New music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
As frontman and lyricist of US rockers The Hold Steady, Craig Finn specialises in vivid storytelling featuring larger than life characters. It’s a writing style that he has carried with him into his solo work too even if, as he says, the stories are “more vulnerable and maybe a little more personal” than fans of his other band may be used to.It’s been a busy year for Finn. Fourth solo album I Need A New War, released in April, completed what he has described as a trilogy of records with producer Josh Kaufman. It’s musically spacious and lyrically dense, its bright spots of harmonica and Read more ...
mark.kidel
PJ Harvey is not just a consummate rock musician but a multi-talented artist, who has re-invented herself throughout her career. She paints and makes sculpture, has participated with Artangel in an ambitious art installation, and written and performed theatre and film music. The music for the stage version of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s classic Hollywood blockbuster and Betty Davis vehicle All About Eve is the latest of her accomplishments.The exciting Belgian director Ivo Van Hove made a shrewd choice, as Harvey has shown herself to be expert at evoking the inner turmoil of women in conflict – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s unfortunate that LAHS’s opening track is titled “Holding Pattern” as the album only achieves lift off with its ninth cut “Light Yearly”, a chugging workout with spiralling guitar and echoes of Sixties folk rock if it were refracted through an opaque crystal. Up to this point, the fourth album by Los Angeles quartet Allah-Las has drifted through a series of sparse, undernourished songs – including “Roco Ono”, a meandering instrumental – which draw a thread between Luna, All Things Must Pass George Harrison and Peruvian band We All Together.Notwithstanding “Pleasure” and “Prazer Em Te Read more ...
Ellie Porter
Having exploded on to the scene like a cross between Queen and My Chemical Romance, Derby’s young glam-rock upstarts the Struts are on top of the world. They've cracked America, supported the Rolling Stones, the Who, Mötley Crüe, Foo Fighters and Guns N’Roses and delighted a home crowd at 2018's Download festival, and are currently thrilling audiences on their own ludicrously entertaining headline tour.Tonight they hit London, and judging by the fevered crowd jammed into the Kentish Town Forum there’s a good night to come. The lights go down and the band saunter on, fully aware that it’s Read more ...
Richard Hawley, Barrowland, Glasgow - black clad crooner's songs remain full of atmosphere and heart
Jonathan Geddes
When Richard Hawley arrived onstage, he had a confession to make. “I like to talk”, he declared, before adding “and play rock n’ roll”. Both were delivered in ample supply during the ensuing performance, the black clad quiff wearing troubadour a natural fit for one of Scotland’s most famed rock n’ roll locations.Yet if the Sheffield native’s persona of a somewhat bruised crooner can flourish in his songs, then his regular chatter tended towards the lighter side. Anecdotes regarding his manager being asked if he had Viagra outside the venue, declarations that he fancied a move to Scotland Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Bill Frisell is all about sound and melody and enhancing whatever context he is in.” That quote, which defines both the American guitarist’s gentle and benign nature and his huge level of musicianship, is from Emma Franz, who recently directed and produced a film portrait of him.In Frisell’s new project, Harmony, which also, finally, marks his debut on Blue Note Records with an album in his own name, he applies that principle to working with singers. “I’m singing with my guitar and the rest are singing with their voices. But basically that’s what it is: we’re singing together,” he has said Read more ...
mark.kidel
Foals, the band with a trademark sound characterised by the African-style intricate interplay of rhythm rather than lead guitars, returns with what amounts to the second half of a double album. The first half was released last spring, and this new release might well feel like more of the same. But the band’s powers of invention are well up to creating tracks that shine on their own.Foals trade on high energy sophisticated pop. They have been compared to Talking Heads, and there is a similar mixture of intelligence and danceability. “Wash Out” is the stand-out track, with cross-threaded Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s an easy joke to suggest that James Arthur needs an editor. By this point, the 31-year-old singer is almost as famous for his lyrical mis-steps and ill-advised use of Twitter as his 2012 The X Factor victory. You, his third album, seems to have been subject to the longest roll-out in history (first single, “Naked”, was released almost two years ago), and arrives at 17 tracks and over an hour in length. Prune away at least four soporific ballads, though, and you’ll find a decent pop-soul album; the insincerity of previous releases replaced with often gut-wrenching takes on broken Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The temptation with the 20th anniversary reissue of Ḣ-Camp Meets Lo-Fi (Explosion Picture Score) is to look for traces of what came earlier and pointers towards what would come in Iceland’s music. The album was credited to Dip, a collaboration between former Sugarcubes drummer Sigtryggur Baldursson and the on-the-up Jóhann Jóhannsson.The latter soon went on form Apparat Organ Quintet and instigate the arts collective Kitchen Motors. By the time of his 2018 death, he was internationally known for his soundtrack music for Sicario, The Theory of Everything and more, and solo works such as Orphée Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I had my first inter-racial relationship.” Moments after walking on stage and before the first song, PP Arnold is reminiscing about when she first arrived in Britain in 1966. The America she knew had barriers, ones she found weren’t apparent in “Swinging London.” Later in this show she says, “Mick Jagger invited me for a walk in the park.” That year, Ike & Tina Turner were billed on The Rolling Stones’ UK tour and she was an Ikette, one of the backing singers and dancers.Although she confessed “I know, I’m a bit long-winded tonight” during the encore, this appearance was about her voice Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Spaghetti Western guitar, rumbling bass, a rattling keyboard pulse and an unyielding forward thrust combine to delineate Somebody's Knocking’s opening cut “Disbelief Suspension”. Then there’s that growling yet melodic voice delivering sinister lines like “gonna fly to the sun in a helicopter…you wanna take a ride.” Recognisably, it’s Mark Lanegan. Equally perceptibly, his new album is another winning episode in the purple period he’s been enjoying over the last four years or so.The album’s PR material finds him declaring his fondness for Depeche Mode and New Order, a predilection first Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Canadian DJ-producer Philippe Aubin-Dionne – AKA Jacques Greene – has had a successful career in global clubland. One release in particular, his spacey 2011 deconstruction of the song “Deuces” by R&B star Ciara, which he entitled “Another Girl”, created waves in the world of house music. His 2017 album Feel Infinite demonstrated he had vision enough to hold listeners on a longer electronic journey. Dawn Chorus steps forward likeably from that set.It is an album that’s all about mood, rather than songs, although there are vocals here and there. The lead single, the lazily acidic “Night Read more ...