New music
Peter Culshaw
Arriving on Thursday for the opening act Orchestra Baobab’s instantly recognisable mellifluous tones spreading out from the main stage over the Wiltshire countryside, it was clear that a high standard had been set for the rest of WOMAD. Whether it's in a small bar in Dakar, the Jazz Café in London, or playing to many thousands here, they are one of the great bands – fabulously musical without being flashy. Old-style Senegalese magic with hints of Latin and radiating immense warmth, they are practically critic-proof.While hundreds of global acts performed over the weekend, many of the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Kendal Calling is a lovely festival. Charmingly misnamed – it’s set 30 miles from Kendal in Lowther Deer Park, a couple of miles from Penrith, in the northern Lakes – it takes place over four days in spectacularly beautiful Cumbrian countryside. It has clearly been lovingly nurtured, but Kendal Calling has many natural attributes going for it: leafy woodland mystery, rolling hills, lakes, all that caper, plus a cosy, walkable site and a main stage set in a tree-fringed bowl which gives the feel of a shallow amphitheatre.Naturally, by lunchtime on Thursday the entire place is already a mud Read more ...
Liz Thomson
For an act that hasn't visited the UK since 2009, the Indigo Girls might have been surprised at the audience's familiarity with their work. It’s now a given that artists have to tour to sell records, but judging by the vigour with which the audience in Islington joined in with the songs, sometimes in an informal call-and-response, the UK must provide a good flow of royalties. And no doubt absence makes the heart grow fonder.Sunday night closed out a UK tour, the highlight of which was the long-established Cambridge Folk Festival, now twinned with the even longer-established folk festival in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Now in its 35 year, Womad is embedded into British festival culture, flying the flags of a musical multiculturalism that is about breaking down barriers and building new relationships. It’s not something you want to lose.Aside from pleasurable headliners – the likes of Oumou Sangare, Toots and the Maytals and Ladysmith Black Mambazo – it’s the names you don’t know who often leave the deepest impression. The BBC Radio 3 Charlie Gillett Stage hosted numerous full-flavoured festival debuts – the London-Greek sound of Kourelou, for instance, or Italian acoustic trio Vesevo’s folk tunes from Read more ...
Helen Wallace
"Everyone suddenly burst out singing"’ wrote Siegfried Sassoon in his paean to humanity amidst the horror of war, "Everyone Sang". And sing they did, all 180 of them, crammed onto Garsington’s modest stage for its new community opera Silver Birch by Roxanna Panufnik to a libretto by Jessica Duchen. Here were primary school children, teenagers, professional singers, members of a women’s refuge, ex-military personnel, and a waggy-tailed dog. Even Sassoon’s own great-nephew lent voice to a chorus of roof-raising passion and purpose.And though the poet’s ghost (an expressive Bradley Travis) Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Girl Ray. Man Ray. Geddit? Earl Grey, the debut album from London female three-piece Girl Ray isn’t as freewheeling as the art of the man whose name they rework, but it is strikingly reminiscent of a particular strand of introspective 1980’s British music which balanced thoughtfulness with an awareness of classic reference points.While Girl Ray aren’t making things overtly explicit, there’s the Laura Nyro/Todd Rundgren piano arpeggios opening “Stupid Things”, and an Elizabeth Fraser trill to “Just Like That’s” vocal. The epic 13-minute title track, coloured with electric piano, organ and Read more ...
Liz Thomson
On a dreary evening in what passes for summer, the news unutterably grim, an evening in the company of South Africa’s greatest export can’t help but lift the spirits. The nine singers that comprise Ladysmith Black Mambazo are mostly blood family, sons of Joseph Shabalala - who founded the group in 1960 following a series of dreams in which he heard traditional Zulu isicathamiya - their cousins and two friends, and what an amazing stage act they are.It’s not just their sound – instantly recognisable, fixed in the mind’s ear – but their look and their athleticism: leaping, high-kicking, dancing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Between them, Marylebone Beat Girls and Milk of the Tree cover the years 1964 to 1973. Each collects tracks recorded by female singers: whether credited as solo acts, fronting a band or singer-songwriters performing self-penned material. That the two compilations dovetail is coincidental – they were released by different labels on the same day – but they embrace the period when the singer-songwriter was codified and when, as the liner notes of Milk of the Tree put it, “female voices began to be widely heard in the [music] industry.”As that quote suggests, Milk of the Tree: An Anthology Of Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Think of Randy Newman and the image conjured up may be of a lugubrious piano man with a sardonic streak. Or perhaps the composer responsible for countless Pixar soundtracks. But there is more to the bespectacled songsmith than just his witty songs and orchestral themes. There are also his theatrical flourishes. And Dark Matter, Newman's first singer-songwriter LP in a while, starts in just such a cabaret mood"The Great Debate" takes the form of a discussion, weighing up the pros and cons of science and religion in an eight-minute epic complete with gospel choirs and spoken-words. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This year’s Førdefestivalen was gabled by an opening Nordic Sound Folk Orchestra showcase and a spectacular closing gala, live-streamed and broadcast Europe-wide. It featured a dizzyingly eclectic range of world and Nordic folk bands, as well as the speediest stage turn-arounds I’ve ever seen.Førdefestivalen is a unique musical gathering in a small Norwegian town on Norway’s west coast, deep in fjord country, the landscape painter Nikolai Astrup’s habitat. Skydiving from the nearby Hafstadfjellet mountain (alas, sometimes fatally) is a popular pastime. Jumpers launch themselves from the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s a rather shocking 20 years since the somewhat unfairly maligned second Black Grape album Stupid Stupid Stupid was released, after which the band went into freefall before imploding. To celebrate this anniversary, or more likely because it might raise them a few quid, Shaun Ryder and Kermit have left the rest of the band out in the cold and wandered into the studio with über-producer Youth for an album that, while it doesn’t hit the heights of the best of Black Grape’s output from the ‘90s, is considerably better than might be expected.Laidback, sunny and funky tunes marinated in a fug of Read more ...
joe.muggs
The orchestral-electronic sounds which the Erased Tapes label epitomises exist balanced on a knife-edge of extreme tastefulness. Not quite fitting into either the classical or the club-electronica worlds, the style is closest to film composition – indeed artists like Jóhann Jóhannsson are increasingly bringing the sound right to the heart of the Hollywood establishment – and can be extremely popular: Erased Tapes's Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds are big names, easily filling big halls worldwide. But it's still viewed with some wariness by those self-conscious about their tastes: to some it all Read more ...