New music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Trying to pigeonhole Apocalypse, girl, Norwegian artist Jenny Hval’s third album under her own name, is like trying to grab onto a snake that is in the process of shedding its skin. It’s a simile that you can’t help thinking Hval would enjoy: “Kingsize”, the spoken word performance poem that opens the album, employs what might be an extended metaphor about bananas rotting in her lap – although it could just be about bananas.The word “album” itself barely seems to fit Hval’s work. It has nominal track divisions, but repeated themes and lyrical snippets cause the lines to blur. Sexual imagery, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Like John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, who died this week, was both a defining and divisive figure in jazz history. His highly individual and virtuosic playing and his development of a non-harmonic style of improvisation and composition have remained milestones in the development of modern jazz. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, and developing as a musician in a series of R&B bands in Los Angeles, he studied musical theory privately, initially meeting widespread ridicule whenever he proposed his novel techniques. He cut a dedicated if idiosyncratic figure for most of the 1950s, operating a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
If the honours system is used to award deserving individuals, its other job is to provide an aspirational marker for the country as a whole. This, it tells us twice a year, is who we want to be: inclusive, non-sexist, colour-blind. From the look of the awards dished out in the arts for the Queen’s birthday honours list, in the summer of 2015 it looks very much as if we want to be a society which favours male privilege. Don’t hold the front page.So arise, then, Sir Van, Sir Lenny and, even if it’s only an honorary knighthood, Sir Kevin. There’s no arguing with any of these gongs. The great Read more ...
peter.quinn
Hosted by self-confessed jazz nut John Thomson, a.k.a. The Fast Show's “Jazz Club” presenter Louis Balfour, the winners of this year's Jazz FM Awards were announced on Wednesday evening in the atmospheric setting of the Great Halls at Vinopolis.Produced by Serious, the evening kicked off with a thrilling call to attention by the House Gospel Choir, before musician, producer and comedian Ian Shaw presented the first of 11 awards for Vocalist of the Year to the great Zara McFarlane. Noting a positive change in the jazz vocalist genre over the past three or four years, Shaw said that, rather Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Giorgio Moroder has long been adopted by the cognoscenti. He’s the studio wizard who gave us key Seventies disco hits, iconic in the development of electronic music and club culture. The culmination of this archiving tendency was the tribute song on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, indeed, the whole album seemed sprinkled with shiny Moroder synth polish. It was undoubtedly this that resulted in Sony hauling him from retirement to work with a who’s who of contemporary chart-pop. The result is appalling, a catastrophic mire of Costa del Dumb Euro-cheese, pitched in some teeth-jarring Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Neither the name, the look, nor the recorded sound of Perfume Genius (*****) seems like the thing to set about a packed Royal Festival Hall with shock and awe, though there was plenty of both in last night’s show. The Seattle singer, known to his mum as Mike Hadreas, has developed a cult following for his ability to combine fragility and scorching power in lyrics of intelligence and versatility. Live, he displayed extraordinary vistas of emotional and techncial breadth.Last year’s third album, Too Bright, raised both eyebrows and expectations with a much broader range of sounds and techniques Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
What Wes Orshoski’s new documentary points out, above everything, is how much pop success relies on an ordered narrative and an easily understood package. First-wave British punk band The Damned, on the other hand, wrote as many great songs as their peers, but their career has been a mess of random creativity, changing line-ups and dreadful business decisions. There is a telling moment where Rat Scabies, the original drummer, weeps as he recalls the one occasion the band had all their ducks in a line. With a major label deal, solid American management, and 1985’s chart-friendly Phantasmagoria Read more ...
peter.quinn
With slowly chiming piano chords, an impossibly high sustained note on the accordion, and a melody of the utmost loveliness on alto clarinet, the achingly beautiful “Walking by Flashpoint”, the opening track of The Thompson Fields, welcomes you into a sound-world of rare eloquence.Presenting eight new pieces written by the composer, arranger and bandleader Maria Schneider for her renowned 18-piece jazz orchestra, the ensemble's first outing since the superb Sky Blue (2007), the album celebrates its composer's love of her childhood home in southwest Minnesota. Entirely Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When International Feel label boss Mark Barrott moved from Uruguay to Ibiza, it was surely only a matter of time before he hooked up with Café Del Mar’s legendary sunset soundtracker José Padilla – inevitable even. The choice of producers to work alongside Padilla on this, his fourth album, is far from predictable however – in fact it’s inspired. Alongside Padilla himself and Barrott are Henning Severud (Telephones), Jan Schulte (Wolf Müller) and Lewis Day (Tornado Wallace). Padilla is in good company here – a fact he has been keen to acknowledge himself.On first listen, this seems Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Kevin Martin is a musician, record producer and journalist. He is best know for recording and performing as The Bug, however, has been and continues to be involved in a variety of other musical projects including: GOD, Techno Animal, Ice, Curse of the Golden Vampire and King Midas Sound. During 2014, The Bug released both the Angels and Devils album and a collaboration with Dylan Carlson of American drone-metalists Earth, titled The Bug vs Earth – which sees its live debut at the Supersonic Festival in Birmingham on Saturday 13 June.Guy Oddy: The Bug vs Earth is a great record. How did you Read more ...
Matthew Wright
No one can accuse Gardot of stinting on the shoe-leather. For her previous two albums she has trotted the globe, drawing together samba, tango, bossa nova and calypso into a rhythmical pot pourri. This time, for the fourth album in seven years, Gardot turns her attention to the streets of LA, which she pounds, discovering, according to the release, the “helpless, homeless and hungry”, whose stories she tells here. Amid some undoubtedly charismatic performances, it feels as if the work’s main discovery has been the particularly diverse instrumentation settings menu in the production suite. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
More than anywhere else, the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music has been the place where I have gone annually for most of the last 20 years to retune my ears, to find inspiration and connections, and to discover new international music. For fans, it was always more than a mere music festival; there was a visionary, idealistic element. The founder, Faouzi Skali, is a Sufi who started the festival as a response to the first Gulf war and invited musicians, thinkers and practitioners from all religious persuasions as a counterpoint to extremism and intolerance elsewhere. That mission’s importance Read more ...