New music
Thomas H. Green
In the four years since Dizzee Rascal’s last album the landscape around grime has changed. In 2013 grime MCs were busy hooking up with as many pop stars as possible, fusing their machine-gun lyricism with Autotune-addled pap pop. A Dizzee single from that time even featured a collaboration with Robbie Williams. With the ascent of Skepta, Stormzy, Jme, Novelist et al, grime has partly returned to its original fusion of spiky word-flow and caustic electronics. Dizzee’s been listening. His sixth album showcases an MC determined to astonish, and succeeding.The best those turning to Raskit for Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
If there’s a downside to the resurgence of vinyl, it’s that all that’s left in most charity shops these days is James Galway and his cursed flute and Max Bygraves medley albums. Then again, there’s always new stuff coming in so it’s down to everybody to get in there quick, before the local record shops hoover up all the gems. And there it is. Many small towns now have local record shops again. That’s surely something to celebrate. There’s even a Vinyl Festival this September in Rotherhithe [Notification 20.7.2017: This event has been cancelled] with a hundred stalls featuring independent Read more ...
Liz Thomson
What’s not to like about To My Roots, the third album by singer-songwriter Emma Stevens? That’s the problem. Not just her problem, of course, but the problem with so many DIY indie artists who release albums, often crowdfunded (as this was), pick-up download traffic, sell albums off the back of tours, and maybe find a champion on mainstream radio. It's bland. Nothing to dislike but nothing to hook you in. Competent, but not memorable.Terry Wogan, who championed Eva Cassidy (unexceptional talent, life cut tragically short) and Beth Nielsen Chapman (exemplary singer-songwriter), described Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Boris are a trio of Japanese noise rockers who are masters of all things heavy, and Dear, a double album of superior quality, marks the band’s 25th anniversary as a going concern. Covering a range of bases from doomy slabs of heavy noise to riff-tastic stoner rock, distortion-soaked dream pop and beyond, there is nothing jaded about Dear, and nor is there anything clunky about the band’s subtle genre-skipping. In fact, this album exudes a vitality that many bands which have been around for half as long as this mighty leviathan frequently have difficulty mustering.“DOWN - Domination of Waiting Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Tough security checks mean I make it to British Summer Time’s main stage just moments before the opening chords of the early evening set from The Lumineers.The Denver-based band’s rousing folk rock beats burn beneath blue skies; a kick drum and chilled Americana vibes warming up the crowds for the forthcoming acts – Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The crowd cranks up a gear as the band kicks off with the famous "Ho Hey", but frontman Wesley Schultz halts proceedings as there’s not enough audience participation. He does realise that this is the British Summertime Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
To anyone other than Eighties and Nineties indie obsessives, the guitarist from The House of Love and Levitation and the singer from Adorable getting together in 2014 did not cause a stir. However, both had stylistically leapt away from their pasts, and the resulting album, Broken Heart Surgery, showcased rich, heart-worn songs, filtered through a sensibility somewhere between Lee Hazelwood and John Barry 1960s film scores. It brought them a new audience. Their second album is equally palatable.Boasting great cover art by photographer Rosanne de Lange, featuring the now disappeared car Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In February 1983, New Musical Express ran a cover feature categorising what it termed “positive punk”. Bands co-opted into this ostensibly new trend were Blood & Roses, Brigandage, Danse Society, Rubella Ballet, Sex Gang Children, Southern Death Cult, The Specimen, UK Decay and The Virgin Prunes. Writer Richard North – a member of Brigandage – said the unifying factors were “mystical/metaphysical imagery”, “the sub-world of Crowleyan abyss” and personal style taking in backcombing, blue hair, long black skirts, red trousers and bootlace ties. The Doors were, he said, an influence. So were Read more ...
Matthew Wright
New Orleans trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah has been at the forefront of the movement to reinvent jazz for some time. On this album he claims to be creating a new kind of “Stretch Music” (and has created an app of the same name, which won Jazz FM’s innovation award), supposedly a genre-blind evolution of jazz. The concept of diaspora, inspired by his experience of New Orleans multiculturalism, is an exploration of the African-American musical contributions to jazz. In this respect he’s joining several other young(ish) musicians of jazz origins including Britain’s Shabaka Hutchings, Read more ...
joe.muggs
For over 30 years, Melvins have been flagbearers for a kind of foundational American underground rock. Monstrously psychedelic, heavy as lead, mischievous and angry, they are part of a lineage that connects to squarepeg counterculture forefathers like Beefheart and The Fugs, share swathes of DNA with heavy metal and particularly Black Sabbath, and are particularly impervious to outside cultural shifts. Though they were fleetingly affiliated by the media with grunge, thanks to founder Buzz Osborne's musical and personal relationship to Kurt Cobain, they were something else. And along with Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Manchester International Festival – a biennale of new creative work – this year has a new artistic director in John McGrath, and there’s no large-scale new opera or prominent "classical" work, it would seem, other than Raymond Yiu’s song cycle, The World Was Once All Miracle, performed on Tuesday by Roderick Williams with the BBC Philharmonic. But the BBC Philharmonic also teamed up with Icelandic composer-photographer-creator Jóhann Jóhannsson for an ambitious premiere at the Bridgewater Hall, Last And First Men, that McGrath clearly sees as one of the festival’s most substantial Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The precocious Steve Winwood joined the Spencer Davis Group when he was 14, when the Sixties themselves were still young, and hasn’t really stopped ever since. True, it has been nearly a decade since his last album of new material, Nine Lives, but he has toured with Eric Clapton and Tom Petty, pops up at assorted festivals and live events, and has put together a highly capable live band that can bend his songs into shapes you might never have thought possible. His voice and abilities on guitar and Hammond B3 organ (a wonderfully quaint instrument which looks like a small wardrobe) remain Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Back in 2013, Haim's debut seemed like the freshest breath of air in a slightly stuffy rock scene. The girls' inimitable musical style – a kind of blend of Stevie Nicks and Shania Twain – lit up any number of radio playlists. Equally important was their air of authenticity. These three musical prodigies from LA were literally sisters and literally doing it for themselves. But there were still nagging doubts – particularly after one TV performance which they, rather oddly, dedicated to David Cameron. For all their hippy hairstyles were the girls actually as free- Read more ...