New music
Tim Cumming
The first K-Music festival landed in London for than a decade ago, and has brought an eclectic range of bands and musicians from Korea to the stages of the capital, whether that’s the sorrowful storytelling tradition of Pansori, the sonic attack of bands like Jambinai or Black String, who return this year to King’s Place on 30 October, with the extraordinary sound of the gayageum – part harp, part oud, part theramin – under the hands of band leader Youn Jeong Heo.This year’s festival opens tonight at the Barbican with Lear from the National Changgeuk Company. Changgeu is a form of Korean Read more ...
joe.muggs
Dan Snaith’s career has been a joyous thing to watch. Almost a quarter of a century the Canadian started out as Manitoba (soon renamed to Caribou) making a giddy mixture of dreamy ‘60s psychedelic pop, glitchy electronica and then cutting-edge dance music.Since then, much like his friend and contemporary Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden – latterly joined on their journey by Sam “Floating Points” Shepherd – he’s refined and tightened his sound, reaching bigger and bigger crowds, while impressively retaining the same fundamental character and inspirations. This is his 11th full album – eighth as Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Smile’s second album Wall of Eyes, released in January, is a thrillingly discomfiting album by Radiohead alumni Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner. It has a coherent mood and flow, a great screw-the-musicbiz rock song in “Read the Room”, and a scintillator for all seasons in “Bending Hectic”.Their latest, Cutouts, feels more ad hoc – Yorke’s non-narrative lyrics are some of his most abstruse, the tunes have stripped-down melodies, and the sequencing of the tracks seems random. Weirdly, it’s an album without an identifiable atmosphere, its jazzy Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Velvet Underground first played before an audience on 11 December 1965. A year earlier, their two founder members Lou Reed and John Cale were beginning a period of schlepping around New York and New Jersey as supposed members of an equally dubious band called The Primitives. The job was to promote a single titled “The Ostrich,” just issued under that name.There wasn’t really a band called The Primitives. “The Ostrich” was a studio creation, fashioned by Reed and his fellow employees of the budget Pickwick label. But it was decided that the Reed-penned and sung single might have legs, so Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lady Gaga has made clear this is not her official new artist album. It’s a side project, inspired by Harley Quinn, the nom-de-chaos of the Arkham Asylum inmate she plays in Todd Phillips’ much-anticipated sequel Joker: Folie à Deux. The original Joker, deep-dipped in Seventies Scorcese aesthetics, saw DC Studios demonstrate they could take superhero fictions to exciting new places. Setting the bar higher, the new film is a musical. Judging from this album, it’s going to boast a whole heap of swingin’ jazz energy.As a stand-alone album, it’s very much in the vein of her two albums with Tony Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Ezra Collective were faced with a challenge. The quintet needed to follow up from their achievement in winning the Mercury Prize in 2023 with Where I'm Meant To Be. That was a remarkable moment in itself, ending a 31-year drought during which a jazz album had been nominated for the prize more or less every year, but never won. Their task was to produce an album while being in demand and constantly touring all over the world. The result, the 19 tracks of Dance, No One’s Watching, infused with a positive spirit throughout, is very good.The unifying principle is, in Femi Koleoso’s words, “a Read more ...
joe.muggs
The enduring good health of UK soul – the fact that we are treated to a continual stream of great records by the likes of Jorja Smith, Children of Zeus, Cleo Sol / SAULT, Maverick Sabre, Joel Culpepper, Yazmin Lacey, Ego Ella May, Michael Kiwanuka and so many others – is down to a few things. First there is the soft music for hard times principle: a craving for tangible tenderness, directness, unfiltered emotion and… well… soulfulness in the midst of the competitive shouting factories of the digital world and the relentless hustle of this austerity-blighted island.Secondly, and this is vital Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It begins with a superb rendering of his 2018 song “Ain’t Gonna Moan No More”, on which Van is joined by the mellifluous voice of Kurt Elling, and which was recorded alongside the other duets on the album in 2018 and 2019.It then winds through a mix of duets recorded in 2014 (alas, no Sir Cliff) and what they're calling "big band" arrangements of catalogue classics like “Avalon of the Heart”, “So Quiet in Here” and “The Master’s Eyes”, a gem from 1985’s A Sense of Wonder. This extremely likeable scoop of slightly random songs is the second of a series of releases from the vaults on Read more ...
mark.kidel
Apart from being one of Britain’s greatest songsmiths of the past 50 years, Elvis Costello – from the early adoption of the rock’n’roll King’s first name – has produced a form of naked self-expression, blurred by intricately-tailored pretence. Though this is “art”, never artifice.The geek of old has gone through several phases of metamorphosis – though something of the original persona remains, albeit battered and matured. While he was fast and furious in youth, a New Wave phenomenon, he has found a more measured stride, and the irony that was played down is now something Elvis revels in Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Somewhat amusingly, the sign outside Birmingham’s O2 Academy on Saturday stated that the evening’s entertainment was to be provided by “Frank Carter and Members of the Sex Pistols”. In a way, it was a bit misleading, suggesting that the original and greatest British punk band was going to be backing a relative newcomer rather than that they were touring with a new front man and, no doubt was more driven by John Lydon’s lawyer than what was going to happen on stage.So, with the former Johnny Rotten having taken a hissy fit and leaving the fold, the Sex Pistols rocked up in the Brum to play the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
White Roses, My God isn’t a Low album. It couldn’t be. Mimi Parker, Alan Sparhawk’s wife and partner in Low, died in November 2022. And despite Low’s many musical twists and turns, Sparhawk’s public return to music sounds nothing like any of Low’s outings across their 13 studio albums, the first of which was issued in 1994.The opening track is “Get Still.” Its melodic bed comes from a keyboard line played on what sounds like a pre-digital synth: perhaps a Korg or a Mini-Moog. A glitchey beat provides underpinning. The vocal combines a treatment similar to that heard on Neil Young’s 1982 album Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As the name of a music genre, new jack swing was coined in an issue of the Village Voice dated 18 October 1987. Writer Barry Michael Cooper was profiling producer, songwriter and member of the R&B trio Guy, Teddy Riley when he created a tag exemplifying the mix of R&B and hip-hop which had hit super-big in 1986 with Janet Jackson’s Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis-produced Control. Riley was on the same wavelength, and Cooper recognised a groundswell.Swingbeat was interchangeable with new jack swing, but it was the latter which caught on. So When TLC and SWV emerged in 1992 they were swiftly Read more ...