New music
Thomas H. Green
Enough hyping! This month, without further ado, let’s head straight to the reviews…VINYL OF THE MONTHLOR Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (Lo Records)With Public Service Broadcasting’s The Race for Space making a noise only three years ago (and First Man doing the rounds at the cinema), who’d have thunk there was an appetite for more moon landing-based electronica. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t, but Belfast DJ-producer LOR has gone for it anyway, with a deliciously warm and quirky two sides of technotronic goodness. A lunar orbit rendezvous is the process by which astronauts travel from their Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
London’s Palace Theatre this week celebrated the thousandth performance of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which opened there back in 2016. Like everything else JK Rowing puts her hand to, it’s been an outrageous success, taking the post-Hogwarts wizarding world further into the future than any other part of the franchise. At least that’s what I understand: I’ve only watched four of the films and read none of the books. However, the music from the production, in and of its own right, assuredly has something.Imogen Heap has been many times around the music biz block, never quite making it Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
My Name is Safe in Your Mouth takes off with “Above You, Around You”, its fourth track. Up to that point, progress has been stately. Minimal piano refrains, distantly chiming guitars, heartbeat percussion, string swells and a plaintive, multi-tracked voice have summoned a subdued yet intense mood. Then, the curtain is drawn and an ascending musical drama spills from the speakers.Once the new ambience is established, the ensuing songs maintain the undulating flow to culminate with the grandeur – even more so than “Above You, Around You” – of album closer “Hidden Sea”. My Name is Safe in Your Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When Jazz on a Summer's Day was first seen in American cinemas in March 1960, it showed that seeing popular music live could be a leisure activity akin to watching high-end sports. Indeed, director Bert Stern intercut the musical performances he captured on film with footage of yachts trying-out for 1958’s America’s Cup. The audience at Rhode Island’s July 1958 Newport Jazz Festival were caught in the congenial surroundings of the Freebody Park over the event’s four days expressing their appreciation in, generally, a reserved and grown-up fashion.Chuck Berry, who played Newport on the Read more ...
howard.male
Whatever happened to real singer-songwriters? That is to say the kind of artist that raged against society’s ills in one song, and sung tenderly or bitterly of lost love in the next. Today’s insipid equivalent tends to be stuck in a perpetual adolescence, imparting solipsistic lyrics that have no more depth than their tweets. But then there’s Sarah Gillespie. Wishbones is her fourth album in just under a decade and what a gem it is. It’s so brimming over with memorable characters and imagery, so alive with her characteristic wit, savvy and sensitivity, that it leaves the afterglow of a great Read more ...
joe.muggs
“I don't peak early / I don't peak at all,” goes the wryly self-aware line in the opening song here, “Take me to the Movies”. Thirty-five years since he started releasing records, Mascis isn't interested in peaking, progress or much else beyond delivering the same he always has.Weary, anhedonic introversion delivered in a cracked Neil Young moan, and primal blues rock guitar soloing, are packed into perfect pop structures with pithy or heartstring-tugging couplets that twinkle like a razor sharp intelligence shining out from behind heavy lidded eyes. The differences between Dinosaur albums Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Olly Murs has done alright for himself. After finishing second in 2009’s X Factor, he’s managed to forge a successful pop career and made a genuinely decent fist of TV presenting (most recently as a mentor on The Voice). Now he’s back with his first album in two years, You Know I Know, which comes with a CD of past hits bolted on. The album proper features collaborations with an impressive list of names, including Ed Sheeran, Shaggy, Snoop Dogg and even Nile Rogers. It’s also predictably, unspeakably and mind-numbingly ordinary. “Move” is, by some Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Pram are an experimental pop band from Moseley in Birmingham, who specialise in creating quirky soundscapes, eerie songs and whoozy instrumentals using all manner of strange instruments. They are also unlikely to ever achieve a mass following. The Good, The Bad & The Queen, on the other hand, are a modern-day supergroup, made up of former members of The Clash, Fela Anikulapo Kuti's Africa '70, Blur and The Verve, who have seemingly tried to appropriate Pram’s sonic template to make music that is infinitely less interesting but is likely to be heard by considerably more people than our Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“That’s what we fucking do!” So says Maxim at the concert’s very end, surveying the sweating, raving carnage of 4,500 souls before him. One of The Prodigy’s two frontman, he stands still finally, after spending the rest of the gig pacing and rushing up and down the lip of the stage like a caged panther. We all know what he means. He means that his band have wrung us out, taken us to a fervour of devil-may-care limb-swinging derangement. The Prodigy always bring the party and, yet again, 28 years into their career, they wreak havoc in a way very few bands of any age or era can.The stage Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Wow, this is truly infectious! Feel-good music played so well and by a guy whose day job is as an actor. And not a bit-part player – this is the man who gave us David Levinson in Independence Day and Dr Iain Malcolm in Jurassic Park and who made his screen debut with Charles Bronson in Death Wish. He also had a cameo in Annie Hall, one of the most beloved of movies by another part-time jazz man. “I Wish I Knew (How It Would Feel to be Free)” is a nice nod to what is now a dual career.Take a bow Jeff Goldblum who, with a little help from friends Imelda May, Haley Reinhart, Sarah Silverman and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although John & Beverley Martyn and Mott The Hoople were both signed to Island, the connection went further than being with the same label. When Guy Stevens conceived the band he named Mott The Hoople, the producer saw them as uniting the essence of Bob Dylan with that of The Rolling Stones. On their eponymous first album, issued in 1969, Ian Hunter’s vocals are so like Dylan it edges into the preposterous. That same year John & Beverley Martyn made Stormbringer! in Woodstock. Two of its tracks featured The Band’s Levon Helm on drums. Dylan was a couple of steps away.Despite the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There are many layers of allusion that come with Marianne Faithfull’s powerful new album. The title is drawn from Keats, his formula for great poetry as opposed to instructive morality, and it’s towards a poetry of experience rather than the fixed wheel of morality that Faithfull bends her muse, just as she has always done.The album’s inside artwork features pictures of, among others, William Burroughs and a young Faithfull with a young Bob Dylan before his manual typewriter – totems of negative capability in storm-force creative conditions – and the album itself also features some musical Read more ...