New music
Russ Coffey
A fortnight after its release, fans now know the Manics’ latest album Rewind the Film to be a rich, contemplative affair. The musical dynamics are intimate and seemingly best suited to small venues, like the one that features in the video for the single “Show Me the Wonder”. As I made my way across London last night, I wondered if this new sound was why the band had chosen to downsize from last year's O2 to the cosy surroundings of Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Was this "last phase of the band's development" to be consciously close-up and personal?To an extent yes, though not straight away. The Read more ...
simon.broughton
“Some say that I come from Russia / Some think that I come from Africa / But I'm so exotic, I'm so erotic / 'Cos I come from the Planet Paprika...” So sang Shantel at the close of the first WOMAD festival in Russia. The location was almost as exotic as Planet Paprika – the town of Pyatigorsk, 1,500 kilometres from Moscow, deep in the south of Russia in the North Caucasus region. Bringing WOMAD here is part of a cultural regeneration of a region which has the spectacular natural beauty of the Caucasus mountains, but uncomfortable associations of tension and conflict. The North Caucasus Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Darbar Festival, now in its eighth year, encompasses four days of talks, yoga, food, and music – swathes of it, morning, afternoon, and night, with each concert featuring two main sets.This year’s focus was on female musicians, and included a talk featuring the great Carnatic singer Sudha Ragunathan discussing her own experiences and the role of women in Indian music.Friday and Saturday evening’s concerts focused on Dhrupad, Hindustani and Carnatic music. Dhrupad is the oldest living form of Hindustani (north Indian) classical music, uninflected by Persian and Islamic influences, and with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If it seems mythical that a singer-songwriter in his early seventies has made an album this vital yet so timeless, then it’s worth pondering that Man & Myth is Roy Harper’s first for 13 years. In 2011, he celebrated his 70th birthday on stage but in the decade before his profile had been low, with time in his Irish home seemingly filled by anything that wasn’t creating new music. It might be making up for lost time, but Man & Myth’s 23-minute closing epic “Heaven Is Here”/“The Exile” is a career highlight. With 20 albums behind him (depending how it’s counted), the first of which came Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
From no visible source, the instantly recognisable voice of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis croons the words of “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. But the lyrics aren’t in their familiar setting. Alone, he’s stripped from the band, naked and vulnerable. He’s been dead for 33 years, but this was as close as he could possibly be. Moments earlier, a string section had begun a cascading pattern that was more Bernard Herrmann than Joy Division, giving a new slant to this most familiar of post-punk musical landmarks.Live_Transmission was a bold, multi-media reconfiguration of Joy Division’s music by electronic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nirvana: In UteroNext April marks 20 years since Kurt Cobain took his own life. Paving the way for that tragic anniversary is a reissue of 1993’s In Utero, the album which unintentionally became the band’s musical epitaph. Their third, it was written and recorded after Nevermind (1991) had pushed Nirvana to world-wide success. The pressures surrounding the creation of In Utero must have been immense and are utterly unimaginable to anyone outside the band or not close to it.Yet In Utero was and is an incredible album: the full-bore affiliation of Cobain’s ear for a pop melody and his Read more ...
joe.muggs
I once got quite excited by Kings Of Leon. Way back in 2007 I saw them play at the Astoria, and witnessed a band who appeared to be ready to parlay indie credibility and southern-states rocker charm into a genuinely interesting kind of mainstream success. And the album that followed, Because of the Times, seemed to live up to that, full of widescreen Springsteenian ambition while retaining just enough of the Strokes/Pixies buzziness they started out with.Then in 2008 came “Sex is on Fire” and “Use Somebody” – two of the most annoying songs of all time, so perfectly designed for absolute Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Normally we introduce these interviews with a few biographical details about the subject. With Yoko Ono, however, there hardly seems any point: she’s as much a part of late 20th-century history as an musician. But if the whole world knows who she is, her work is a different matter. John Lennon memorably described her as “the world's most famous unknown artist”. And despite recent critical success and an album out this week (Take Me to the Land of Hell), her reputation is still for being obscurely arty. Memorably, The Simpsons once affectionately sent her up as a woman who goes into Mo’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s one of the delightful incongruities of pop that Moby continues to be a presence. This 5’7”, bespectacled, bald, 48-year-old New York intellectual hardly seems frontline material in a world where One Direction and Jessie J rule the roost. Even his home country’s clubland, the turf which nurtured him, has been taken over by younger contenders whose over-production is rife with keg-party obviousness. And yet, despite a slow downwards sales curve since his 1999 behemoth Play – understandable, given it shifted over 12 million copies – Moby’s music and concerts continue to do the business.In Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This is a key weekend for lovers of Indian classical music or the merely sonically adventurous – the Darbar Festival in the Southbank has some of the most extraordinary practioners of the art from both the Carnatic (South Indian) and Hindustani (North Indian) traditions.The most fascinating aspect may be the presence of some really ancient styles notably Dhrupad.One of the most extraordinary musical experiences I have ever had was seeing the Dagar Brothers in the early Eighties. A group of bohemians calling themselves the Guild of Transcultural Studies had turned the abandoned Cambodian Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Some people are lucky enough to have the sort of friends that, no matter how rarely you see them, you can call them up and instantly pick up right back where you left off. Some people are even luckier, and have the sort of friends that they see even less but yet, when they reconnect, they can spill out their most intimate longings and hopes and discomforts and immediately feel unburdened. Seasons of Your Day, Mazzy Star’s first album in 17 years, is like that friend. The band’s core duo - singer and multi-instrumentalist Hope Sandoval, and writer and guitarist/keyboardist David Roback - sound Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A new album from Elton John is also a window into the world of Bernie Taupin. For four decades the lyricist, like a golfer who has always just won the previous hole, has had the honour of going first. It’s easy to forget that with songs from Elton’s pomp in which the words, the voice and piano have long since melded into a unified whole. The reality is that the fantabulously out-and-about showman channels the musings of a heterosexual Californian recluse. It’s been a remarkable conjuring trick.So what has Taupin been thinking about on The Diving Board? Well, the opener “Oceans Away” is about Read more ...