New music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Sad singers never write truly happy albums, but Positive Songs for Negative People – and was there ever a title that so perfectly summed up the work of Frank Turner? – is probably as close as this one gets to putting a brave face on it. Turner’s sixth album opens where 2013’s Tape Deck Heart left off: a sinner amongst saved men on the banks of the muddy Thames, dusting himself off and falling back in love with the city he calls home anthropomorphised as the Angel of Islington. Along the way expect choruses designed to get punk pulses racing, awkward tennis metaphors and not a little Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Treeless and shrubless but for some tufts of broom, these corrugated ridges formed a lunar landscape, pale and inhuman.” Lushly green and densely planted, today the view out over Tuscany’s Val d’Orcia is unrecognisable as the blasted landscape first witnessed by author Iris Origo in 1923. From a barren wilderness, the valley was transformed by Origo and her husband into a thriving farm, crowned by one of Italy’s loveliest landscaped gardens, where now, some 80 years later, Origo’s children and grandchildren continue the family legacy. But while Iris and husband Antonio brought water, life Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Cocteau Twins: The Pink Opaque, Tiny Dynamine/Echoes in a Shallow BayThe current fad for all things vinyl is of course, in general, a good thing. It has also meant that a column with CD in its header has, inevitably, broadened its scope. There might be careless major-label abominations like the Marvin Gaye box set reviewed in a recent Reissue CDs Weekly, but there are also gems like the enhanced-sound Mission of Burma albums covered last week.But what to make of new vinyl-only editions of releases where original copies sell for less than the reissue? A first-press of the US vinyl album Read more ...
joe.muggs
Jill Scott albums should, in theory, be a bit of a chore. Everything about them, this one included, is like listening to a life coach: positive affirmations, exhortations to self-care, expressions of gratitude to the universe, homely snippets of advice... It's all so wholesome you almost feel as if it should be printed in a curly script over tranquil beach scenes and shared on your more uncomplicated school friends' Facebook feeds. Almost.In fact, Scott pulls off the miraculous, and makes all these homilies not just bearable but really uplifting. This is, after all, the singer who turned the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Julio Bashmore” is actually the nom-de-dancefloor of Bristolian DJ-producer Matt Walker who’s been slowly building a rep over the last five years. Outside clubland, music-lovers may have heard of him via his production on Jessie Ware’s early singles. In the nightworld, he’s better known as the purveyor of classy, propulsive house sprinkled with a smidgeon of grit. His debut album combines both these aptitudes to increasingly enjoyable effect as it progresses.It opens with the title track, which samples early Eighties easy listening R&B-disco queens The Jones Girls and, for a few songs, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
After years of pussyfooting around pop, hoping the Pet Shop Boys will write something in a passable classical idiom, the Proms has embraced the most euphoric popular genre of all - dance - to its bosom. Pete Tong, long-standing Radio 1 presenter and DJ, is probably the high priest of this music, and under his guidance last night, Radio 1 and the Heritage Orchestra, conducted by Jules Buckley, brought a near-capacity Proms crowd to a booming climax in way that's quite possibly never happened before.It never seemed likely the sedately seated rows would stay put once the dance beats were Read more ...
Matthew Wright
With the sad news of John Taylor’s sudden death at the age of 72 following a heart attack during a performance at the Saveurs Festival (France) earlier this month, this delightful and intimate but low-key release acquires unexpected lapidary weight. Taylor, an undisputed and much admired, though self-taught, master of contemporary jazz piano, made his name in London in the late 1960s collaborating with both mainstream (John Dankworth and Cleo Laine) and avant-garde (Kenny Wheeler and Norma Winstone, with whom he formed the influential Azimuth trio). He saw his fortunes follow that of the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Now was the summer of our disco tent. The disco tent in question backstage was not jumping as much as in previous years – somehow strutting your Travolta moves in wellies doesn’t quite cut it. A glam tribute band at Molly’s Bar on Thursday night, knocking out Bolan and Bowie numbers dressed in cheap sci-fi tat were hugely entertaining though.Friday was a washout, with nonstop rain, but there were gems – like Tinariwen (pictured, below) whose music is more roll than rock, something to do with how the camels move in the Sahara. Though their main man Ibrahim seems to have been replaced by Read more ...
mark.kidel
Trudging through the mud at last weekend’s WOMAD provided fleeting moments of random entertainment, as if surfing old-style across the bandwidths of a short-wave radio, you’d stumble unexpectedly on snatches of exotic sounds from around the globe: an eerie double-bass Mongolian throat-song one minute, and a horror-dark wisp of electronically enhanced tango the next. The food was taste-bogglingly varied too, from Algerian-flavoured steak wraps to a mysterious array of Tibetan treats. WOMAD’s programmers know their stuff. There was a profusion of excellent music drawn from all corners of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
There is something strange happening in mainland Europe at the moment. Perhaps this has been spurred on by a feeling that the old certainties of the past aren’t quite so solid, but a mind-expanding psychedelia with an eye for the dance-floor and free of navel-gazing pastoral whimsy has been springing up in all kinds of unexpected places. Bands like Goat and Sonic Jesus (from Sweden and Italy respectively) have begun to make themselves heard by peddling sonic rituals that take their cues from a far bigger world than late ‘60s California, and it is out of this miasma that Portuguese threesome Read more ...
Matthew Wright
With its time and observatory, Greenwich is a fitting venue for record-breakers, and Sir Tom Jones, who sang at the Greenwich Music Time Festival last night, has some impressive vital statistics. The still-slim, still-dynamic figure in a black suit has sold 100 million records in a career of over 50 years, and on a good day, he can be Elvis Presley with a touch of Bryn Terfel.Last night’s show flagged a little towards the end, after a succession of slightly creaky R&B songs, though a couple of cobwebby numbers is an inevitable consequence of a 75-year-old plundering their full back Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Peter Perrett reappears for his third encore. This time his band doesn’t play with him. He attacks the guitar alone, “No Peace for the Wicked” and “It’s the Truth”, both songs from his days in The Only Ones, 35 years ago. His distinctive cracked voice is strong. In any case, the crowd assist him, even though these are not sing-along songs so much as perfectly constructed mini-melodramas of the heart. Clad in a black open-neck shirt and – rare for him – no shades, he’s not the pale wasted junkie princeling of myth. He’s clearly invigorated – fragile, for sure, but with drive and purpose about Read more ...