New music
Kieron Tyler
Nightclub Tähti is on the seventh floor of an anonymous-looking building along Tampere’s main shopping street, Hämeenkatu. Black-suited security wave you into a lift which zips straight up there. After surrendering your coat at the cloakroom – obligatory in Finland - a walk around the bar reveals the dance floor. The couples occupying it are doing the Finnish tango, a measured, understated version of the dance. Finnish schlager is the soundtrack, a sort of native-language Eighties’ electropop with emotive crescendos. It rarely strays from the mid-paced.Thirty minutes earlier, a couple of Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Pop is a cruel mistress. Watching numerous BBC4 rockumentaries, such as the recent one on Squeeze, a pattern emerges. You make it, go through an imperial phase when you can do no wrong, then the honeymoon ends. The records are still great but the parade has moved on. This struck me again listening to the 10th studio album from Madness, which comes complete with a classy Peter Blake sleeve design. But despite plenty of TV coverage and an unforgettably moving profile-boosting performance of “Our House” on the Buck House roof at the Diamond Jubilee concert I cannot see this album topping the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
To the first-time listener of Martha Tilston’s work, the “folk” tag seems like a tremendous over-simplification. Right from its opening track, “Stags Bellow”, the songwriter experiments with novel percussion and call-and-response choruses to create complex compositions that demand to be gotten lost in.These compositions do, however, blend the more traditional percussive and string sounds associated with the genre with some of its central concerns; both personal and political. And Tilston certainly has the pedigree: her father, Steve Tilston, ran a folk club with Bert Jansch and has released a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If Grizzly Bear’s name is unfamiliar to you, you’ll certainly know some of the indie-folk bands they’ve influenced. These include Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes, two of music’s more unlikely recent successes. Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear never seemed to want that mass appeal. This autumn they followed 2009’s melodic Vecktamist with the rather more difficult Shields, whose songs suggested they might sound better live. Last night a 5000-strong crowd at the Brixton Academy was hoping so.The audience may not quite have been hipsters but most were modish, educated-looking youngish men and women. By the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall has won two Grammys and sold more than 15 million albums worldwide. Born in 1964 in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, she attended Berklee College of Music in the early 1980s and had her major breakthrough with the 1995 album, All for You: A Dedication to the Nat King Cole Trio. Produced by T Bone Burnett and featuring Marc Ribot on guitar (and a cameo from Howard Coward, a.k.a. Elvis Costello, whom she married in 2003), her new album of vintage material largely from the 1920s and '30s, Glad Rag Doll, features songs that Krall has spent a lifetime Read more ...
bruce.dessau
We currently seem to be awash with rockumentaries. The Rolling Stones have yet another retrospective out, while Friday night on BBC Four would not be complete without dusting off the back catalogue of some mid-table band once adored by some nice middle-aged folk unable to find a babysitter. Status Quo fare better than a BBC Four slot, if less well than Jagger & co's la-di-da London Film Festival airing, with their very own doc, Hello Quo, enjoying a brief cinema release before coming out on DVD.While Quo might not have the cachet of the Stones, they do have a definite niche. Welcome to Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Pop is a silly business in so many ways, but even so I don't think I ever imagined that when the year 2012 came, the globe's charts would be dominated by a dopey-looking middle-aged Frenchman and a lanky grouch from Dundee. But here we are, with a billion radios blasting a new, ramped up, amped up, obliteratingly popular kind of dance-pop, with David Guetta and Calvin Harris the new overlords, each with megastars on speed-dial.Where Guetta is the bland enthusiast, never less than 100 percent on-brand, Harris is a cantankerous sod and perpetual square peg, and that's maybe reflected in his Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Chilly Gonzales is a self-mythologising huckster, a throwback to a vaudevillian tradition of entertainer. He’s had enormous success producing the likes of Feist, is in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest solo piano concert (over 27 hours), and starred in the "existential sports movie" Ivory Tower as the inventor of “jazz chess”. His early albums were a crashed-up mélange of funk, electronic, rap and lounge, but his biggest success was a curveball of an album, Solo Piano (2004), a set of introverted Satie-influenced pieces. In a pop world where even playing keyboards Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The concept album can be a tricky beast; Titus Andronicus’s 2010 epic The Monitor more so than most. How to follow up an album that loosely ties your frontman’s break-up to the American Civil War, complete with spoken-word interludes voiced by contemporary punk artists playing historical figures, in which rousing choruses bounce surprisingly out of 14-minute rock operas? The answer, as provided by Local Business, is that you don’t.Titus’s third full-length is instead probably as close to a straight-up rock record as they have in them, bearing in mind that we are talking about a band from Read more ...
theartsdesk
Peter Gabriel: So Russ Coffey In early 1986 Peter Gabriel was still the guy who used to be in Genesis. He may have released four solo albums, but had also done his best to keep them in the “cult” section of local stores. With So, however, his spell as a bona fide pop star began. The video for the lead single, “Sledgehammer”, with its iconic stop-motion animation would eventually become the most played ever on MTV. That was, in part, due to the brilliance of the guys at the Aardman studios. But it was also because the song is close to pop perfection.Now, 26 years later, comes a belated Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Can a septuagenarian wear skinny trousers? It is not a question that I ask myself very often, but it was my first thought on seeing the frighteningly fit 73-year-old Ian Hunter stroll onstage at the Shepherds Bush Empire last night. Life in America clearly suits the Shropshire-born former frontman of Mott the Hoople, as he led a band young enough to be his children through a storming, age-defying 110-minute set.Ian Hunter has been around long enough to know what the fans want and he was happy to give them plenty of it, with a show that mixed tracks from his latest album, When I'm President, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The Gaslight Anthem’s star has been in the ascendant for some time now - arguably since the release of their 2008 breakthrough record, The ’59 Sound. But nowhere has that change been more dramatic than in the evolution of their live shows. The Gaslight Anthem that commanded the stage in Glasgow last night was an altogether more confident, self-assured beast than the band that played the same venue in the summer of 2010.There’s a certain weariness that sits on Brian Fallon as a songwriter nowOne thing that hadn’t changed since then, however, was the somewhat eclectic choice of support band. Read more ...