New music
Kieron Tyler
By 1970, John Barry had composed music for Born Free, The Lion in Winter, Midnight Cowboy, You Only Live Twice and about 38 other films. His work with cinema began in 1960 and averaged around five films a year. In 1965, eight films were released with his music. He was busy.Yet when the album Ready When You Are, J.B. appeared in 1970, its liner notes said “he’s invisible most of the time.” Although he had recently appeared briefly in the film Deadfall, Barry was principally a backroom presence; his name less prominent than those of the songs or films he contributed to. Earlier, he’d hit the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Crispy Moon is a musical kaleidoscope encompassing free-jazz skronk, Japanese folk melodies, Krautrock insistence, echoes of Recurring-era Spacemen 3, South African percussion styles and space rock. One is overlain onto another, or there are sections where one approach dominates before diving into another.The album opens with the gentle “Makkuroi Mizu (まっくろい水)” where a reggae lope gradually gives way to a more linear rhythm. Next, “Dividual Individual” – with the album's only English-language lyrics: declaring “you are free to go” – brings more on board: bubbling sounds, spacey synth and what Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album starts and ends so brilliantly. It kicks off with a salvo of three tracks that remind you exactly why Def Leppard became one of the biggest bands in the world in the mid Eighties. They distilled the things they most loved growing up – T Rex, Mott The Hoople, Queen, ABBA – down to their rawest essences, then built up a sound using the most elaborate studio technology available at the time that was in tune with the current post-Van Halen US rock world but actually belonged entirely to them. “Take What You Want”, “Kick” and “Fire it Up” are archetypes of that process. They are Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
While Britpop was a retrogressive media construct, Oasis were a genuine socio-musical phenomenon (albeit also retrogressive!). And at their heart was, of course, Liam Gallagher, bullishly Manc, sneeringly rude and pugnaciously charismatic, a proper rock star, perhaps the last before the oncoming generation of coffee-drinking, fleece-wearing nice-boys-next-door.He’s mellowed with age; the 2019 documentary As It Was revealed a more self-aware, likeable fellow, yet retaining just enough truculent edge. It’s a shame that more the latter is not present on his third solo studio album.Gallagher told Read more ...
Tim Cumming
As break-up albums go, Heidi Talbot’s new set knocks that tightly wound ball of heartbreak, separation and release into the front rank, on an arc of often beautifully melodic self-penned songs, choice covers, and accompanists including guitarist Mark Knopfler and fiddle player, singer and the album's producer Dirk Powell.After more than a decade of marriage and musical collaboration with fiddler John McCusker, Sing it for a Lifetime finds Talbot negotiating the rapids of that union’s end. The title song opens the album with a beguiling melody carrying hard-won words that speak of their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Touched by Rodin in a Paris Museum” is a 14-minute consideration of exactly what its title says: the impact of encountering Auguste Rodin’s work in person. The composition features piano only. There are nods to Debussy and Ravel. The playing is measured and minimal yet still full-bodied. At odd points, there are seconds of complete silence.Taped in 1970, this recording was meant to feature on an album which was never issued. It would have been the third by Patty Waters, following-up her ESP-Disk LPs Sings (1965) and College Tour (1966). After these, Waters seemed to have vanished. Actually, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Harry Styles’ previous two albums sounded like someone rifling pleasantly through the history of pop and rock, but always genially and politely. More entertaining than his scalpels-ready critics wished when One Direction paused in 2016, those albums still didn’t fully hold together as bodies of work. Harry’s House does. It’s also more middle-of-the-road, albeit in a self-aware and musically sussed way.The nearest historical equivalent to Styles’ career is probably Robbie Williams, but whereas Williams went off on bizarre tangents that somehow usually worked, Styles is smoother. Even more so Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“I live to survive another heartache/I live to survive another mistake,” roars a sold-out Heaven. It’s a new song but everyone seems to know it. It’s not MØ’s most famous song but is the bluntest monster banger of the night, crunching four-to-the-floor club-pop that brooks no argument. It’s the last of the set (prior to an encore) and MØ is now a perspiring ball of energy. She’s clad in a white vest top, black shorts, and leather effect chaps, their ties flapping everywhere, as are her two red-auburn pigtails. Then she hurls herself into the crowd and continues the song born aloft, lying on Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I have to confess, it’s a long time since I’ve thought about the Nitty Gritty Dirty Band and a new album serves as a reminder of how good they were, and are. Formed in Long Beach, California in 1966 by a Bob Dylan-obsessed high school student named Jeff Hanna, the band has been through many incarnations (Jackson Browne was briefly a member) and has worked with some great names, among them Mother Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, and Merle Travis on Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972) and scored a hit with a cover of “Mr Bojangles”, thus helping to bring folk-rock to the mainstream. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Toronto’s Tallies have acknowledged their fondness for Aztec Camera, The Smiths and The Sundays. Add Cocteau Twins into the building blocks, too. Encountering a band so strongly immersed in the back catalogues of familiar names can obscure what’s really notable about them. Do they transcend their influences?Seeing them live on the final date of a short UK tour – booked before the July release of their second album Patina – meets the question head on. Yes, a Smiths “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” guitar swirl fuses with a Cocteau’s shimmer. And The Sundays are never far.But whatever there is Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Swedish singer Lykke Li has called her new album Eyeye “her most intimate work to date”. In regard to Lykke Li’s music, this feels almost impossible at this point. Her music has time and time again explored the depths of heartbreak. Is it possible to write a song more intimate than “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone”?Eyeye is her fifth album and it sees Li return to familiar topics of love and heartbreak. She also returns to work with Björn Yttling, who worked on her first three albums. Eyeye leaves the more electronic experiments of 2018’s So Sad So Sexy behind and returns to more minimal, Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
“This town makes me sweat”, declared Charlotte Aitchison at one point in this set, as she took a brief breather between songs. The 29-year-old should have tried being in the audience, for this was a sweat-drenched evening right from the opening seconds, with a wildly devoted crowd which congregated into a heaving mass rapidly and consistently.Aitchison might have too many quirks to ascend beyond a venue like the O2 Academy, but something about both her personality and performance suggested she is better suited to such a setting anyway.Which isn’t to say that the Essex native is Read more ...