soul music
Adam Sweeting
Not only was Channel 4's Top Boy a brilliant slice of TV drama, but it delivered a neat little pay-off over the closing credits with Charles Bradley's track "The World (Is Going Up in Flames)". An anguished chunk of classic soul, sung by Bradley in a gutsy James Brown-style rasp, it sounded at least 40 years old, but in fact it was only released in 2007 on Daptone Records' subsidiary, Dunham.Bradley's story could make a thrilling TV biopic of its own. Born in Gainesville, Florida in 1948 and raised in Brooklyn, Bradley experienced a miserably impoverished childhood, but yearned to Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There are two fundamentally opposing schools of thought on Florence Welch and her mysterious machine. For the believers, her music belongs to the tradition of questing, modernist pop with a pagan trim of the kind Kate Bush made before she started writing 14-minute songs about having sex with snowmen. To the naysayers, on the other hand, she’s both shallow and contrived, a paint-stripping belter desperate to lend her sub-Siouxsie Sioux shtick gravitas by grafting on a skin of borrowed poses and studied weirdness.Neither view quite nails it. In reality, Welch makes occasionally stirring but Read more ...
joe.muggs
Joker, aka 22 year old Bristolian Liam McLean, is one of the most individual talents of the dubstep/grime generation. His long run of dancefloor-directed single releases, some originally recorded when he was in his early teens, showed natural gifts for finding the funk in the sparsest rhythms and for frazzlingly catchy melodic synth riffs which meant his productions leapt out of DJ sets wherever and whenever they were played. Now, following a quiet 18 months, his debut album shows that he's not content to rest on his laurels.The Vision is a high-gloss affair. McLean has always been a Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is a strangely kaleidoscopic approach to documentary. A selection of recently unearthed footage and interviews which shows the Black Power movement in the USA through the eyes of idealistic Swedish film-makers, now re-edited and framed with the voices and music of both modern and veteran black radical cultural figures, it provides a disorienting, shifting set of superimposed viewpoints of a period in which in any case change seemed to be the only certainty.The footage itself is gripping and often truly eye-opening, particularly when it's at its most ordinary. The stories of dramatic Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
With Cliff Richard it’s tempting for commentators and critics to pull a conceptual double bluff. Cliff is regarded as naff, safe and beloved of grannies, so restating that angle and sneering is tired - it was tired 40 years ago. So what to do? Dig around his back catalogue for a corner to be fought? (I’m Nearly Famous and Wired for Sound are the usual contenders.) Make the valid case that he was the British stepping stone between rock’n’roll and The Beatles? Or simply quote the stats – upwards of 200 million records sold, a national treasure, etc?It doesn’t wash, any of it. Cliff and the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By 1977, disco was a cliché to be mocked. But a few years earlier, before its ubiquity, disco was a liberating music uniting minorities on the dance floor. Funk, too, became a cliché, little more than a reductive musical cypher. Two new reissues celebrate these genres when both were still vital, still able to surprise. Disco Gold: Scepter Records & The Birth of Disco is exactly what its title says it is, while Darondo’s Listen to My Song: The Music City Sessions collects A-grade funk that had languished in the vaults until now.Disco wasn’t just the place to dance, but the music, too: a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Little Rock, the state capital of Arkansas, usually comes to mind in association with hometown boy Bill Clinton. Soul and funk fans, however, aren’t fussed with the sax-playing former governor and president and fixate on the city’s True Soul label, the home of a raft of rare and sought-after sides. Two volumes compiling the imprint have just been issued and include previously unissued tracks. The harmony-driven soul, Southern grooves and tight funk make a case for True Soul being an essential component of soul USA.Musically, Bill C’s sax was in keeping with Little Rock’s limited musical Read more ...