New music
Miranda Heggie
Fresh from winning this year’s Scottish Album of the Year Award – for the third time no less! – Young Fathers gave a spectacular performance on Tuesday night on their home turf, at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. Sure, it seems odd that a competition that’s only been running ten years has been won three times by a band who’ve released four albums.Listen to the albums though and you’ll get it. See Young Fathers live and you’ll realise why this is one of the most exciting bands making music right now not just in Scotland, nor even the UK, but internationally. This is a group who are always creating Read more ...
Cheri Amour
Just over 30 years ago, avant-pop icons Stereolab released their debut album Peng! establishing the early hallmarks of the English-French band’s sound; 1960s pop harmonies, chorus-laden guitar riffs and a borderless world of analog electrics. Helmed by longstanding members English songwriter and guitarist Tim Gane and French lyricist and vocalist Laetitia Sadier, Stereolab was born from the ashes of 80s indie pop band McCarthy after frontman Malcolm Eden called time on the band at the start of a new decade. Spurred on by their shared stage antics, Gane and Sadier continued their Read more ...
mark.kidel
There is a great deal of sense in transposing electronic music to a symphony orchestra. However beautifully crafted, imaginatively constructed, and creatively programmed, the sounds that come out of synthesisers and other digital tools lack the knife-edge fallibility of music that is produced with the hand or the human breath. Brian Eno’s concert with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic provides compelling evidence that his compositions reveal more of their essence when taken on a trip into the world of strings, brass and other wind instruments, and the chance-prone reality of human moods and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Los Angeles is a collaboration from ex-Cure man Lol Tolhurst, former Banshee, Creature and Slits’ drummer, Budgie and producer Jacknife Lee, as well as an army of musical mates from Bobby Gillespie and The Edge to LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Starcrawler’s Arrow de Wilde. So, it could easily have descended into a supergroup exercise of backslapping and excessive self-regard by a load of rock stars who haven’t been in the limelight for a while.Not so fast though, despite trading under the rather clunky name of Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee, Los Angeles is an unexpected peach of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For Finnish composer Osmo Lindeman, the decision to pursue electronic music was made in 1968 during a visit to Poland. He had recently started using graphical notation for the scores of his compositions and was having problems getting conductors and orchestras to follow what he wanted.In Poland, he met composer Andrzej Dobrowolski and visited the Warsaw School of Music’s electronic music studio. He found that Dobrowolski also used graphical notation. With electronic music, Lindeman saw that there no barriers to using any type of score. He had the way forward. He would embrace electronic music Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Atmospherically and musically, the debut album from Lebanon’s Mayssa Jallad swiftly makes its case. It opens with a drifting, elegiac voice singing a wandering melody over a sound-bed including what sounds like a koto and a droning cello. The language employed is Arabic. On the next track, the meditative spell is punctured by the crack of distant gunfire. As it progresses, Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels seamlessly fuses folky introspection, orchestrated drama, crackling electronica and field recordings. Sometimes – again, without any incongruity – within the same song.Marjaa: The Battle of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Who knew! James Blunt has sold 20 million records worldwide. Who to, I wonder? Back to Bedlam, his 2004 debut, was the biggest-selling album of the first decade of the 21st century. Call that progress? When pop was pap – think the Carpenters or Bread – it was at least melodic and well-produced, leaving in its saccharine wake a handful of truly memorable songs that still evoke a pang of nostalgia and happy memories of sixth-form parties. But this kind of stuff is just… meh.Who We Used to Be is Blunt’s seventh album. There are also live albums and a box set, and a greatest hits collection, Read more ...
Cheri Amour
With a name like The Kills, it’s not surprising to hear that the band’s long-awaited sixth album, God Games, is suitably tuned for spooky season. This year marks two decades since the duo – made up of songwriter and vocalist Alison Mosshart and her creative soulmate Jamie Hince – slinked onto the early Noughties scene with their gutsy garage rock debut, Keep Me On Your Mean Side earning them a place on the podium alongside fellow dual-pronged powerhouses Death From Above 1979 and The White Stripes. While their sludge-coloured, super lo-fi sulkiness became synonymous with that Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
As a cultural destination, Salzburg really is hard to beat. Each year, a million and a half tourists descend on this compact city with its baroque architectural delights, and a population of just 150,000. The city of Mozart and of the Salzburger Festspiele was also once home to Paracelsus, Heinrich Biber, Stefan Zweig, Georg Trakl, and more recently – of course – The Sound of Music and Red Bull.The city’s setting and its skyline are breathtaking. One can marvel at the way buildings more than three centuries old were hewn into the sides of the rocky outcrops. There are churches everywhere; I Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Despite playing together for almost 25 years, Rodrigo y Gabriela are still taking chances in the live arena and refusing to take the easy path. They certainly didn’t put on a heritage act set in Birmingham this weekend.The Mexican guitarists’ show comprised wholly of tracks taken from their recent In Between Thoughts… A New World album and a handful of unrecorded tunes that have been composed since recording this disc. So, there was no “Diablo Rojo” and none of their flamenco nuevo-tinged covers of “Creep”, “Stairway to Heaven” or even their magnificent take on Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”, not that Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Simon Le Bon has described Duran Duran’s new album as being “about a crazy Halloween party” that is “supposed to be fun”. In fact, it’s a fair bit thinner than even that might suggest.Danse Macabre consists of mainly inadvisable cover versions of tunes by the likes of the Specials and Billie Eilish, a handful of reinterpretations of some of their old album tracks and three uninspiring new songs, written especially for this project. So, anyone expecting a reworked film soundtrack to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre might be advised to lower their expectations to something closer to an alternative Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Marilou lies on the ground. She’s been bludgeoned to death by a fire extinguisher. Its foam covers her body. Her murderer is a forty-something man who has become obsessed with her. She shampoos hair in a barbers, where he first comes across her. Their affair turns sour after he finds her in bed with two other men. After the murder, her killer ends up in a mental hospital.This depraved, sordid story is told on a song-by-song basis by its provocative creator Serge Gainsbourg on his 1976 album L'Homme à tête de chou. The narrative of the album whose title translates as “the man with the cabbage Read more ...