New music
Tim Cumming
Steve Earle is country music's great polymath - short story writer, playwright, novelist, activist, actor, oh yes, and singer and songwriter of some of the most acutely intelligent and literate songs in contemporary country. He's adept at evoking the human cost of American history, American politics and the lay of the promised land, and on his latest album, The Low Highway, the first song takes a long, slow panning shot of the body politic. It’s not in great condition. Happily, though, Steve Earle’s muse is.Not only that, this, one of his first band tours in years, with the gallantly named Read more ...
mark.kidel
Tricky left Massive Attack, the Bristol collective who provided tbe soundtrack to many a shopping therapy expedition, and went on to make one of the greatest albums of the 1990s, Maxinquaye. He was never a purveyor of easy listening or trippy-hoppy background music. He delved much deeper, dredging through a family history of mixed race shenanigans, gangland violence and his own martyrdom as a victim of major respiratory and skin disease.It’s been over 16 years since the first album came out, and Tricky claims he has returned to form with False Idols, after a number of rarely better than Read more ...
joe.muggs
It took nine years between the first and second instalments of this series, and another 22 years to make the third. And that's one of the least strange things about this record. The production team of B.E.F. (aka Human League / Heaven 17 members Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh) have dedicated themselves to unusual cover versions, in the past featuring guest vocalists from Gary Glitter to Tina Turner to Paula Yates, and they are still on a mission to rework classic songs in a high-gloss 1980s pop style with very peculiar results indeed.There are a lot of high points here. Sandie Shaw yelps her Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Stooshe are a manufactured London girl band. They were put together a couple of years ago by shrewd ex-girl-bander Jo Perry, a self-made London studio engineer and a songwriter for, among others, Peter Andre. Despite this prosaic, business-savvy backstory Stooshe emanate a sass that’s likeable. Unlike, say, Little Mix, there’s a certain garrulous, sweary bounce to them, a sense that perhaps they really are friends and really are having fun. On top of this, the influence of their (comparatively) easygoing attitude to body shape and appearance in a teen/tween market overrun with homogenized Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Imagine the rising and falling piano cadences of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Then plug the gaps between each note with any of those which may have been encountered on the path to the next. Once that’s done, ensure that the playing is constant with each note bleeding into the next. Mesh the result with a similar composition played at the same time and you have some idea of how Lubomyr Melnyk’s “Windmills”, his final piece last night, sounds.Melnyk’s precise music – what he calls “continuous music” – bears some relation to a few minimalist pianists: Charlemagne Palestine comes to mind. But Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Scott Walker: The Collection 1967-1970Few pop records possess a beauty taking them into the otherworldly, inexplicable realm where it’s impossible to understand the magic which coalesced in their creation. The Four Tops’ “Seven Rooms of Gloom”, Joy Division’s “Atmosphere”, Billy Fury’s “Halfway to Paradise”, ABBA’s “Dancing Queen”, Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream”, Sigur Rós’ "Hoppípolla”: all channel something other, rapturously embracing the listener.Another such is Scott Walker’s “Boy Child”, the string-bedded contemplation he wrote which closed side one of his fifth solo album, 1969’s Read more ...
peter.quinn
Jamie Cullum's sixth studio album is about as good a pop record as you'll hear all year. Newly signed to Island Records, the singer-songwriter has seemingly raided ideas from the entire history of pop music, such that low-fi vintage synth lines and jazzy piano breaks rub shoulders with heart-on-sleeve soul belters and subtle electronica. The kind of stylistic pluralism that directly reflects Cullum's own musical loves, in other words.The mash-up of opening salvo “The Same Things” is typical of the album as a whole, combining a deep, New Orleans-type rolling percussion groove with stacked up Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
From being “a strange facsimile of the original” to generating the “first British record made by people who are 100 per cent convinced that they are doing the right thing”, Rock ‘n’ Roll Britannia breezily mapped the protracted birth of a British rock scene which could take America on at its own game. As Cliff Richard put it, what was created was “different enough to become European. Or other-worldly.” It took The Beatles to crack America, but they would not have done so without being rookies in Britain’s Fifties’ musical boot camp.That the programme tackled this familiar story with a Read more ...
joe.muggs
A wise man once said: DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE. It's a simple concept, but it seems so very hard to grasp, even – or especially – in a supposedly media-savvy world. The oddest thing of all is that it seems to be the people who consider themselves the most resistant to, or able to rise above, hype campaigns who have been caught up the most in the frenzy around this album.I have been consistently boggled and slightly saddened by the number of people who should know better that I have seen tripping over themselves to explain how “bland” or “disappointing” or “derivative” or “cynical” or "shallow" Read more ...
James Williams
The ICA was the perfect location for the UK debut of hotly tipped new duo Tomorrow’s World, consisting of Air’s Jean-Benoit Dunckel and English synth-rockers New Young Pony Club’s ivory tickler Lou Hayter. The venue added a prestigious edge to what promised to be an auspicious occasion. A scant crowd suggested this was more of a test run than a full-blown debut, but they needn’t have worried about the reaction. Their music spoke for itself.Support came from another alumnus of London’s New Young Pony Club, guitarist Igor Volk. His set was impressive, the newly-released single "Voice" really Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It is no hyperbole to say that The National have made some of my favourite albums of all time. In every case, it has never been a decision I have reached lightly, or quickly. Those first few listens, you’re merely aware that your heart beats a little faster when the band expertly hit certain emotional pressure points. It could be six months later before you realise why.2010’s High Violet marked a progression in the music of a band whose arrangements have always been the most remarkable thing about their work. Trouble Will Find Me is album number six and the music here is richer still, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Pop that summons the word “cute” has a tendency to nauseate. If executed with the correct ratio of candy to content, however, it may persuade. The Scandinavians have proved effective in this area and Jonas Angergård and Karolina Komstedt, from the south of Sweden, add to the region’s good stock. Their latest album sits somewhere between The Cardigans and St Etienne, a very conscious electro-pop tinge coming to the fore, especially on numbers such as the toy town hi-NRG of “Taking My Time”.The duo have been around for years and this is their eighth album. Angergård is also a member of mid- Read more ...