New music
joe.muggs
If anyone in British music still deserves that rinsed-to-death term "maverick" it is Battersea-born "Dr" Alex Paterson. From roadie for postpunk industrialists Killing Joke in the early Eighties, he went on to work as an A&R then - originally collaborating with The KLF's Jimmy Cauty - formed The Orb in the heat of the acid house explosion to bring the world "ambient house". Inexplicably the loose collective, which has featured Berlin producer Thomas Fehlmann as a key member, became huge, their dub basslines and loony-tunes samples somehow encapsulating the psychedelic oddness of the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
News that Tunng were releasing a fifth album came as a bit of a surprise, given band founder and frontman Mike Lindsay’s recent relocation to Iceland (and subsequent reinvention as Cheek Mountain Thief). Of course nobody ever said that the band was splitting up, but in their decade together their work has remained so undeservedly underground the message may never have gotten out.It’s tempting to describe Turbines as Tunng’s most accessible album to date, given that its nine tracks see them dialling back some of the more obvious experimental flourishes which have set apart their sound even Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In a two-decade ripple effect typical of pop culture, there’s been a recent spate of interest in 1990s jungle. This was frantic bass-led breakbeat club music that led to the more media-friendly term “drum'n'bass” which, in turn, led indirectly to UK garage, grime and globe-conquering dubstep. DJs such as Shy FX and DJ Hype have maintained their careers and the spotlight is now creeping back towards them. Another player from those days is London’s Rebel MC, AKA Michael West, AKA Conquering Lion, AKA Congo Natty.The Rebel MC’s career was woven deep into Nineties rave, starting with a series of Read more ...
theartsdesk
Almost a decade on from their debut album, Tunng’s founding folktronic ethos no longer carries the shock of the new, but the sprawling and vaguely mystical collective continue to make ever more beautiful and interesting sounds. Turbines, their fifth album, is released on Full Time Hobby next Monday. To get in the mood, readers of theartsdesk can catch a world exclusive eyeful of the video for their new single “The Village”. Let us know what you think.
Tim Cumming
This is the third Songlines Encounters festival at Kings Place. Wednesday’s programme featured Balkans, Polish and Georgian music, Thursday had Egyptian Baladi Blues and Louisiana’s Sarah Savoy, and Friday featured West Africa, Spain and Palestine.Malick Pathé Sow opens with a short solo set on the Senegalese ngoni, the hoddu, singing in a high, clear, declaiming style, the big, deep ghimbri-like bass notes of the large hoddu punctuating and emphasising the verses. Then he is joined by Senegalese kora player Bao Sissoko, with touches of percussion on the calabash, for a song representing “the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Iain Banks, who has died at the age of 59 only two months after revealing that he was suffering from terminal cancer, was a leading purveyor of contemporary fiction. Iain M Banks was eminent in the field of science fiction. Iain "Spanks The Plank" Banks, however, was less well known as the composer of about 60 rock songs from the palaeolithic period, 1972-75.An explanation. Banks's Espedair Street is one of the better British novels about pop music. It chronicles the rise, not to mention the fall, of Frozen Gold, a Glaswegian student pub band who go global when budding writer Daniel "Weird" Read more ...
joe.muggs
The original Black Sabbath were a feat of engineering on a par with a classic Land Rover or an AK47. Everything about them was basic, brutal, unadorned and brilliantly functional – and as such achieved a very real, if rather grim, kind of beauty. So it's very nice indeed to see Tony Iommi's churning detuned guitar, Ozzy Osbourne's desolate howl (one of the most inhuman voices in popular music this side of Kraftwerk, in fact) and Geezer Butler's basslines and lyrics of alienation reunited, 35 years after they last recorded together.There are issues here. Sadly original drummer Bill Ward is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Burt Bacharach: The Art of the Songwriter - Anyone Who Had a HeartSometimes, greatness takes a while to surface. Tommy Sands’s 1961 single “Love In A Goldfish Bowl” didn’t return the hopeful teen idol to the charts. He’d had his day in 1957 with "Teen-age Crush", a slice of ersatz Elvis which rose to number two in the US. “…Goldfish Bowl” was hokum of the highest order, written by Burt Bacharach and lyricist Hal David for the film of the same name. “It’s love in a goldfish bowl” hiccups Nancy Sinatra’s then-husband. But it was less silly and less fun than 1958’s “The Blob”, by The Five Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The last two years have seen the Tiger Lillies hit a prolific peak of activity, to be found as often on the theatrical as the concert stage, drawing on plenty of influences from outside the UK to boot. Mike Pickering came on board last year in place of drummer Adrian Huge, who’d been part of the trio’s line-up from its founding back in 1989, but there was no let-up in levels of intensity last night from lead performer Martyn Jacques, who gave his all to a 90-minute set drawn from numbers from their last four albums, from 2011’s Woyzeck & the Tiger Lillies through to this year’s Either Or. Read more ...
bruce.dessau
When the Stone Roses first made a splash with their eponymous debut album in 1989 they were almost perfect. The only mistake was a brief flirtation with flared trousers. Nearly a quarter of a century on in north London the strides were strictly straight-legged. The only flares were the red ones some clot in the audience kept lighting. I don't envy his prospects if health and safety ever get hold of him.As for the music, this show, the first of two nights in the capital, certainly burnt brightly, but only in places. At times Ian Brown's vocals sounded flatter than the sozzled audience Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“My generation all were steeped in Bollywood.” Meera Syal, Wolverhampton born and bred, is recalling the cinematic influences of her youth. “It was our major link to India and was much more current than trying to make a phone call. You did feel that, though you were so far away, you were watching the same movies as your cousins.”We’ve moved on a bit since the 1970s. Bollywood is now much closer to the British cultural mainstream, helped along by entertainments as diverse as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams (co-written by Syal, pictured below) and Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When Liam Gallagher comes up in conversation, it’s usually as to whether he’s the last great belligerent rock star or just a boorish goon. As he leads four fifths of the final Oasis line-up into the second Beady Eye album, he appears to be neither. Upon occasion this is no bad thing, although it results in an album that’s occasionally pleasing rather than “a striking return to form” (as music journos insist on claiming when high profile names return to the fray).For my money, Gallagher in Oasis’s prime was a great rock star, all sneer, swagger, and an infuriating insouciance about Read more ...