New music
bruce.dessau
Sympathy vote time is over. After Edwyn Collins suffered two cerebral haemorrhages in 2005 his comeback album, 2007’s Losing Sleep, was greeted with ecstatic reviews. It was a certainly pretty good, but maybe critics, being the old softies we are at heart, were slightly swayed by our unbridled joy at the fact that the former Orange Juice frontman was simply back in the game. So the new album, Understated, is the real test of whether Collins can still cut the musical mustard.The verdict was hardly ever in doubt. From the opening Northern Soul stomp of "Dilemma" to the unashamedly sentimental Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Nick Rhodes (b 1962) is a founding member of the group Duran Duran. Their synthesizer player and driving force, he is the sole member to have been in every incarnation of the band. Duran Duran started in Birmingham in 1978 when Rhodes was only 16, a post-punk synth-pop act indebted to Roxy Music and David Bowie. The other members were singer Simon le Bon, bassist John Taylor, drummer Roger Taylor, and guitarist Andy Taylor, although Stephen “Tin Tin” Duffy was frontman for the first year of their existence.Duran Duran became known as leaders of the New Romantic movement, famed for their Read more ...
mark.kidel
Unlike the Rai masters Khaled and Mami, who grew up in Algeria and are slightly uncomfortable with the audience-winning slide into rock, Rachid Taha is a beur, a North African born in France, raised on punk but with a thorough knowledge of his heritage: for him, music has always combined partying with political protest, fuelled by the righteous frustration of the second generation immigrant.On stage, Taha is an erratic performer: some of his gigs are magical invocations in which supercharged rock energy meets the complex rhythms of the Maghreb, and the singer darts around the stage displaying Read more ...
james.woodall
He looks the part: straggly, desert hair and haunted fizzog. He sounds the part: opening dry rhythmic strumming over unchorded strings; acrobatic trills; percussive attack. Flanked on the left by two singers, Kiki Cortinas and Simón Román, and a shadowy dancer, Paloma Fantova, and on the right by second guitarist El Cristi and percussionst Israel Suárez, this flamenco stalwart decked out the Sadler’s Wells stage with the requisite musical equipment.Tomatito (real name José Fernández Torres) is famous for being Tomatito. His is not a big name outside his frame of reference, though he’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
To the left of the electronic pop that dominates radio and the charts sits music which is that bit artier, emanating more class, imagination and sonic inventiveness. Think SBTRKT, Jessie Ware, Frank Ocean or Aluna George. Far, far to the left of that, then, out in a smeared alt-reality where Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker” is the template for all, sits Lapalux.Twenty-five year-old Stuart Howard from Essex first popped onto most radars last year through a pair of 12-inches with incongruous cover art, images of posh Keira Knightly-esque models sprawling, pouting, smoking cigars. It looked like the Read more ...
joe.muggs
The portents were good. The single “Heaven” emerged with all the melodrama and crypto-religiosity hardcore Depeche Mode fans have loved – Dave Gahan hitting some notes that suggested he's spotted certain tics that Muse's Matt Bellamy has nicked from him and gone “ahaa no, THIS is how it's done.” It's a dirge in the best sense, a gorgeously crushing piece with – thankfully – digitally degraded sounds and robotic drum-rolls putting the guitars and pianos in their place: this is Depeche Mode at peace both with their stadium Goth stature and their history as electronic innovators. The follow-up “ Read more ...
howard.male
How much more of a melancholy experience walking round this exhibition would have been if its subject hadn’t just sprung a new album on us that’s so suffused with energy and life. It’s meant that the exhibition's title - David Bowie Is – feels like a genuine statement of fact rather than just wishful thinking, at least in the literal sense. However, metaphorically speaking, the title would have still held since Bowie's influence as a multifaceted creation is still everywhere in our culture. There is much – in fact almost too much – to enjoy in this show. But let’s get a couple of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There must be something quite frustrating about being a Stroke in 2013, assuming you just want to get on with the business of making music without constantly being reminded that you are part of a band once labeled the biggest in the world by the music press. It’s no wonder they aren’t giving interviews around the release of their fifth album, even if they’ve now pretty much outlived every magazine that once put them on the cover. The thing is, the Strokes have eschewed the simplicity of their debut on every release since, which is why the new wave-y synths and 80s influences on their latest Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
You will have to excuse my solipsism but I can find no way into this review without my own preoccupations butting rudely in. Music journalists sometimes end up reviewing albums utterly disconnected to their own interests, background and musical tastes. Some overcome this with ease, finding their inner dispassionate judge, while others find a meaty angle that adheres closely to their own perspectives, then pile in. I am closer in tone to the latter. However, it would be unfair and boring to play that game with Suede.I don’t like them and never have, yet they were ahead of the pack, a vanguard Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bernard Herrmann: Vertigo and Music From the Films of Alfred HitchcockGreat film soundtrack music can have a tough time being accepted as thus. There’s the test of time: does the music continue resonating? Is the music a sympathetic foil for the visuals? Can it live away from the screen and still create its atmosphere? The questions are endless, but the music of Bernard Herrmann will always pass any test. With Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo declared the greatest film ever in last year’s Sight and Sound poll, Herrmann’s music for it was, by association, also cast as an all-time great. Previously, Read more ...
joe.muggs
You really don't need the context on this, do you? Event album, comeback, cheesy title, blah blah – it's all there splattered all over the internet if you really want it. I'll just cut to the chase and say: I love Justin Timberlake's music, and I'm very, very relieved to say I love this album, for a number of reasons. And rather than try and analyse anything too much, I'll just list them.It doesn't try too hard. There's nothing that explodes in your face with hyper-pop orgasms like "Cry me a River" or "Sexy Back", and neither should there be. This wouldn't be dignified for a movie star, keen Read more ...
theartsdesk
Regular readers of theartsdesk will know that we have a lot of time for Volker Bertelmann, the composer-pianist-producer better known as Hauschka. Adapting styles from rigorous minimalism through romantic compositions to club-inspired electronica, he has ploughed his own furrow through postclassical and leftfield music.So we were very happy when, to trail a show he's doing tomorrow night at London's Bishopsgate Institute with regular collaborator violinist Hilary Hahn, and his new remix album, he offered us the first showing of this 38 minute concert recorded in Nairobi, Kenya last year Read more ...