New music
Thomas H. Green
In recent years there’s been an explosion in feminised self-empowerment anthems, perhaps best epitomised by Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” (This is my fight song/Take back my life song/Prove I'm alright song). For those in need of a masculine equivalent, Dee Snider’s latest album may prove a tonic. A word of warning, though: where the feminine self-empowerment anthem can sometimes veer into the trite and solipsistic, this male version is simply a preening strut of preposterous bravado. Once that’s understood, however, there’s much to enjoy.Dee Snider was, for decades, the singer with face- Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Even seasoned veterans can suffer from programme amnesia over the four days and nights of rock, pop, dance and traditional music from around the world to be found at WOMAD, such is the array of choices across its 10 stages, ranging from the main arena through to the Ecotricity stage in Charlton Park’s leafy Arboretum – also home to the World of Words and Taste the World tents, the gong bathers and tarot readers in the World of Wellness.Most of us clearly knew where and when we were when Leftfield headlined on Friday night, reproducing their 1995 classic Leftism live and drawing one of the Read more ...
peter.quinn
This gloriously feel-good album offers irresistibly catchy hooks, a myriad of musical influences handled with an unruffled ease, plus a communicative power that thrills at every turn.Penned by the orchestra's MD and co-founder, multi-instrumentalist Paul Booth, album opener "Cross Channel" typifies the band's all-inclusive aesthetic, careening as it does between darbuka-fuelled rhythms and Afro-Cuban grooves of enormous heft, with pianist Alex Wilson's left hand driving the music to its inexorable climax. As evidenced by the freewheeling dialogue between Jonathan Mayer's sitar and Jason Yarde Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It might have begun with The Beatles espousal of Bob Dylan in 1964. There was also The Animals whose first two singles, issued the same year, repurposed tracks from Bob Dylan’s 1962 debut album. Before The Byrds hit big with their version of his “Mr. Tambourine Man” in summer 1965, Britain’s pop groups were already hip to Dylan and incorporating elements of his approach into their sound.Some acolytes like Donovan, who emerged in early 1965, even attempted to clone the Dylan look. Other were more subtle. The Searchers’ late 1964 single “What Have They Done to the Rain?” was an adaptation of a Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It starts with countdown to cacophony. A well-indicated pathway to absolute and total sensory overload. It’s calculated, clear and concise. The succinctly titled “Intro” hits like a sucker punch you never saw coming because it was never on the cards. The next thing that Sweden’s Echo Ladies presents is Kick-era INXS-level compression on “Almost Happy”, a track that answers the age-old question we’ve all struggled with – what would Peter Hook have sounded like with the Sisters of Mercy? This debut from Matilda Bogren, Joar Andersén and Mattis Andersson is awash with distorted synths, Read more ...
joe.muggs
He's known for his myriad collaborations – Public Image Ltd, Primal Scream, The Orb, The Edge, Can, all the way through to recent work with singers PJ Higgins and Hollie Cook – but Jah Wobble really deserves attention in his own right. A cosmic Cockney of immense erudition, he has created some extraordinary fusions of global sounds, ambient, electronica, post-punk and more. Perhaps the ideal illustration of his modus operandi is the incredible footage of him performing “Visions of You” with Sinead O'Connor and his band The Invaders Of The Heart, or maybe even better the interview Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As far as All Saints aficionados will be concerned, 17 years after they originally split they’ve pulled the dream team back together. Not only is regular “fifth member”, producer/songwriter K-Gee Gordon on board, but for two songs so is producer William Orbit, the man who, back in the day, polished “Pure Shores” and “Black Coffee” into their final chart-topping form. More to the point, Melanie Blatt, Shaznay Lewis and the Appleton sisters sound like they’re having a top time, bubbling with a joyousness which saturates their music.In the latter half of the Nineties All Saints were second only Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In spirit if not musical style, Musikk! shares chromosomes with late-Sixties ESP-label mavericks like Cro Magnon and Octopus, as well as The Residents of Meet the Residents, early This Heat and the Rock in Opposition collective. Sun Ra is in there too. The non-linear third album from Norway’s Skadedyr skips through jazz, traditional music, atonal scrapings and wind instrument burblings – all during the same piece. Musikk! defies conventions.It is, though, a focused suite of six disciplined compositions which range between just over a minute and close to 12 minutes. The key track is “Festen” Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Signed to FatCat records and purporting to create music that “recalls thoughtful days spent outdoors”, Breathe Panel’s self-titled album could easily be lost in the thriving soft-psych scene that seems to have set itself up in the south of England. Ultimately, though, Breathe Panel’s considered melodicism and dynamic range ensures that it’s a strikingly tender body of work that gets more and more enjoyable with each listen.Album opener “Carmine” quickly blossoms into the simple-yet-catchy guitar hooks and soaring chords which permeate much of the album. “Myself” treads along more gently; Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When The Blue Notebooks was originally released in February 2004, it did not seem to be an album which would have the afterlife it has enjoyed. It had little context. Max Richter’s second album was his first for the 130701 label which, at that point, had not yet set out its stall. Nonetheless, the label’s previous albums – especially Sylvain Chauveau’s Un Autre Décembre – provided evidence for a burgeoning minimalist undertow in contemporary music, one drawing on classical influences as much as ambient music, and one also unafraid of embracing electronica. 130701 was (and still is) at the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Shoegaze was only a moment really, a scene that flared briefly as the Eighties drew to a close. The music press – the “inkies” - used the term to describe bands, usually flop-fringed with lazy posture, whose heads would hang as they played gigs, ostensibly because they were looking at effects pedals and wotnot, but really because they and their music were shy. Following the example of My Bloody Valentine, they’d found a way to hide their pop songs amid distortion, deep down in it. But what no-one realised was that shoegaze’s reach would be so far and long.Who knows whether Hannah van Loon Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Graham "Since You Been Gone" Bonnet has long been one of hard rock’s unlikelier stars. When everyone else was wearing denim and leather he modelled himself on James Dean. And he actually started out as an R&B singer. Bonnet's change of direction came in 1979 when he was asked to join rock supergroup Rainbow. He never looked back. After Rainbow he joined the Michael Schenker Group and later formed his own band, Alcatrazz. Now, at 70, he's still ploughing the same musical furrow.In fact, Meanwhile Back in the Garage sounds so close to Bonnet's earlier band it could almost be a bunch of Read more ...