New music
Thomas H. Green
The music keeps coming thick and fast. There’s an emphasis on rock this month but, as regular readers will know, theartsdesk on Vinyl has no favoured musical genre. All music is welcome, as long as it’s cut to plastic.This month we open with a jazzy Vinyl of the Month from Kathryn Williams & Anthony Kerr but read on and there’s everything from techno to acoustic singer-songwriter fare to retro Brit-funk. We’ve also been sent a book for beginner crate-diggers, and those who simply like ticking lists. The subscription club Vinyl Me, Please, along with publishers Octopus Books, have let Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Little Mix, like Girls Aloud before them, have developed fast from TV talent newbies into impressively sparkly industry professionals. They won The X Factor in 2011 and released a flabby cover of Damien Rice’s moany fist-pumper, “Cannonball”, but they’ve since honed their act to laser precision. No longer ingénues (if they ever were), they’re a polished showbiz machine with songs to match. They first reached such a status with last year’s Get Weird album and its ubiquitous chart-topper, “Black Magic”. Their fourth long-player sees them snappily consolidate.Glory Days already has a No.1 hit Read more ...
peter.quinn
There are singers who can dazzle with their technical mastery, those who welcome you into their musical world through a special communicative gift, and those who can traverse genres with absolutely no artifice. Rarest of all are those singers who combine all of the above with a timbral quality that can touch your very soul. Lizz Wright is one such singer.From the very opening song, an unaccompanied take on Hoagy Carmichael’s “The Nearness of You”, the stunning beauty and emotive power of Wright’s voice carried all before it, and immediately set up an electrifying charge between singer and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Rachael Yamagata likes to take her time. Tightrope Walker comes a full five years after the American songwriter’s last release, and it’s an album that demands to be listened to with as much care as clearly went into its creation. Like the French daredevil Philippe Petit, for whom her latest album was apparently named, slow and steady wins the race for Yamagata: it’s there in its staid, rhythmic opener and title track; and it’s there in the atmospheric, but no less deliberate, “Money Fame Thunder”, which closes proceedings with another nod to its central character.Best known for the sort of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On the final night of Iceland Airwaves 2016, Polly Jean Harvey and her band are ranged in a line just inside the edge of the stage constructed inside Valshöllin, a sports hall south of Reykjavík’s city centre. The festival’s five days have climaxed with a diamond-hard performance drawing heavily on this year’s Hope Six Demolition Project album. The venerable “50ft Queenie”, “Down by the Water” and “To Bring You my Love” are played, but this is about the PJ Harvey of now and 2011’s Let England Shake: the PJ Harvey engaged with and aghast at a world which appears to be wrecking the lives of its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Good grief, was Out of Time really 25 years ago? This was the seventh studio album from the li'l ole band from Athens, Georgia, and the one with which they finally cracked open the mainstream international market. This was when people still used to buy CDs, and a time when it was still possible for bands to sustain slow-growing careers which built steadily from the ground upwards. Having been one of the trailblazers of America's mid-Eighties alternative rock movement, growing a faithful following through college radio and endless touring, REM had had it moderately large with their Read more ...
Matthew Wright
This rambunctious German-Swiss trio is used to selling out much larger venues at home. Their overdue EFG London Jazz Festival debut, in an enthusiastic but not full Kings Place, introduced British audiences to an exhilarating take on the acoustic jazz trio. This is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a brilliantly, brutally eclectic ensemble that pushes the language of jazz to new limits of originality, and does so with irresistible energy, and a refreshing sense of fun.One of Wollny’s trademarks is his choice of inspiration, which extends far beyond the usual jazz canon, in both directions, from the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
After four years, Martha Wainwright is back with her fourth solo album. While she’s been away she’s turned 40 and now says that on this outing she’s “a songwriter, but also just a singer and interpreter. This is perhaps the essence of who I truly am.”Wainwright is, of course, folk royalty: the daughter of Kate McGarrigle (whose loss understandably dominated Come Home to Mama in 2012) and Loudon Wainwright, sister of Rufus. All have washed the family laundry in full public view. Her aunt is Anna McGarrigle, one of an eclectic range of writers who share the album’s credits: novelists Merrill Read more ...
peter.quinn
Following the seismic events across the pond earlier this week, an outcome which has left the rest of the world blinking in disbelief, Guy Barker’s brilliant arrangements for this year’s Jazz Voice offered much needed balm for the soul. Creativity, collective endeavour, community: humanity’s finest qualities were in evidence.Relocating to the Royal Festival Hall this year and hosted by Jay Rayner, this celebration of song announced the opening of the 2016 EFG London Jazz Festival and featured the customary jazz-related anniversaries, birthdays and milestones stretching back from 2016.Known Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The day after Trump won the US presidential election was always going to be an interesting day for a concert by Billy Bragg and his American cohort Joe Henry. Bragg’s 1986 song “Help Save the Youth of America” is, for instance, given added power by historical circumstance, and the closing lines have real heft: “The cities of Europe have burned before/And they may yet burn again/And if they do I hope you understand/That Washington will burn with them.” After the song, however, he says the election actually gave him hope because of the massed support for the left-leaning Bernie Sanders, even if Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
After a hiatus, theartsdesk Radio Show is back with a new partner, Music Box Radio, hosted in their studio at the Market House in Brixton. Peter Culshaw’s global round-up of new and newly re-released discs jumps from Brazilian psychedelia to synth funk from Capo Verde and assorted exotica. There’s new jazz from Michael Wollny and Vincent Perani and new tango-tinged systems music from Steve Reich, and West African grooves.One track was donated on a USB from a taxi driver in Fes in Morocco. Fifty years after the Beatles "Tomorrow Never Knows", we bring you the Indonesian gamelan version from Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Even now, Sting's reputation as one of rock's most earnest men looms large. His last two projects consisted of a Broadway musical about Newcastle's ship industry and a "symphonic" retrospective of his greatest hits. Before that it was saving bees and Elizabethan madrigals with a Bosnian lutenist. Now, however, the singer promises something lighter. 57th and 9th has been heralded as the return of "Sting the rock star". Could it really be the tantric one is returning to the sound he created in the early Eighties? The first signs of familiarity come Read more ...