has the power of a tank stuck in third gear. The voice suggests John Lennon at his most raw. Two squalling guitar breaks set the Jimi Hendrix of “Third Stone from the Sun” in a hard rock context. Produced by former Hendrix co-manager Chas Chandler, it could be Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It seems perverse and self-defeating to record Australian piano trio The Necks. Acquiring over 25 years a reputation as the ultimate long-form improvisers, their single-take performances unfold with intricate, mesmerising drama, each one differing according the environment, acoustic, and mood. A dedicated groupie who followed this month’s extensive European tour (15 venues, 19 gigs, 19 days) would hear a noticeably different piece every time. So there’s something of the lepidopterist’s specimen about the idea of fixing these organic musical creatures in the binary certainty of a recording. Read more ...
theartsdesk
In the arts there is never a best of anything. There is good, great and glorious. But best? There is, however, Stop Making Sense. Talking Heads invited the director Jonathan Demme to film them in performance over three nights in December 1983 at Pantages Theater in Hollywood. The result is (arguably) the greatest concert movie ever made. And the good news, as a restored version is released on disc, is that time has not diminished its greatness, any more than it has shrunk the outsize suit David Byrne wears for “Girlfriend Is Better”, which if anything looks bigger in an era free from shoulder Read more ...