New music
Russ Coffey
Best Troubadour is Bonnie Prince Billy's musical tribute to his "forever hero", country singer Merle Haggard. Haggard was best known for his song "Okie from Muskogee", a wry homage to small-town Southern values. Students of country music, however, remember a different Merle – the armed robber turned musician and iconoclast. In his own bohemian way Bonnie Prince Billy, aka Will Oldham, is another sort of radical. And on Best Troubadour he interprets Haggard's artistic vision through 16 of his lesser-known songs.The album opens with "The Fugitive", whose Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the second week of September 1979, Nick Lowe’s “Cruel to be Kind” entered the Top 40. A month later, it peaked at number 12. The commercial success was belated validation for a song with a history. In May 1978, an earlier version was the B-side of his “Little Hitler” single. Fans with long memories heard another, even earlier, “Cruel to be Kind” when his old band Brinsley Schwarz recorded it for the BBC’s John Peel Show in February 1975. It was co-written by Lowe with fellow bandmember Ian Gomm.Now, the story of “Cruel to be Kind” is pushed back further. The new Brinsley Schwarz release It Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For some of us Blur were an irritant during the 1990s rather than one of the decade’s premier bands. However, once Gorillaz arrived it was impossible to ignore Damon Albarn’s outrageous talent any longer. His golden touch ensured his cartoon group with artist Jamie Hewlett straddled not only multi-million-selling global success, but awed critical kudos. 2010’s The Fall album did not fare so well, but seemed to be a different kind of project, more experimental, cobbled together by Albarn on tour in the States, then fired out without extra polish. Their fifth album, though, seven years later, Read more ...
howard.male
This is a bit of a curiosity. Kasai Allstars were bought to our attention by producer Vincent Kenis almost a decade ago, after he’d had great success with those masters of the amplified thumb piano cacophony, Konono 1. Though the Allstars also have a fondness for thumb pianos (likembe) played through cranky homemade amps, their music has more space and melodic content and utilises a greater variety of instruments. In fact, listening to them is such a seductive, transportive experience that it comes as a surprise when, three edgy, buzzy, trancy songs in, a classical vocal choir imposes its Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This Saturday, April 22, is Record Store Day, the annual celebration of independent record shops. Thus, everyone from the biggest major to the weeniest micro-label is putting out unique, limited edition vinyl runs. When Record Store Day was first inaugurated in 2008, record shops were in trouble, everyone was still in thrall to free invisible music. A decade ago the idea of music as content became king. The principle still holds but there’s been a significant comeback for vinyl. So don’t moan about how Record Store Day has been hijacked by the majors with their “Sir Elton John Commemorated as Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Known to his mum as Troy Andrews, singer and instrumental virtuoso Trombone Shorty has been steadily accumulating rave reviews for his live performances for years. His profile has now reached a point where his fourth studio album will be released on Blue Note next week, and his reputation is beginning to acquire some serious international momentum. Though he’s only recently turned 30, Andrews has a lifetime in New Orleans music-making, and already has his own charitable foundation dedicated to preserving the city’s musical traditions.Yet he’s savvy enough to realise that those traditions need Read more ...
Liz Thomson
From Muswell Hillbilly to Beverly Hillbilly, Ray Davies – Sir Ray – has long been infatuated with America and it must have been a great disappointment when the Kinks were banned from touring there in the mid-1960s. Then in the 1970s and Eighties they were reborn as a stadium rock band, criss-crossing the States and losing their audience back home.These days, Davies is a much-loved figure, drawing crowds at venues large and small, the power chords of those Sixties anthems recognisable to all and his quiet observational songs cheered to the echo. The centrality of the Kinks to popular music Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The extent to which Gargoyle counts as a Mark Lanegan or Mark Lanegan Band album is debateable. The entire musical backings for six of its ten tracks were created in Tunbridge Wells by former Lanegan support band member Rob Marshall and made their way across the Atlantic via the internet. In Los Angeles, Lanegan then wrote lyrics and melody lines, and sang to what he had received. The other four tracks were recorded in California in a more traditional way with PJ Harvey/Queens of the Stone Age/Them Crooked Vultures associate Alain Johannes.Nonetheless, despite its curious birthing process, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When the Sex Pistols first played live on 6 November 1975 at St. Martin’s School of Art, they were the support act to a Fifties-influenced band called Bazooka Joe whose roadie was John “Eddie” Edwards. Of the first band on that night, he declared “everyone said ‘oh, they’re not much good are they?’ They were a bit untogether.”On 11 March 1976, Edwards made his own live debut as the drummer of another new band, The Vibrators. They opened for the rising Stranglers at Hornsey College of Art. His bandmates were guitarist John Ellis – who, in 1970, co-founded Bazooka Joe – bassist Pat Collier – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It's easy to presume that the early ‘00s indie boom just fizzled away. Not so. Many of those bands have had successful albums reasonably recently. The Fratellis? Check. The Wombats? Check. The Kooks? Check. Maximo Park’s last album, 2014’s Too Much Information was a Top 10 hit. In truth, though, Maximo Park were never landfill indie. For one thing, their first three albums arrived with the blessing of electronic maverick label Warp. For another, their 2005 single “Apply Some Pressure” remains a deathless, dynamic pop-rock belter. And their sixth album, put together in Chicago with Norah Jones Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Perhaps most famous as the singer in seminal Nineties art-pop band Stereolab, Laetitia Sadier has worked hard in recent years to establish herself as a solo artist in her own right through a series of well-received avant-muzak albums, including this year’s Finding Me Finding You. She has not been to Brighton since 2014 – that visit had one audience member describing them as “God’s in-house band” – and the gig is a near sell-out, with a sea of happy faces awaiting the bands.The stage of the Green Door Store is decked out in golden sequined fabric for Batsch, a self-described “groove- Read more ...
Katie Colombus
My ears are doing the time warp. If I close my eyes, I'm in high-heeled jelly shoes, wearing silver lipstick, and with my hair in Bjork buns – back when a satin slip dress over a T-shirt was cool as opposed to vintage. The first track of Sheryl Crow's new album Be Myself has propelled me backwards into the Nineties, when Tuesday Night Music Club battled with Alanis Morrisette's Jagged Little Pill to etch permanent marks on my young heart.There's a sensible reason for my nostalgia. For the first time in a long while, Crow has re-connected with her original 1990s productiom team of Jeff Read more ...