New music
Thomas H. Green
There’s nowhere to go with this one, is there? Like any music writer, I want to come at James Blunt afresh. I’d love to say, “No, put your prejudices away, this album is actually alright and here’s why…”, but even the most accomplished sophist would, I suspect, find this impossible. That said, there’s not much quality difference between the better tracks here and those on Ed Sheeran’s well-loved, hugely successful Divide. The Bee Gees-like “Heartbeat”, with its simple guitar motif, underplayed drum tattoos and subtle, catchy tune is the best song on The Afterlove and I’d as soon listen to it Read more ...
joe.muggs
One tries not to conflate the man and the music too much. Getting overly tangled up in questions of authenticity is a fool's errand, songs are ultimately public property, and in general, short of Gary Glitter-level crimes, dislike of a pop star's demeanour or attitudes shouldn't stand in the way of enjoyment of a good piece of music. All that said, snide, smirking, condescending, tax-avoiding Gary Barlow makes it very, very hard to enjoy his work.Not that there's a huge amount to enjoy here. It's a shame, because after being a good to excellent boyband, Take That upset every standard pop Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Craig David’s two-hour show, in two parts, receives an ecstatic response in Brighton. The audience, dominated by women in their twenties, is loudly vocal in their appreciation, apparently knowing every word to every song on his six albums. It feels as if you might jump from the balcony, where I’m seated, and surf across the shimmying capacity crowd, buoyed up solely by the rising waves of love for this man.The first half isn’t for me. David’s band arrive in darkness and warm things up with an intro, then he strolls on, bearded, in white sweats, singing the 2005 album track, “My Love Don’t Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Silver Eye is Goldfrapp’s seventh long-player in an 18-year career that has taken in electronica sounds of all stripes. It sees the duo make a stab at melding together the club-friendly electropop and the witchy rural folk-noir sounds of their repertoire. Not ones to repeat themselves sonically, this involves the band inhabiting a sound characterised by dirty and sparse electronics with distorted, helium-powered vocals that annoyingly bring to mind Thereza Bazar of Eighties pop-muppets, Dollar.While this is initially an interesting and intriguing concept, it soon starts to wear pretty thin. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tommy Sissons is a 21-year-old poet, originally from Brighton, now based in London. He has won a number of poetry slam championships, and has performed across the UK at venues ranging from the Boomtown Festival to the Royal Albert Hall. His debut collection Goodnight Son was published last year. Sissons has taught classes and workshops as far afield as Germany and as close to home as the Victoria & Albert Museum. He was a regular presenter of Channel 4 music programme Four to the Floor and was commissioned by the BBC to write a Remembrance Day poem in 2015. He will be appearing at the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On Jethro Tull's classic "Songs from the Wood" Ian Anderson promised "all things refined". And refined the band certain has been. Musically educated, too. For 40-odd years they have specialised in baroque rock and minstrel ballads all served up with harpsichords and flutes. There were even a couple of albums featuring a full orchestra. Yet, notably, string quartets have only made the occasional appearance. In a way, then, you could say an album like this is actually a little overdue. The thing is, though, Jethro Tull – The String Quartets isn't really a Tull album. Nor is it Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lebanese singer Yasmine Hamdan founded Beirut’s groundbreaking 1990s electro-duo Soapkills with Zeid Hamdan – the first Middle Eastern electro band to garner a cult following across the Arab world. More recently she featured in Jim Jarmusch’s 2013 movie, Only Lovers Left Alive, the same year she released her debut album, Ya Nass, on the hip Berlin label Crammed. Her latest is a dreamy, lyrical foray into the shifting soundscapes of contemporary Arabic and Western music.For Al Jamilat (The Beautiful Ones), she turned to UK producers Luke Smith and Leo Abrahams, who between them have worked Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When a skiffle group called The Quarry Men played live in 1959, their repertoire included covers of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”. The folk-based skiffle was becoming rock. In 1960, when the same band became The Beatles, they added Berry’s “Carol” and “Little Queenie” to their set.For their first radio broadcast, on 8 March 1962, the Fabs played his “Memphis Tennessee”. On 30 July 1963, they taped Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” for what would be their second album, With The Beatles. Their final live show, in San Francisco on 29 August 1966 opened with a scrappy run Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Judy Collins was one of the great folk icons of the 1960s, competing for the spotlight with Joan Baez. Where the latter was instrumental in bringing Bob Dylan to wide prominence, the former was crucial in putting Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen on the musical map. She was first to record their music – on Wildflowers (1967), a seminal collection arranged by Joshua Rifkin, celebrated scholar of Bach, Beatles and Scott Joplin.Collins’ tastes are no less eclectic: she was exploring Brecht and Blitzstein in 1966 and, a decade later, won a Grammy nomination for “Send in the Clowns”, a trans- Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Listening to the Jesus and Mary Chain’s first album of new material in 19 years is like meeting up with an incorrigible old friend. Maybe there are a few more wrinkles and grey hairs but the original spirit is most definitely still there. Fuzzy, distorted guitars and a gallows humour may still predominate but maybe there is now also a certain maturity in the mix. Produced by Youth and featuring vocal contributions from Sky Ferreira, Isobel Campbell, Linda Reid and Bernadette Denning, as well as including a number of tunes that have been previously aired on Jim Reid solo projects, Damage and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Un Voyage Á Travers Dans Le Paysage Électronique Français, the French subtitle, goes further. French Touch is the first exhibition to celebrate and dig into France’s electronic music heritage: exploring the lineage which laid the ground for the world-wide success of Daft Punk.French Touch traces electronic music back from now to when the Futurist musician Luigi Russolo performed in Paris in 1914 – his home-country Italy had not received him warmly – and on through Maurice Martenot, Edgard Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Jean-Jacques Perrey (pictured below right in 1997), Jean-Michel Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For many, music is simply background, blurring tinnily from phones, sense-candy to “Like”, swipe and scroll alongside Pokemon and Snapchat. Music is content, filling digital space in the same way Polyfilla fills dents in walls. Zara Larsson epitomises this. Hers is the sound of nothing happening, albeit to a relentless masturbatory tang of gossipy sex obsession. Her second album is a void in the human soul.Larsson came to prominence on her native Sweden’s version of Britain’s Got Talent in 2008, aged only 10, and has been a star there ever since. As well as guesting for Tinie Tempah and David Read more ...