New music
Ellie Porter
“We will be taking you on a journey,” promises Caro Emerald at the start of tonight’s return to the Royal Albert Hall, which she last played back in April 2017 – and for the next 90 minutes, that’s what jazz-pop queen Emerald and her slick seven-piece band, the Grandmono Orchestra, do. Having bustled in from the cold and dark Halloween night, the audience is ready to be swept away to somewhere a lot more sunny.Prior to departure, however, is a sombre, six-song set by Loren Nine – not a nine-piece jazz combo but a diminutive Dutch singer-songwriter who sits down at her keyboard and smilingly Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The young Dublin folk trio fuse vocal harmonies with superb acoustic musicianship, primarily on cello, fiddle and Nyckelharpa. They bring together Irish and Nordic – specifically Finnish – folk traditions, building them to dizzying heights on a foundation of acoustic drones and group interplay. The trio brought their second album, Starfall, to the Southbank for the last date of a UK tour on Wednesday night. Fresh from touring their original score for Swan Lake with Teac Damsa dance troupe, they’ve also performed with The National and headlined The Gloaming fiddler Martin Hayes’ Masters Read more ...
joe.muggs
If there's anyone on this godforsaken planet who is fully entitled to emote their way through a mash-up of “Imagine” and “What a Wonderful World”, it's Barbra Streisand, right? This, after all, is the woman who was able to deliver “Life on Mars” as a Vegas showstopper, complete with the pronunciation “from Eye-beetser to the Norfolk Broads” and make it into a thing of wonder. This is the woman who has personified camp sincerity for decades, for whom no orchestra is too big, and no crescendo too grandiose. She is, quite often, beyond good and evil, musically speaking.One thing that is just Read more ...
Tim Cumming
You get plenty of Dylan for your buck these days, with the Mondo Scripto exhibition currently at the Halcyon Gallery in London, and a totemic and arrestingly beautiful set of Jerry Schatzberg's photographs of mid-Sixties Dylan in all his fuzzy glory just published by ACC Art Books. And now, following on from last winter's gospel-era entry into the Bootleg Series, Trouble No More, comes another generous hawl from the tape archives.At first sight, the prospect of a single album’s worth of sessions spread across six discs and 87 tracks – even if it is Blood on the Tracks – is a daunting one, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
One of the major abiding musical memories of the late 1990s for many wasn’t so much five Mancunians ripping off Beatles’ songs, but Keith Flint of The Prodigy, growling “I’m a Firestarter/Twisted Firestarter” while all kinds of electronic battery was let loose. The Essex Crew may no longer be the media folk devils of “Firestarter” and “Smack My Bitch Up” but they still pack a mighty punch and No Tourists, their first album since 2015’s The Day Is My Enemy and their seventh in all, is ample proof that Liam, Keith and Maxim have no intentions of sitting on their laurels anytime yet.Rocking a Read more ...
theartsdesk
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why. Baxter Dury, Etienne de Crécy and Delilah Holliday - B.E.D. ★★★★★ A small but perfectly sleazy work of sweary, cynical brillianceBob Dylan - More Blood, More Tracks ★★★★★ The fourteenth volume in the Bootleg Series is a keeperBrad Mehldau Trio - Seymour Reads the Constitution! ★★★★★ Prolific improvising pianist creates the apotheosis of the piano trioThe Breeders - All Nerve ★★★★★ Kim and Kelly Deal - plus Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Winter came to Birmingham this weekend but fortunately, so did a modern-day, multi-national Viking band of rockers, consisting of Corrosion Of Conformity and Orange Goblin, ably assisted by Fireball Ministry and Black Moth. With no intention of moping about, in the words of Orange Goblin lead singer Ben Ward, they came to “get drunk and get wild”, and that is exactly what happened.Neither Corrosion Of Conformity nor Orange Goblin are spring chickens, having been around since 1982 and 1995 respectively, but that didn’t affect their stride in any way, with both bands pumping out an energy that Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Forty years on from her eponymous debut album, the eldest child of Johnny Cash and his first wife Vivian Liberto returns after a near five-year gap from recording with a collection of songs that walk the hyphen of country-rock. Hardly surprising for a musician with such impeccable country credentials who left Nashville for New York.Rosanne Cash’s distinctive voice is to the fore, the band tight, the sound bright and she has some pretty classy company – jazz man Dan Reiser on percussion, and old friends Kris Kristofferson and Elvis Costello who add vocals on “8 Gods of Harlem”, an understated Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Think of Cocteau Twins. Their label 4AD will inevitably be high on the list of markers coming to mind. Whatever they were like as people, mysterious, oblique, shadowy and other similar adjectives were conjured for the band – and label alike. Despite interpretations of them as something other, their 1990 album 4AD Heaven or Las Vegas went Top Ten in the UK, entered the American Top 100 and sold quarter of a million copies.Yet Cocteau Twins’ final two albums came out on Fontana, an adjunct of the major label Phonogram which, in time, was absorbed into the multi-national conglomerate Universal. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Certain artists’ success lies in a direct ability to pastiche the past into something new and bumptious. Oasis, The Scissor Sisters and The Vaccines all had this in spades and, at their best, created music whose pizzazz and punch eventually rendered their retro allusions irrelevant. The musical back-references are still there but the albums in question long ago outgrew what was so obvious on first listening. The second album from bigger-in-America Derby rockers The Struts falls joyfully into such territory with a couldn’t-give-a-damn insouciance.The Struts look the part, adopting a dandy-ish Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In our era of TV so-called talent shows and cynically manufactured stars, how wonderful it is that many of the truly talented musicians who for decades have written the soundtracks of so many lives are releasing late-career albums that can stop you in your tracks. This year has been particularly rich – Joan Baez, Paul Simon, Judy Collins/Stephen Stills – and now David Crosby, with his fourth album in as many years.Here If You Listen finds Croz working once again with Michelle Willis, Becca Stevens and Michael League, all of whom put their individual prints on Lighthouse (2016). The album was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rock critic Greil Marcus observed that John Fogerty’s songs are “about as contrived as the weather”, and there can surely never have been such an easy and instinctive songwriter in rock’n’roll. After his glory years with Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fogerty endured a painful period of career-threatening lawsuits, but has successfully re-emerged as one of the grand icons of rock’s golden age.His live band is now a family affair, since for this show at the O2 he was flanked by his son Shane on guitar, with whom he frequently indulges in bouts of twin-guitar arm-wrestling, and was sometimes Read more ...