New music
Kieron Tyler
The listless Complete Strangers drifts by in such a haze that it’s impossible to maintain any concentration on it after the first 10 minutes or so. When it ends, after 43 minutes and 10 songs, awareness that it’s finished only comes when whatever else has been focussed on instead comes to an end. Appropriately, for Vetiver’s mainstay Andy Cabic, it seems his attention has been elsewhere too since the release of 2011’s The Errant Charm. The Complete Strangers press release says he has been “experimenting with elaborate vegetarian cooking” and digging through San Francisco’s record shops to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tennessee Ernie Ford: Portrait of an American SingerAlthough there are different American music charts, success in one category but not another is not a marginal accomplishment. A major star on the country chart can be as popular, heavy selling and as big a live draw as one on the mainstream chart – now known as The Hot 100. But crossing over is still the dream. Taylor Swift isn’t for the country charts alone. Back in the Nineties, nor was Alan Jackson. The daddy of them all though was Tennessee Ernie Ford (1919–1991). In 1955, his single “Sixteen Tons” figured as strongly on the pop Read more ...
Thomas Rees
When Afro-Cuban jazz pioneers Irakere first played Ronnie Scott’s, back in 1985, they sold out the venue for five weeks on the trot. Thirty years later, and 40 years since the pioneering Latin jazz outfit began, they’re back to celebrate the anniversary, playing two shows a night across six nights, with pianist and founder Chucho Valdes at the helm. I’d heard the stories and I was in the mood for a party – for the kind of gig that has you wishing you’d splashed out on one of the tables at the front where you're right in the middle of the action, with room to dance – and at times it was Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
That I’ve tended to lump The Maccabees in with a certain brand of mid-Noughties landfill lad-rock is my problem, not theirs; not least because the Londoners’ ambitions on their latest album are pitched more at cinéma vérité than Kasabian. The band’s self-professed “difficult” fourth album, Marks to Prove It, takes its inspiration from the nightlife of the inner city – and it’s certainly sonically ambitious, if sometimes a bit joyless in its execution.London and guitar bands go hand in hand, but the things that differentiate The Maccabees from their brethren are apparent right from Read more ...
theartsdesk
It’s forecast to rain for a fortnight, just as the schools tip out their restless young. The roads are jammed, and Calais hasn’t been this bunged up since Edward III laid siege for the whole year in 1346. It must be summer. To help you celebrate if you’re one of the lucky ones who got away, or to get through it if not, our new music team has suggested a summer playlist both eclectic and exhilarating. From Madonna to Motörhead, the Beach Boys to My Bloody Valentine, whether you’re downing cocktails, or drowning out the rain on the tent roof, these are our songs of summer. A Man Called Read more ...
Matthew Wright
To some critics, Joss Stone manages her career with the authenticity and conviction of her accent at the 2007 Brit Award ceremony. Yet with seven albums under her belt, a Grammy, two Brit Awards, and her own record label by the age of 28, her approach seems to be working. And for this latest, she’s stepped boldly outside her familiar soul territory. She got to know Jamaican star Damian Marley for Mick Jagger’s and Dave Stewart’s project Superheavy, and amongst the stew of flavours on display this time, reggae is the spiciest. There is a story of sorts to the album, about the break-up of Read more ...
Russ Coffey
A cover of Talking Heads' “This Must Be the Place” opens Sing Into My Mouth and it's classic Iron and Wine - all Appalachian harmonies and gently plucked guitar. Like Sam Beam's earlier cover of The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” the arrangement lends the original - a slightly abstracted piece of electronic pop - fresh heart and simple emotion. But it's the only song in this collaboration with this trademark sound. What then of the other 11 tracks covered by the big-bearded singer and his friend, the Band of Horses’ front man?Oddly for two such colourful Read more ...
Phoebe Michaelides
Many festivals have become increasingly family-friendly. The children who, 10 years ago, were taken to outdoor multi-dayers such as Latitude, Camp Bestival and the now-defunct Big Chill, are now teenagers. Many have grown up with festivals as a usual part of their summer holidays - rather than a countercultural escape - and now they want to strike out on their own. Theartsdesk asked 17-year-old aspiring actor-writer Phoebe Michaelides to attend Latitude (with a friend) and report back. This is what she had to say. With minds full of high expectations and Morrisons Basic cider in hand, my Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Owl & Mouse is a name so cutesy that even the Scottish legions of twee who bloom, decade after decade, from the ashes of Eighties indie – the Pastels, Camera Obscura, Belle & Sebastian, etc – might flinch at it. And like that movement, with its endless coy, baby-sweet reassessment of the Velvet Underground, the music of Owl & Mouse initially seems to have a glaze of guilelessness about it, a pride in naivety. Keep listening, though, sucking down the sugar-coated but eventually lovelorn lyrical themes, and this debut defies such expectations.Owl & Mouse are not from Scotland, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
With nothing to sell except herself, Jessie J was at her most engaging and spontaneous last night, closing the summer series at Somerset House, and her own current tour. There was no need to plug her latest album, Sweet Talker, now nearly a year old, so the set picked and mixed her whole career. For some musicians that would emphasise a stylistic narrative of some kind; but Jessie has always been characterised by a kind of generic patchwork quilt, with soul, pop, and R&B sharing a slightly uneasy bed alongside snatches of hip hop and dance music. It took the engineers a minute to Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lautari Vol 67: Live 2014 features Michael Zak on clarinet, flute and shawn, with bassist Marcin Pospieszalski, fiddle player Maciej Filipczuk and the prepared piano and accordion of Jacek Halas.That instrument list gives you an idea of the musical territory you’re travelling through. Just as Jabusz Prusinowski Kompania, of which Zak is a member, specialises in antique Polish styles, so Lautari set about blowing wind, striking keys and drawing bows across a musical landscape of angular and contemporary arrangements of deeply rural tunes and dances.Sonically, they shape-shift from antique Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Mission of Burma: signals, calls, and marches/Vs.The opening moments of Mission of Burma’s “That’s When I Reach for my Revolver” still exhilarate. Recorded in early 1981, it was the first track on the Boston-based band’s 12-inch EP signals, calls, and marches. The tension, power and forward motion of this sparse encapsulation of rock at its most textured lay the bed for a brooding melody drawing its lyrical jumping-off point from – depending on how the story is told or who is telling it – either a Hermann Göring comment about his antipathy to culture or a line from 1930s German play by Read more ...