Levitation: Meanwhile GardensIf Meanwhile Gardens had been issued as it was meant to be in 1993, it would not have had an easy ride. The band itself was falling apart. Founder member and former House of Love guitarist Terry Bickers had said on stage that May that the band was “a lost cause” and “we've completely lost it”. He left, the album was not released and, with a reconfigured line-up, Levitation limped on before splitting in autumn 1994.That wasn’t their only problem. The contemporary context in which they operated was changing and also unforgiving. The weekly music press were Read more ...

While many of his contemporaries make the most of their grizzled old men’s voices, Georgie Fame sounds as young and fresh as he did when he first burst on the London scene in the 1960s. This is supposedly his last album, and it sounds, in many ways, as if it had been made 50 years ago.Accompanied by a group of top-drawer British jazzmen, including Guy Barker (trumpet), Alan Skidmore (tenor sax), Alec Dankworth (bass) and Anthony Kerr (vibes) – along with his sons Tristan on guitar and James on drums – the veteran delivers a very tasteful range of characteristically bluesy hard bop, blue beat- Read more ...

It’s Patti Smith week. Her second memoir M Train is out. To mark its publication she spoke on Wednesday night at a Guardian event of her love of Morse, Lewis and George Gently. On Thursday she had an appointment with U2 at the O2. Last night (and again tonight) Smith was back at the Roundhouse, where she first performed in the UK in 1976. The question on nobody’s lips was whether, at 68, senior citizenship has remotely withered the savagery of her voice. “We Smiths age well,” she said before she sang a note.On the setlist was a complete performance of Horses, which turns 40 on 10 November, Read more ...

For women making music, it’s probably a tough call to decide on what is more tedious: being asked what it’s like being a girl in a band, or being grouped with other female musicians, regardless of genre, for magazine features and documentaries on Women in Rock. Girl in a Band – which, like Kim Gordon’s recent memoir, wears its title as a wink to the first – is a little too much of the second, although still has plenty of interesting things to say.Kate Mossman, the New Statesman’s arts editor, put together an impressive selection of interview subjects from Carol Kaye, a former jazz Read more ...

It’s been a while since we heard from Jamie Woon. 2011 to be precise. Back then his debut album Mirrorwriting was a critics’ favourite, a ghostly post-dubstep soul affair that had “music journo-friendly” written all over it. He remains an elusive figure, easy on the eye yet reticent of playing the game and propelling himself into the public realm. His second album is, by his own somewhat abstract standards, a poppier affair, created in collusion with Lexxx, AKA rising producer Alex Dromgoole who’s  previously worked with Bjork, Wild Beasts, Crystal Castles and multiple others. It is a Read more ...

Some artists you'd only ever want to see in a club or a theatre, but if ever there was a group who belonged naturally in stadiums and arenas, it's U2. They have a history of elaborate stage productions, and for this tour, focusing on last year's album Songs of Innocence, they've shown the opposition a clean pair of heels with a remarkable show based around a wall of screens that stretches out towards the back of the auditorium.It's a kind of rock'n'roll IMAX, projecting giant blow-ups of the band in action or dazzling panoramas of imagery to illustrate the songs. Particular attention has been Read more ...

On record, Cat aka Chan Marshall is the quintessence of hip. From art-rock to blues, her vocals are cool and effortless. Live, however, things have been notoriously inconsistent. Google “Cat Power live”, and you will find a catalogue of stage meltdowns. Even her Wikipedia entry tells tales of drunken rants and abuse of fans. And yet for every gig disaster, there’s another rave review. When it comes to a Chan Marshall gig, it seems you pays your money and you takes your chances. As I queue up outside the huge Victorian St John-at-Hackney Church the moon is shining and fans are chatting in Read more ...

For an album exploring the theme of heartbreak in wintry, coiling musical phrases, peppered with stark, fractured lyrics, the reception of Björk’s original Vulnicura was ever so slightly lukewarm. Her spacious and probing compositions were admired rather than adored, her analysis of breakup seeming to have a steely, cerebral edge. So it was a brave decision to adapt these songs for strings, an alteration that’s unlikely to make them any more accessible.Losing the rhythmic texture offered by the percussion, which is only partially replaced by a chopping string pulse on pieces like “Notget Read more ...

Jewel fans from circa 1995, when the folky rebel-poet-warrior's first multi-platinum album Pieces of Me (one of the best-selling debut albums of all time) was released, have been longing for more of that fresh, raw, melodic artistry ever since.But after the fiercely made Spirit, a world tour and This Way, what came next was a seemingly experimental series of new sounds – the bewildering intellectual pop of 0304, a Christmas album, two kids' CDs released by Fisher Price, a country album and a starring role as June Carter Cash in a Lifetime Channel film.Twenty years on and Picking Up the Read more ...

James Morrison is undeniably one of pop’s more likeable and unassuming recent stars. Influential too: his laid-back sound has paved the way for recent megastars like George Ezra and Ed Sheeran. How much that constitutes a good or bad thing, though, divides opinion. Some find Morrison's blend of folk and soul relaxing yet intimate; others have said it's so bland it has its own zen. All, then, agree the amiable singer is a little short on grit. Maybe Higher Than Here can offer something a little more raw? The album starts off promisingly enough. “Demons” – an anthem to positive Read more ...

 Laraaji: Ambient 3 – Day of Radiance“If you are OK with this as being an ‘ambient’ record, then I am OK with it too,” says Laraaji in the booklet accompanying this new reissue of his first album, 1980's Day of Radiance. He goes on to explain that back then he described his music as “‘beautiful’ or ‘ethereal’ or ‘celestial’.” As for being defined as New Age, he declares: “I have always accepted it. It was a term that was very alive at the time I began exploring this direction.” Minimalism is another genre which Day of Radiance could slot into quite comfortably. Pinning down exactly what Read more ...

Back in the early 2000s, it was rumoured that Ryan Adams had covered Is This It by The Strokes in its entirety. According to my extensive cataloguing of the career of Americana’s enfant terrible, only “Last Nite” ever surfaced (I have a live version, which opens with a couple of versions of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”), but the point is that Ryan Adams is no stranger to these sonic experiments. Which is why, as a huge fan of both artists I have found it both amusing and perplexing to watch the internet collectively lose its shit over Adams’ version of Taylor Swift’s 1989.The parallels between Read more ...