New music
joe.muggs
It must be tough being Coldplay (bank balances aside). To hit a formula so successful that you essentially make all of pop music sound like you is quite a weight to carry. It wasn't just the obvious Keane/Starsailor/Snow Patrol copycat bands of the noughts, nor even the reformed Take That (their 'Rule the World' was the Coldplay template taken to pop perfection). It was the American megastar soft rock singers, the rap and R&B players from Jay-Z on down, and the mainstream dance producers like Swedish House Mafia, all cashing in by getting a plaintive white guy (sometimes even Chris Martin Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The arrival of Duran Duran is announced by a barrage of strobes, dry ice creeping about the stage, and the thunder-rumble of an approaching storm through the speakers. There is another noise too. It is the sound of female voices letting rip. They’re doing a loud, heartfelt approximation of the hysterical teen shriek that’s greeted boy bands from The Beatles to One Direction. Duran Duran, after all, are the top dog poster boys of their youth. However, these are women, not girls, and they are in their 40s and 50s so the pitch is lower and the tone less piercing. It is oddly poignant.Accompanied Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Recently, after listening to the over-polished tryhard that is Justin Bieber’s Purpose, I concluded that it was no Off the Wall. That still stands, but Love Sax and Flashbacks, the debut from Fleur East has a bloody good (horn) stab at providing us with a passable impression of it. A bit karaoke perhaps, but fuck it, karaoke’s fun. Or so I’m told.Fleur East is, as you may know, part of the X Factor alumni. Her key moment on the show was a rendition of "Uptown Funk" and album opener "Sax" sounds like the brief was: ‘Something like "Uptown Funk", but not "Uptown Funk". But really like "Uptown Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Last night Rebel Heart began to make sense. For over two hours, performing from the album, her back catalogue, and a couple of well-chosen covers, Madonna sustained both a diversity and intensity in her approach to singing about love and sex that probably no-one else could match. We all knew she could sing “Material Girl” or “Like A Prayer” till the lid came off the O2. When she followed those with Edith Piaf, sung to the ukelele, and held nearly 20,000 people in rapt silence, she gave us a much better idea of what makes her rebel heart beat.The first 40 minutes was a barrage of the new album Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Kannon, Sunn O)))’s (pronounced “sun”) first non-collaborative album since 2009’s epic Monoliths and Dimensions, is a doomy triptych that will make long-term fans of the American band very happy indeed. Taking inspiration from the Buddhist Guanyin Bodhisattva “perceiving the cries of the world”, walls of distorted guitars played very, very slowly provide a cosmic and crushingly heavy groove that suggests that Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson are still very much on top of the drone metal game after their recent, more avant-garde collaborations with Ulver and Scott Walker and almost 20 years Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
You want punk? You got it. The debut album from NOTS explodes into the room and all 11 songs fly by in a rampaging 27 minutes. The all-female quartet from Memphis have been signalling, via singles on their local scuzz-rock label Goner (home to Jay Reatard), that We Are NOTS would be taking no prisoners, and it lives up to such promise. Producer Doug Easley, whose work with Sonic Youth and the White Stripes may have recommended him to the band, does not polish, he merely marshals their fury to a caustic, garage-buzz edge.Occasionally NOTS recall long-lost British Eighties trash-goths We’ve Got Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It might sound hackneyed but Sculpture can only be described as truly psychedelic. They achieve this via a thoroughly original stage set-up. Dan Hayhurst, in a black tee-shirt and military cap, manipulates sounds on a laptop, with a rack of magnetic tape loops to his left which he carefully plucks up and sets on reels, but what makes the London duo a unique proposition is the zoetrope-style visuals of Reuben Sutherland.Moustachioed and clad in an eye-watering multi-coloured poncho, long stripey socks and what appear to be plus-fours, he places cards of images on a vinyl turntable with a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1986, the Russian state honoured Mikael Tariverdiev with the People's Artist of Russia award, a mark of respect given to only the most significant figures in the arts. The Tbilisi-born composer was the head of the Composer’s Guild of the Soviet Cinematographer’s Union and had written concertos, operas, ballet music, song cycles (Russian poetry was a favourite), music for television and for 132 films. He was prolific, saw few boundaries and, in 1956, had set Shakespeare sonnets to music. The following year, he did the same for Japanese poetry. But his film music resonates most as it was Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Jamaican-born R&B singer Ruby Turner has been part of Jools Holland’s touring band for more than a decade now, her rich and athletic tone a great match for the band’s hectic, muscular rhythms. This is a bumper disc with 22 songs, although unfortunately only four of those are new recordings, so serious fans should check how many they already have before splashing out. There’s a modest festive element, with Jools’s arrangement of Wendy Cope’s “Christmas Song” and a couple of spirituals, such as “Get Away Jordan”, but there are no carols, so it’s something that even the Richard Dawkins in Read more ...
joe.muggs
“May you live in interesting times,” goes the old curse – and for better or worse there's no question that we do. Among the many, many couldn't-make-it-up elements in play in the global landscape in 2015, we appear to have something of a hippie Pope. Alright, there's a lot to pick through in Pope Frank's statements and policies, but at the very least he appears to have just dramatically converted the USA's biggest single bloc of swing voters away from global warming denial and attempted the same with gun worship, and he certainly talks the egalitarian talk a lot louder than any of his Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
If you’re between 12 and 15, The Vamps are big news. Ten million singles sales and 225 million YouTube views. That sort of big. They are, allegedly, not a boy band as they weren’t put together by one of Cowell’s televisual juggernauts. They also “play real instruments”, although I challenge anyone to come up with such software-amped earbud-candy in their garage. In any case, musical criticism is somewhat irrelevant, since the real purpose of this album is to act as a danger-free practice boyfriend for girls just starting to think about the real thing.The lyrics say it all: “Seven AM and you’ Read more ...
Matthew Wright
James Morrison has spent several years out of the limelight, with family difficulties to attend to. Would age and experience give the gravelly soul-pop star’s soft-focus romantic ballads sharper edges on his return? The underwhelmed reviews of his recent fourth album, Higher Than Here, suggested not, but last night’s live show, in a swaying, crooning, heaving Shepherd’s Bush Empire, showed an astute, modestly charismatic performer, and a warm embrace of a gig.Higher Than Here has only been out a few weeks, and it showed in the crowd’s choral reticence, so it was important to mix things up, Read more ...