New music
Jasper Rees
John Prine was once touted, along with every other gravelly young huckster with a guitar, as the new Dylan. If this latest release is any indication, he’s more like the new George Jones. For Better, Or Worse is an anthology of classic country duets by the likes of Jones and other deities of the Grand Ole Opry. Prine has revisited them accompanied by a sorority of Nashville’s rootsiest songbirds to parry and spar in break-up songs and make-up songs.Prine did something similar with In Spite of Ourselves in 1999. This follow-up is another almanack of historical pleasures. They include George Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In 1983, on the raucous punk-a-billy number “A13, Trunk Road to the Sea”, Billy Bragg affectionately sent up the parochial nature of Britain as compared to the USA (“If you ever have to go to Shoeburyness/Take the A-road, the okay road, that’s the best”). He’s always had a thing for the wide open spaces of America that inspired the blues, country and, eventually rock’n’roll. Now, in an almost documentary fashion, his latest pays tribute to the way trains once brought a nation together, albeit very far from “Pitsea, Thundersley, Hadleigh, Leigh-on-Sea”.Shine a Light, subtitled Field Recordings Read more ...
Ralph Moore
theartsdesk meets Christine McVie on a sunny Friday afternoon in September; the Warner Brothers boardroom (with generous hospitality spread) is suitably palatial. We’re the first media interview of the day, so she’s bright and attentive. McVie was always the member of Fleetwood Mac who you’d want to adopt: the most approachably human member of a band constantly at war with itself. Readily admitting that she’s the “peacekeeper” in the band, the singer/songwriter behind such Mac classics as “Everywhere” and “You Make Loving Fun” is as sweet and serene as you’d hope she would be.She’s here to Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes it seems there's nothing less progressive in life than progressive rock. That was certainly once true of Marillion; during the Eighties critics were quick to pounce on their ponderous 20-minute songs, and Fish's painful sixth-form poetry. But after Steve Hogarth's arrival the band underwent an epiphany. Their music became increasingly focussed and succinct. And soon there was only one word for it – tasteful.As such, the format of FEAR (aka Fuck Everyone and Run) may, initially, seem a backwards move. It certainly looks a lot more proggy than most of the recent material, with the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Chicago’s Chess Records first made waves in the Fifties with a raft of records which included future classics integral to defining the urban slant on blues music. Early in the decade, the label issued singles by John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. They also issued Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88”, one of the building blocks of rock ‘n’ roll and brought Bo Diddley to a wide audience. The pioneering label issued different styles of music, but blues defined its early days. It moved with the times though and embraced soul in the Sixties.Little Richard is also easily Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s fair to say that vocal jazz ranks modestly in British awareness of Danish culture, certainly below the instrumental music and the phenomenon of the moment, the cable-knit-sporting detective Sarah Lund. Which is a shame, because this second event in Pizza Express’ week-long festival illustrated the variety and strength of that country’s scene very effectively. Sinne Eeg is a multiple award-winning performer broadly in the American tradition, while Cathrine Legardh exemplifies a Scandinavian, folkloric style.Eeg performed a tasteful and eclectic selection of favourite standards and Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The career of Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, better known to us as Vangelis, has been as wide-ranging as it has influential. From his beginnings as one-third of the almighty Aphrodite’s Child, veering from light, classy psychedelic pop to triumphant, thundering progressive rock, to his later incarnation as a synth soundtrack wizard capable of being both visionary (Blade Runner) and unashamedly populist (Chariots of Fire).He has nothing left to prove, there is no need for him to grandstand, and so it comes as no surprise that his latest project, a composition written for and commissioned Read more ...
David Nice
"Total immersion", the term used for the BBC Symphony's one-composer days, takes on a whole new meaning in the Thames Tunnel Shaft now transformed – but fortunately not subject to makeover – under the mantle of Rotherhithe's Brunel Museum. All the more so with the pioneering Modulus Quartet, who presented the mostly consonant music of six collaborative composers with the main lights out, shifting colours on the performing space and films either to accompany three of the works or to let the creators speak in short, unpretentious introductions.The ambitious peripherals weren't perfect; Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a lot of neurosis these days about retro-ism and lack of innovation in music, as if the shock of the new is all that gives things value. Of course, this is something worth keeping in mind: we certainly don't want to end up in a Keep Calm And Carry On world of faux nostalgia for golden ages that never existed, ingested as an analgesic as the present crumbles around us. But taken as dogma, it becomes a very one-dimensional way of looking at things, and can stop us appreciating how much newness there is in our ever-complexifying relationships to the past.Many musicians mining the past – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
You couldn’t make Yello up. They’re a couple of wry Swiss synth-pop ironists fronted by a suave, moustachioed, septuagenarian multi-millionaire poker-player, golfer and industrialist. Everyone and their uncle makes electronic music now, but when Yello began at the end of the Seventies, they were members of an elite club – Kraftwerk, Human League, Gary Numan, OMD, Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the rest of that relatively small crew of innovators.Yello’s use of sampling was ahead of its time, and singles such as “Bostich” and “I Love You” (and, a few years later, “The Race”) bridged the avant- Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Fantastic Negrito, aka Xavier Dphrepaulezz, is a singer from Oakland, California. His music is steeped in the raw and urgent spirituality of the early blues, especially Robert Johnson. Yet he refuses to be pigeonholed as a blues performer, disdaining all talk of genre, and infusing his compositions with the grit and anger of punk, hip-hop and hard rock as well as the mournfulness of the blues, not to mention political protest that’s bang up-to-date. His current musical persona is what he calls his third incarnation, after a teenage major-label signing turned sour, and he spent years out of Read more ...
mark.kidel
Madeleine Peyroux made her name channeling Billie Holiday. White stars have never ceased to model themselves on African-American genius – Mick Jagger on Don Covay, Rod Stewart on Sam Cooke and Joe Cocker on Ray Charles. The resemblance is often uncanny, and yet there is always something missing - call it authenticity, roughness or soul. Peyroux has grown away from Lady Day, and found her own voice, but the jazz and blues that characterize most of the covers she sings with great skill and feeling, don’t quite have the edge of the originals.And yet, black vocalists have been as attracted to the Read more ...