New music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Open letters are so passe. There’s a track on Back to Forever, the second album from folk-pop crossover star-in-the-making Lissie, that addresses the recent shenanigans of Miley Cyrus and her ilk as well as the singer’s own place in the music industry. “I stole your magazine, the one with the beauty queen on the front,” she sings in that glorious, smoky voice of hers, half mocking, half angry. “I don’t want to be famous if I got to be shameless.”And yet wouldn’t a Lissie take on “We Can’t Stop”, all midwest drawl and laidback swagger, be the greatest thing? It’s easy to imagine: the singer is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Kinks: Muswell HillbilliesRock’s rich tapestry currently has it that 1968’s The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society is their best album. This deluxe edition, 2CD reissue of 1971’s Muswell Hillbillies isn’t going to alter that, but it does force the emphasis away from the notion that their most lasting legacy will be a fascination with and celebration of Britishness.The album found Ray Davies and co looking to American archetypes, musical and cultural, and bringing them into songs drawing figurative links between the former colony and those still wedded to the old country. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Over the decade and a half that I’ve been writing about music, it has been my goal to distinguish between music that I just don’t like and music that is, in a more objective sense, terrible. Sometimes the line is a fine one, and - as many a Leona Lewis fan reading this site will attest - I don’t always end up on the side of it I think I am on. But even bearing that in mind, the new album from Gary Numan is a genuine puzzler: I can’t decide if it’s a sluggish, noisy, unlistenable record, packed with laughably nihilistic lyrics; or if it’s just me.To give a bit of context I should note that new Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There was much to be said for attending the third and final show of Crosby Stills & Nash's Albert Hall stint, because this was the night when they played their debut album in its entirety. Clearly much – almost everything, in fact – has changed since 1969, but though the musicians are four decades older, their original collective spirit survives remarkably intact.The addition of Neil Young turned CSN into a supergroup, but the original trio had a natural cohesiveness the four-piece version could never replicate, despite the fact that they were completely dissimilar characters with very Read more ...
joe.muggs
The hip hop music of California has always been deeply stoned, and the wave of instrumental beats that have emerged from LA in recent years have taken this to quite some extreme. The scene around the Brainfeeder collective and Low End Theory club have, in fact, produced some of the most deeply psychedelic music of the 21st century, and Sam Baker aka Samiyam is one of the key figures within that.Baker's profile is relatively low outside the scene but he is a foundational figure within it, and his influence is subtly felt more widely: key UK label Hyperdub released an EP in 2008, and electronic Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Following the completion of the White Album, and the conclusion of recording sessions in Los Angeles with new Apple signing Jackie Lomax, in late November 1968 George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd departed for Woodstock in upstate New York. They were heading for Bob Dylan country.Harrison had first fallen for Dylan early in 1964. The Beatles had played his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, over and over again in their rooms in the George V hotel in Paris, and were quickly seduced. On their second trip to America in August of that year they had met him for the first time, smoking Read more ...
Ronnie Flynn
Puglia, otherwise known as Apulia, is the heel of the kinky boot that makes up Italy. It’s usually associated with the golden sands of the Ionian coast, the clear, sun-spun waters of Castellanata Marina, the palaces of Bari, and the sublime fish restaurants of Peschici. There is, however, another side to this Italian paradise. It boasts a music scene whose chief contenders resent being lazily lumped in with cheesy holiday Euro-disco or worthy local folksiness, bands and DJs who wish to engage with the wider spectrum of western pop, rock and dance music.For four days Puglia Sounds is bringing Read more ...
mark.kidel
Tubular Bells stands alone in the history of late 20th-century music: a rock album without vocals. But it turns out as well to have been a kind of one-hit wonder for multi-instrumentalist and composer Mike Oldfield. The piece apparently came out of the blue – at least that is how it felt in 1973, when Virgin Records adventurously made it their first-ever LP release. As we discover in an outstanding music documentary to be shown on BBC Four, Oldfield never again touched the same source of original creativity, in a working lifetime dominated by acute emotional and mental distress and the very Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Morcheeba are sometimes dismissed as makers of dinner party music, of being the trio who drove the triphop juggernaut started by Massive Attack down an easy-listening dead end. Such a view, however, ignores the quality of their songwriting, especially their first two albums, featuring the impeccable likes of “The Sea”, “Trigger Hippy” and “Part of the Process”. For my money, their song with Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, “What New York Couples Fight About?”, from their fourth album Charango, is a 24 carat classic, as lovely a lament for the confusions of lovers’ arguments as has ever been written. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If there’s a problem with Jonathan Wilson’s astonishing second album, it’s the potentially distracting presence of the stunningly heavy list of contributors. Those mucking in to help out include Jackson Browne, David Crosby and Graham Nash who gather alongside Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench from Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. Former Fleet Fox Josh Tillman is on board too. But they all take a back seat to Wilson on Fanfare, the mind-blowing follow up to 2011’s Gentle Spirit.Gentle Spirit was good, and a terrifically assured echo of LA’s early Seventies Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter scene. But Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In their new, semi-fantastical concert movie Metallica: Through the Never, the gas-masked marauder who hunts the band’s fictional roadie, Trip, through a nightmare landscape, pictured below, is less cinematically memorable than Metallica themselves. Director Nimrod Antal gets his cameras up amongst them on-stage, as their muscles and eyes bulge and mouths gape, revving up the fans with how much they get off on this music, too.Metallica have been metal’s most important and respected band for much of their 32 years. Debut Kill ‘Em All (1983) combined speeding guitar athleticism and pummelling Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The debates that come with music awards tend to be more interesting than the institutions themselves, which is why it was so novel to see this year’s SAY Award - the Creative Scotland-backed equivalent of the Mercury Prize - go to a work that was not only innovative but genuinely loved. Though it must have been tempting for RM Hubbert to take some time out and blow the prize money on a Porsche, the Glasgow guitarist - a 20-year veteran of the local music scene - announced his next album two weeks later.Breaks & Bone is the final part of what Hubbert has termed “the ampersand trilogy”, a Read more ...