New music
graeme.thomson
There is something eternally refreshing about catching a band on the first show of their first tour after the release of their first album. Banter remains untarnished by overuse; smiles appear spontaneous and gratitude genuine; mistakes are swatted away with a giggle and a sly curse. Hope – that most intoxicating of emotions – fills the air like the scent of fresh cut grass. When the group march off stage at the end of the set and plonk themselves behind the merchandising table, it almost seems churlish not to hand over your cash, if only to buy into the dream that, right now, everything Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And so to the windswept hangar of Earls Court, and the 30th Anniversary Brit Awards. Except it wasn’t, because as any pedant knows the very first Brits (then mystifyingly entitled the British Record Industry Britannia Centenary Awards) occurred in 1977. No matter. Lady Gaga cleaned up with her outlandish couture-pop, the increasingly annoying Lily Allen turned up in her underwear to win the Best British Female Solo Artist award and daringly told host Peter Kay to **** off, and Liam Gallagher oafishly threw the microphone into the audience after picking up the Brits Album of the Last 30 Years Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The death at the weekend of Doug Fieger, the co-founder of The Knack, meant that melodic US pop had lost a fine exponent. But more than 30 years on from the eternal über-hit "My Sharona" the appeal of infectious hook-lined music lives on in the work of preppy foursome Vampire Weekend, who have made their name by mixing new wave revivalism with African beats, dubbing their style “Upper West Side Soweto”.Contra, the quartet's January follow-up to their 2008 eponymous debut, received mixed reviews. theartsdesk came down particularly hard on the band's derivative style, which frequently owed a Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Oumou Sangare, Malian diva and one of the world’s great singers, is not, as I eventually found out myself, a woman to be trifled with. When she bought some land outside Bamako, the capital of Mali, a local official by accident or oversight also sold the land to someone else who planted the fields. Sangare turned up with a bulldozer and destroyed the man’s crops. She also had a quiet word with the President of Mali and got the offending official sacked. I could easily imagine Sangare in her preferred garb of traditional colourful African robes and Parisian stilettos in the driving seat of a Read more ...
Anonymous
The force of Israeli-born Gilad Atzmon’s world view – his anti-Zionism, but also what Robert Wyatt, a self-confessed “Gilad groupie”, calls the “intrinsically non-racialist philosophy that's implicit in jazz” – comes through loud and clear in his stage banter. Not many jazzers namecheck the Chilcot Inquiry or dedicate tunes to “the biggest arseholes on the planet”: ie a good handful of (named) British and Israeli politicians. Crucially, though, that ideology comes through at least as strongly in the saxophonist’s music, the mix of jazz and Middle Eastern folk music pursued by his now decade- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Along with the compact disc and record company profits, the Guitar Hero has become virtually extinct in the modern era. Thus, finding two gilt-edged specimens of this increasingly scarce breed sharing a stage is gold dust indeed. Both of them have been drenched in accolades, Jeff Beck having been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice and Eric Clapton three times.Beck replaced Clapton in the Yardbirds in 1965 after "God" decided that the group were becoming too commercial and un-bluesy, but while Clapton has remained stubbornly true to his blues calling over the decades, Beck has Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“The human body is extremely limited. I would love to upgrade myself” says Kevin Warwick, one of the boffins interviewed on screen in Three Tales, the “video opera” from composer Steve Reich and his partner - they live as well as work together- video artist Beryl Korot, their “meditation on 20th Century technology.” When I met them the morning after the launch party in Amsterdam I could have done with an upgrade myself.Three Tales will be reprised next week at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge for four late night performances from the 17th – the first time the piece will have been reprised Read more ...
joe.muggs
It has been reported today that Google - via its Blogger and Blogspot services - has been closing down popular music blogs and wiping their archives without warning, citing copyright violation by those blogs who post downloadable mp3s of the tracks they review. While hosting copyright material may not by the letter of the law be legal, it seems that this heavy handed approach completely ignores the subtlety of the "grey economy" that exists between bloggers and a music industry which knows full well what a valuable promotional tool they can be - and it appears to be yet another example of how Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Should we be silent in classical concerts? Alex Ross, the classical critic of the New Yorker and writer of the superb panorama of 20th Century music The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, an “unlikely mass-market proposition” which has been a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic will be giving this year’s Royal Philharmonic Society Lecture. His talk is entitled Inventing and Reinventing the Classical Concert and will be given on 8 March at the Wigmore Hall. In the lecture Alex Ross will address concert culture - what has changed since the 18th century and what Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Zinc ft Ms Dynamite, Wile Out (Zinc)It takes a lot for an artist to admit they've taken a wrong turn and return to what they do best. So kudos to Ms Dynamite for ditching the dreary, wholemeal attempts to become a British Lauryn Hill and taking her rightful place again as one of this country's best rave MCs. With the irresistible electro-house beats and bouncing bass of DJ Zinc, she's turned up the attitude and created a very British twist on dancehall that almost, but not quite, betters her 2001 debut "Booo!".In slang terms, "wile" means "wild", thus "wile out" means "go wild"; the intimate Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Hoxton area of Shoreditch is a strange place for gigs by bands with general appeal. Specialist acts bring specialist crowds who know what they're going to get, but any like Music Go Music – whose records show a huge pop sensibility – will attract a fair few curious local scenesters, which sadly in Shoreditch means a load of drunk posh twits and Peaches Geldof clones falling over themselves to photograph one another every three seconds and show how fabulously bored they are with everything. These were out in force last night and it didn't, frankly, set up a celebratory atmosphere for the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Mine's a Strawberry Mivvi, if you are buying, thanks. Suburban Counterpoint: Music for Seven Ice Cream Vans is a deliciously intriguing work by composer Dan Jones that does what it says on the tin. It will be performed as part of this year's Norfolk and Norwich Festival in May, before being reprised in London.A set of seven ice-cream vans will, we are told, "weave a spellbinding counterpoint across an entire suburb at a time, weaving a carefully planned route as melodies echo from one van to another, calling out across great distances through the evening and sometimes into the Read more ...