New music
howard.male
Last night was the third and probably last time this 21-year-old Nashville songstress will grace the humble Windmill pub in Brixton with her charismatic yet down-to-earth presence. Not because the gig wasn’t a sell-out and an unqualified success, but because of the radio airplay and unanimous critical praise she has received for her debut album Own Side Now from everyone from the Daily Mail to the Independent. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if by this time next year she’s performing at the Union Chapel or even the Barbican.I’ve never seen a Windmill crowd so attentive to an act before. Read more ...
iris.brooks
The group Pingasan’k “calls for good spirits”. The name refers to “a bucket to put rice in, tied with the bark of a tree”. Regardless of rice or spirits, this band touched my heart. The gentle, haunting sounds come from the bamboo tube zithers (pratuon’k) made from giant mountain bamboo, which is only cut down when they see the moon. “We do not want our instrument to smell sweet or our insects will bite it,” explains leader Arthur Kanying.But the hypnotic groove of the music does sound sweet (Pingasan’k pictured right). Who would expect that these gentle sonic waves include pieces for Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
As there's something of a forest theme this weekend on theartsdesk, with the Royal Opera House's If-A-Tree festival curated by Joanna McGregor with Scanner, and a report from this year's Borneo Rainforest World Music Festival, and here, a diary of an extraordinary trip I took in 2003 to sample the culture and music of the Pygmies deep in the heart of the Central African Republic.Day 1: The Beauty Contest
The Miss Bangui beauty contest takes place at the Palais de l'Assemblée, an edifice built by North Koreans, where the Central African Republic's parliament used to meet. Since democracy was Read more ...
david.cheal
It’s funny how things turn out. Of the four former members of Led Zeppelin, John Bonham is dead, John Paul Jones is an odd and unpredictable figure, popping up only occasionally with an album or a collaboration, while Jimmy Page is, according to Mick Wall’s definitive 2008 Led Zeppelin biography When Giants Walked the Earth, lost in a twilit world of his own creation.Which leaves Robert Plant, shaggy-haired singer and hip-shaker, and – unexpectedly, given that he used to be the kid-brother figure in the band - the one whose post-Zep career has been easily the most successful, both Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Over this weekend the spaces of London's Royal Opera House will be transformed by strange sounds, vaguely operatic, vaguely foresty, thoroughly chilled. The ambient atmospheres will be made by Scanner, who calls himself a “cultural engineer” and has made sounds for morgues, dances, Philips wake-up lights and chill-out rooms in clubs, during an extraordinarily eclectic career that seems to exist somewhere on the very edge of technology.Scanner’s music studio is a laptop, an amplifier, a keyboard and five hard drives. His scores look like Rorschach blots of computer scribble or wildly exploding Read more ...
David Nice
Did anyone find the aged-rocker thrash of Mark Anthony Turnage's new work at the Proms, Hammered Out - a bit of a disappointment to Edward Seckerson - oddly familiar? This brilliant YouTube remix will tell you why. And for all the orchestral flash, which struck me too as a bit vieux jeu, give me the dazzling Beyoncé Knowles and her sensational dance routine in that video over the Turnage piece any day.
Kieron Tyler
The keyboard player usually associated with Paul Weller is "Merton" Mick Talbot, who, after leaving mod revival band The Merton Parkas, filled out The Jam’s sound in their twilight days and accompanied Weller’s journey through the Style Council. Andy Crofts of The Moons has made the journey in reverse: currently Weller’s live keyboard player, he also fronts and plays guitar with The Moons, a five-piece he formed in 2007.Fêted by Edwyn Collins, The Moons push some classic British buttons. Crofts’ songs betray a fondness for The Kinks, but there’s a Buzzcocks edge too. Screw up your eyes and Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Coming on stage in a gangsta bandana, wrap-around shades, and what looked like Saddam Hussein’s beard, Mr E was giving little away. There was no opening gambit, nor any indication of what direction the evening was going. Some had said the Scotland concerts hadn’t been so great. I heard one girl say that if Eels concerts had personalities they’d be as capricious as the fragile moods of the man simply known as E. But E stood there saying nothing.Of course, on record it’s been a different story: cathartic, contrary and finally redemptive, Eels year-long concept trilogy came to its conclusion Read more ...
theartsdesk
Born in Edinburgh in 1958, musician, singer and songwriter Mike Scott has been the leader of the rock band The Waterboys for almost three decades. Perhaps best known for the sky-scraping hit single “The Whole of the Moon”, on albums such as Fisherman’s Blues, This is the Sea and Book of Lightning, Scott has consistently reinvented the band's sound, fusing folk, rock and pop and working with a changing cast of musicians.He currently lives in Dublin, where earlier this year over five nights at the Abbey Theatre he premiered the latest Waterboys project, An Appointment with Mr Yeats, which Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The French have got serious form when it comes to twisting the determinedly uncool into something hip, a fact Phoenix illustrated so winningly last year with Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, a beautifully crafted album of mid-tempo soft rock which lounged dreamily in some critic-proof holding area between the mid-Seventies and early Eighties.The Versailles four-piece have been kicking around for the best part of 15 years, but they only really hit their stride with their fourth studio album, a veritable party bag of lush, dreamy, fluid, euphoric pop. It won them a Grammy for Best Alternative Album ( Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month's top releases are headed up by a brilliant covers album by Brazilian singer Seu Jorge, and the Manic Street Preachers and Richard Thompson on peak form. Elsewhere there is South African pianist Kyle Shepherd, Argentinian "eccentric mystic" Axel Krygier and dance music from Underworld and Superpitcher and "like a Humberside Randy Newman" Paul Heaton. Reviewers are Sue Steward, Joe Muggs, Russ Coffey, Peter Culshaw, Kieron Tyler, Marcus O'Dair, Bruce Dessau and Howard Male.CD of the MonthSeu Jorge and Almaz Seu Jorge and Almaz (Now Again Records)by Sue Steward"Errare humanum est” is Read more ...
howard.male
“One afternoon back in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, I met four scientists in a bar, they were on their way to West Africa to study a parasitic worm that attacks the eyeballs of human beings and turns them into blind men.” And so begin the sleeve notes of C W Stoneking’s second album, Jungle Blues. Last night this teller of tall and fevered tales washed up in deepest Brixton, to perform to a motley crowd in the gloomy but brightly painted Windmill pub. It was an unlikely juxtaposition which nevertheless worked rather well.Because the truth of the matter is that wherever Mr Stoneking landed, he and Read more ...