New music
Owen Richards
According to Metronomy maestro Joseph Mount, his first attempt of album number six was a much snappier affair. But it wasn’t until he broke from his self-imposed immediacy that it started connecting with him. In its final form, Metronomy Forever clocks in at 17 tracks of singles, instrumentals and soundscapes, and though it skirts close to double-album indulgence, you’re never more than one song away from a winner.The title Metronomy Forever refers to the never-ending nature of radio, and this airwave-skipping mindset has given Mount a toy box of genres and forms to play with. The preceding Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Thanks for being in here with us tonight,” Wayne Coyne begins, “when you could be outside with the universe shining down on us.” Having clearly experienced a pre-gig epiphany from the unexceptional South London sky, The Flaming Lips singer seems primed to take us all higher. And so this 20th-anniversary celebration of their breakthrough LP The Soft Bulletin begins with an explosion of joy. Giant balloons rain down and stay rogue, bouncing through the childishly engaged crowd for the next two hours. Confetti cannons fire at will, dry ice pumps. And as the yearning anthem of quixotic human Read more ...
mark.kidel
Over two days in 1972, the great Aretha Franklin, undoubtedly one of the greatest American voices of the 20th century, performed and recorded gospel classics in Los Angeles, with a predominantly African-American audience, the red-hot Los Angeles Community Gospel Choir and the support of Rev James Cleveland. She was generally known for her soul classics, including “Say a Little Prayer”, “Think”, “Respect”, “I Never Loved a Man”, “Natural Woman” and many others, but she had grown up in the church under the tutelage of her father the Rev CL Franklin, one of Detroit’s most fiery preachers.Warners Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This is the kind of thing that the Proms does well – indeed, where else would it get an outing? A "big event" piece of massive scale in terms of size and duration, in many ways a modern Spem in Alium, but where Tallis’s 1570 piece demands 40 singers, In the Name of the Earth ups the ante to 700-plus voices, led by eight conductors and arrayed around the Royal Albert Hall. Both the title, with its nod towards the Christian sign of the cross, and the scheduling for Sunday morning, made this feel like a secular meditation with the natural environment substituting for a traditional God. As the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
With a line-up that has been stable for a few years, Black Francis seems to have decided that it’s now time for Pixies to embrace their role as Rock’s Elder Statesmen by taking the best bits of their sound and adding something of a more mature sheen. That’s not to say that the band have recently lurched into easy listening pop territory, but with Beneath the Eyrie it finally seems natural to consider Pixies on the same terms as some of their heroes and influences, like Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young.Beneath the Eyrie is a stew of sunny power pop with slyly twisted lyrics, country rock Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Original UK pressings of Slade’s Seventies mega-hit singles like “Coz I Luv You”, “Everyday”, “Gudbuy T’Jane” and “Mama Weer all Crazee Now” sell for between £1 and £5 if they’re in decent shape. If a copy is needed to listen to, there’s little need to fork out more than £2. On seven-inch, the real Slade rarities are their pre-hit singles and what they issued earlier as Ambrose Slade and The 'N Betweens.Slade, though, weren’t all about the UK. They were, for example, popular in the Netherlands where “Coz I Luv You”, “Everyday”, “Gudbuy T’Jane”, “Merry X-mas Everybody” and “Take me Bak ’Ome” Read more ...
Ellie Porter
It’s fair to say that things are going pretty well for Denver folk-rockers the Lumineers: Grammys, two platinum-selling albums, huge arena tours, support slots for the likes of U2 and Tom Petty, and the massive boost of having one of their songs (the insanely catchy "Ho Hey") make a memorable appearance in soapy TV country saga Nashville. Now they're back with their much-anticipated third album, III.With III, the Lumineers are really upping their game – and it’s possibly their finest album yet. A harrowing story told in three "acts" of three or four songs apiece, it follows the fictional Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's no knowing what to expect from Natasha Khan. Her most recent output has been furiously intense Thai and Persian psyche rock covers (as SEXWITCH in 2015) followed by torch songs full of shadow and eeriness (Bat For Lashes' 2016 The Bride). It rather felt from these two releases that she was happy cosmically dreaming on the margins – certainly in contrast to the strange pop promise of her early work, which prefigured the likes of Grimes and Lana Del Rey in many ways, and suggested someone with an eye on grandiose visions materially as well as mystically. But it turns out she Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Neu!, Neu! 2 and Neu! 75. For many a committed collector of rock’s more interesting corners, these three albums are the motherlode of 1970s Kosmische Musik, or Krautrock, the fruit of an intense and far-out focus on musical essentials, combining guitarist Michael Rother’s trippy lyricism with wild-man drummer Klaus Dinger’s motorik drive. The sound of Neu! was a mixture of sigh and scream, meshed in a grid of minimal rhythms, maxed-out thrash and Dinger (who died in 2008) expressing what sounded at times like a bad acid trip in sound.Rother and Dinger, along with their contemporaries – Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Tinariwen’s music has always been evocative of West African deserts with their mellow blues-like guitars and shuffling groove. Initially recording everything in Mali until it was invaded by religious fanatics who deemed playing music forbidden, Tinariwen have had to lay down their last few discs away from home. Amadjar, however, sees the band return to West Africa to team up with griotte singer, Noura Mint Seymali and her guitarist husband, Jeiche Ould Chighaly. Recorded in two weeks, in a large tent outside Nouakchott in Mauritania, Amadjar is soaked in nomadic grooves with a dromedary’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s half a century since Iggy shrieked that it was “No Fun”, that it was “1969, OK”, that he wanted to be your dog. His original Stooges and his storied cohorts David Bowie and Lou Reed are all no longer with us. The Ig is the last man standing and he knows it. 72 years old, he’s the lizard-punk shaman figurehead who, off-stage, is a considered literate gent, the radio presenter with the velvet croak. His new album acknowledges that he’s now an old dude. It does so with elegiac poetry, cheeky humour and unforced gravitas.While Pop’s last album, Post Pop Depression, was a sonic tribute to his Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Chrissie Hynde has always loved a cover song. But never before, has she strayed so far from her comfort zone. The 14 covers on Valve Bone Woe are a million miles from new wave. They're a kind of jazz odyssey - a journey from bebop to easy listening via early soul. It couldn't be any less like what usually happens when a rock star 'goes jazz'.Hynde's approach is both sophisticated and tasteful. Along with her Valve Bone Woe Ensemble, the Pretenders' singer explores songs as diverse as "Wild is the Wind" and Charlie Mingus's "Meditation (for a Pair of Wire Cutters)". The band Read more ...