New music
Graham Fuller
Let us go now to a foreign country. To the foreboding concrete tunnels and rooms of an RAF early-warning facility under the Sussex Downs in the early summer of 1973.The Lower Sixth has somehow procured the space for an epic late-night party. Cheap beer and cheaper cider is drunk. Cigarettes are smoked, self-consciously. Flared jeans and cheesecloth shirts are worn under Afghan coats, not with panache.There’s no dancing because there’s no DJ and no one has thought to bring any pop singles. Instead, there’s a pile of gatefold-sleeved albums beside the record player, each of which gets played to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
She has yet to hit the second half of her twenties, but Caitlin Rose already has a voice to melt the heart of the most casual listener. While her pedigree - Nashville-born daughter of a Grammy-winning songwriter - screams country starlet, Rose’s vocal is instead the rich, melodic croon to match the torch singer coyness of the pose she pulls on the cover art to her second album.The songwriting may be simple and the vocals straight from a Patsy Cline record, but Rose’s work is about as old-fashioned as the whisky cocktail. Wurlitzer organ, pedal steel and a horn section get used strategically, Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Walking into the auditorium of a packed Heaven last night, we were instantly treated to the sensation of having our bodies invaded by thousands of infinitely complex machine insects. It's rare that a band can have such an instant and disquieting effect, but Fiium Shaark's music, we discovered, is as unusual as their name in many ways. At first seemingly entirely improvising, Rudi Fischerlehner on drumkit and Maurizio Ravalico on assorted high-tech looking percussion set arrhythmic patterns scampering around one another while Isambard Khroustaliov filled the spaces with itchy fragments of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Yesterday Kenneth Branagh was thanking Manchester – saying that he felt he had “come of age” the previous time he had performed Shakespeare in the city 25 years ago, the audience being so “generous, quick-witted and lively". He also thanked the city for having the determination and audacity, in the face of gloom and cuts, at the launch of its adventurous festival, to back to the hilt a biennial world-class arts extravaganza, which, among many notable headline acts has Branagh as lead in Macbeth (directed by Branagh and Emmy and Tony award-winning Rob Ashcroft). Tickets will be gold dust, but Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There is a problem with every single Richard Thompson concert and it is one of omission. With a songbook to rival the best in the business, every triumphant rendition of one song comes tinged with the knowledge that some other gem has been elbowed out of the way to make room for it. If you’re not careful you can spend the entire night curating an alternative, shadow concert in your head while failing to enjoy the evidence of your own ears or eyes.There was a bit of that last night in Edinburgh. Perhaps a little more than usual. There were times, when the likes of “Sidney Wells” and “If Love Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Dark Side of the Moon and Frankie Howerd’s Roman-era television farce Up Pompeii! aren’t as unlikely bedfellows as it first seems. The link comes from Clare Torry, whose voice opened the show each week. She also provided the unrestrained vocal on The Dark Side of the Moon’s Rick Wright-penned “The Great Gig in the Sky.”As one of the most in-demand British session singers from 1970 to her retirement in 1996, Clare sang on ads for British Caledonian airlines and Glenrick pilchards. She appeared on French iconoclast Serge Gainsbourg’s Rock Around the Bunker album and sang the gentle Read more ...
graham.rickson
I’m embarrassed to admit that I’d never listened to The Dark Side of the Moon until a few weeks ago. I’ve heard loads of other esoteric vintage pop, most of it terminally unfashionable and deeply obscure. Growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, I was vaguely aware that Pink Floyd had hit an uncool patch and the album passed me by. I’ve now made up for lost time. Through vintage speakers and scratchy second hand vinyl. Via weedy iPod headphones. In the car, en route to Sainsburys.Classical music critics haven’t had an illustrious track record when writing about pop. Back in the Sixties Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Boz Scaggs is one of the greatest white soul men. Endowed with a distinctive silk-lined voice, he has navigated the waters of blues, country, jazz and quality disco with ineffable cool and a pretty consistent hit rate. Memphis, his first album in five years, is a return to the music of the South – in some ways a homage to Al Green - after a couple of gently impressive jazz releases in which he showed he could master the standards canon with delicacy and ease.The new CD was made with a cast of studio superstars: Ray Parker Jr plays guitar with a deft combination of minimal intervention Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Stars are never sleeping, dead ones and the living” sings David Bowie on the “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)”, The Next Day’s third track. He could have been singing about himself. Having apparently hibernated for a decade after heart surgery, his return puts to bed speculation about retirement. More than that, The Next Day finally extinguishes one of the great Bowie what-ifs – what if he had continued the path set by 1980’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) and the trio of albums which preceded it?Scary Monsters wasn’t afraid to look back and revisit Major Tom. Similarly, The Next Day Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour once commented that whoever had the idea of synchronizing the 1939 Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz (with the sound turned down) to his own band’s The Dark Side of the Moon was “some guy with too much time on his hands”. The hippy culture of the Seventies contained many who fitted that description, as well as multiple baggies of what they then called “pot” to help. As the video age dawned, poring over Dorothy and Toto’s adventures soundtracked by Floyd’s prog-angst classic became almost a rite of passage for advanced stoners.By the mid-Eighties I was in my late Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Back in the early Eighties, Saxon made the heavy metal equivalent of home-cooked roast beef and Yorkshire pud. Axe-grinding albums like Denim and Leather and a work-ethic straight from the Barnsley pits made Biff Byford and the lads a loveable bunch. Their meat-and-potatoes approach, however, meant they have always struggled to compete commercially with the likes of Iron Maiden and Def Leppard. The band never seemed to care. Sacrifice sees them complete their 20th album in 34 years. Just. In true Spinal Tap fashion it has arrived two weeks late due to “manufacturing problems”.That’s not the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There's a lot about stoner culture that smacks of earnestness, and The Dark Side of the Moon has been at the heart of a good deal of that. The number of long, dreary, late-night conversations that must have taken place over “doobs” and “munchies” about its themes of life, death, madness, desperation and all the rest doesn't even bear thinking about.But there is a whole other side to the album that was about – yes, really – fun, and also sensual pleasure; as a teenager in the late Eighties/early Nineties, for me DSotM was about giggles and immersion, about getting a stoned friend to drift off Read more ...