New music
Barney Harsent
Christmas came, and brought with it the usual silly-season headlines. "Vinyl outsells digital downloads" came the cries, bringing with them a vision of a plastic phoenix rising from the ashes. The truth was, of course, much more prosaic – digital downloads are falling faster than Icarus as more people take to streaming services and abandon even the most ethereal physical things for an internet full of stuff.Meanwhile, in the real world, a rather wonderful release by Laurie Shaw, a ludicrously prolific 22-year-old, Ireland-based singer songwriter, passed by with barely a mention. That’s the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been 12 months since the news guy wept and told us: David Bowie, ever out in front, became the first to depart in the year of musical mortality 2016. After the initial lamentations, the memorial tributes have been a mixed bag. Best was the life story stitched together for Radio 4 from a vast back catalogue of audio interviews. Less impactfully there was also the well-meaning misfire at the Proms, plus a messy Dadaist meta-biog rushed out by Paul Morley. Broadcast on what would have been Bowie’s 70th birthday, The Last Five Years is the best attempt yet to contextualise late Bowie in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sixty-eight tracks into the intriguing Action Time Vision, orthodoxy suddenly gives way to individualism. The two-and-bit discs so far have mostly showcased what passes for notions of punk rock: block-chord guitars, guttersnipe vocals, Ramones-speed rhythms and Clash-style terrace-chant choruses. Suddenly, The Fall’s lurching “Psycho Mafia” suggests the early punk era was not about trying to be same as every other band. Individualism was possible.Recorded in 1977, but issued in 1978, “Psycho Mafia” was from The Fall’s first record, an EP on the Step Forward label. Other bands on the imprint Read more ...
peter.quinn
Through her work with Tomorrow's Warriors and the Nu Civilisation Orchestra and, more recently, Jazz Jamaica, alto saxist Camilla George has been an integral part of the UK jazz scene for over a decade. Apart from its melodic fecundity, subtle arrangements and the impressive way in which it fuses jazz, highlife, afrobeat, calypso and more into a meaningful whole, what makes this debut album stand out is the sense that George has been quietly honing not only her own sound but also that of her estimable quartet.George’s journey of self-discovery, from her African and Caribbean roots to her Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Oczy Mlody is so weak it’s a wonder it makes the finishing line. The album’s 58 minutes are taken up with unfocussed songs, fragmentary arrangements, moments of grating novelty and such a lack of sense of purpose, it’s hard to figure out why they bothered.The Flaming Lips' etiolated 15th album baffles. Lead Lip Wayne Coyne makes no effort to sing in an engaging way. No wonder everything else is as anaemic. Fronting up the songs with a voice this feeble leaves little to latch onto and little to lead the listener in.Recognisably a Flaming Lips album, Oczy Mlody meshes keyboard wash, clichéd Read more ...
mark.kidel
Popular music works best when it strikes a chord that goes beyond the beauty of the hook, the seductive quality of the melody, or the catchiness of the lyrics. The resonance can be personal or universal, or perhaps, in order to qualify as a critic’s choice as album of the year, it should be both. Leonard Cohen’s last album, made in the full knowledge that it would be his last, spoke to me with a directness and depth that induced a paradoxical mixture of pleasure and pain.Cohen was, it would seem, born wise, and a certain native maturity coloured his work from the start. As he revisited over Read more ...
Bernadette McNulty
Much like the year itself, 2016's strongest albums tapped into a spirit of restlessness, defiance and disorientation. But unlike the punk explosion of 1977, there was no real sound or even genre that this mood of rebellion cohered around.Grime came closest to embodying a scene, fuelled by blistering albums from two stalwarts – Kano and Skepta. The latter's Mercury prize win gave a focus to the re-emergence of the sound, stripped-down to basics again, shorn of the shinier pop stylings that had diluted it during its brief absorption into the charts a decade ago. This time around, the beats Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Context in rock is everything. Popular music is, after all, essentially a reaction to a moment in time. So, whilst in another year, an album like A Moon Shaped Pool may just have lurked in my top five, political circumstances propelled it straight to number one. It wasn't just that the piece was thick with feverishness and alienation. What really made it embody 2016 was the unmistakable whiff of fear. The album's emotional release began from the get-go. "Burn the Witch" was built on a series of rhythms that pulsated like a montage of Daily Mail headlines. Lyrics Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Paul Simon has always been as eclectic as anyone in popular music, tapping into latin music, gospel and reggae long before they dreamed up the term "World Music". Simon is now 74, but he's as restless and inquisitive as ever. For Stranger to Stranger, his thirteenth solo album, he picked up his metaphorical pith helmet and machete and trekked deeper into the hinterland of his private musical vision.He returned clutching a batch of cunning, allusive and questioning songs, constructed from many components but defying anybody to pin a nametag on them. Alongside the likes of Nico Muhly and Mark Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
New Year’s Eve has its rituals and, in the Russian-speaking world, watching the 1976 film The Irony of Fate is core to ringing out the old and ringing in the new. A television staple, it has the seasonal status of It’s a Wonderful Life, The Little Shop on the Corner and White Christmas. First seen in Russian homes as a three-hour, two-part small-screen production on the first day of 1976, it was subsequently edited and shown in cinemas.The Irony of Fate (the full title is The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!: Ирония судьбы, или С лёгким паром!) is a farcical and straightforward-seeming Read more ...
peter.quinn
Despite all of the challenges – more venues going to the wall, scarcity of funding, lack of column inches, and more – jazz in 2016 showed its seemingly endless capacity not only to survive and thrive, but also to innovate and invigorate. As one of 137 jazz writers invited to vote in the 2016 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll, both the range and vastness of the year’s output, from Old Locks and Irregular Verbs by poll winner Henry Threadgill (adding to his Pulitzer Prize earlier in the year) to Countdown by 13-year-old piano wunderkind Joey Alexander, offered a life-affirming jolt.Noted for its Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The unsinkable Dolly Parton turned 70 in 2016 and the new year marks the 50th anniversary of her debut album, Hello, I’m Dolly. Pure & Simple is her 43rd studio album, its genesis a brace of stripped-down concerts given at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium which were reprised at Dollywood. Such a back-to-basics approach is much favoured by country musicians – Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris and Loretta Lynn have trodden a similar path. Everything is relative, however: the backing quartet multiplied in the studio yet still Dolly describes it as “almost like a garage band”.As ever, Parton’s Read more ...