New music
Kieron Tyler
Broadcast: Berberian Sound Studio Original SoundtrackMore than the soundtrack to one of last year's most impactful films, the release of the music for Berberian Sound Studio is a tribute to the memory of Trish Keenan. With her Broadcast partner James Cargill, Keenan had begun working on Peter Strickland’s film before her death in January 2011. Cargill found sound files of her voice on her computer and began from there – a task that must have been both eerie and poignant.Broadcast had long drawn inspiration from Italian soundtrack music and their 2009 album collaboration with The Focus Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Up to this point it’s all gone swimmingly for Manchester-based quartet Everything Everything. Their debut album Man Alive charted high in the summer of 2010, but follow-up Arc is the test of whether they’re in for the long haul. Although the answer is largely in the hands of their strong fan base, the unfocused Arc suggests the band themselves aren’t sure of who they are.It’s difficult to stand still while paddling furiously, but that’s what Arc sounds like – a band with a million-and-one ideas and no overriding sense of unity. Not only does it fail to take them beyond Man Alive, it dilutes Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Thirty year old London harpist Serafina Steer goes admirably her own way. Her sound is often sparse and acoustic, but never predictably so, and lyrically she’s off-piste, gambolling carefree from the opaque galactic ruminations of “Alien Invasion” to a clear-eyed glance at nude physicality in “Skinny Dipping”. The song “Island Odyssey”, for instance, appears initially to be a soppy love ballad - “I am a flower/You are a flower” etc – but then suddenly veers wildly into the undergrowth with the line “They killed your pigs and drank your wine”, and the listener is knocked off kilter, wakes up, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
David Byrne's new book How Music Works has once again brought to the fore the ever thorny debate about the relationship between technology and music. The dance between the two is being conducted at an ever more frenetic pace, and seems likely to continue to do so throughout 2013. In some countries ringtones now make up a reported 20 per cent of record companies profits - will labels be less inclined to sign or promote music that doesn’t boast a suitable catchy few seconds? ITunes and iPads clearly favour tracks over albums, while it’s become increasingly an advantage for artists to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The world goes apeshit when the Stones manage to drag themselves out for a few gigs after half a decade or so of indolence, but Neil Young rightly gets a bit prickly when people accuse him of making a "comeback". He tends to snarl that "he's never been away."And he's right. Though he's not far short of 70, Young keeps banging out albums which are at least intermittently impressive (eg Fork in the Road, Living With War, Le Noise), and this year the cantankerous old North Ontarian has been particularly productive. There's been Jonathan Demme's on-the-road film Neil Young Journeys, a box set Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Quite reasonably, many of 2012’s year-end reviews focused on the triple celebrations of the Jubilee, Olympics, and Royal pregnancy. For many, the year was quite different. In February, on Blues Funeral, Mark Lanegan’s end-of-the-world vocals presaged apocalyptic weather, war and death. It felt like an Old Testament prophecy being filtered through a Seattle drug addict. Which it virtually was.This was the Mark Lanegan Band’s first album in eight years. After 2004’s Bubblegum, Lanegan had concentrated on a series of collaborations, most notably with yang-to-his-ying, Isobel Campbell. With Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This is both a bang up-to-the-minute album, but also a throwback to the glory days of Ethiopian jazz in the late 1960s and 1970s - an era excavated with loving care over the last 15 years by Francis Falceto’s Éthiopiques series (now up to 27 releases). That series created enormous interest in Europe and the States, reviving the careers of some its leading proponents like Mulatu Astatke and Mahmoud Ahmed, and in recent years has resulted in some fabulous new music from the likes of The Heliocentrics, Imperial Tiger Orchestra, The Ex and Dub Colossus, in whose ranks pianist Samuel Yirga could Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
For years there have been pundits predicting that just as our high street restaurants and football teams represent a much more globalised world, surely pop music would follow suit. Fifteen years ago my local high street had a Wimpy Bar, a curry house and a wine bar – now we have Vietnamese, Turkish, Keralan and Mexican eateries to name a few – and the street is much better for it. Pop music, though, has been clinging to its Anglo-Saxon power bases in the US and the UK (the language helps, of course). But in 2012 you could claim that the most significant group and track were outside Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Can’s The Lost Tapes towers over any of the other reissues theartsdesk has covered this year. Although not strictly a reissue – it collected unheard recordings from tapes which had lain in the band’s archive – it rewrote the story of the seminal German band, offering a new perspective on their creative process and what they had issued. More than any of this, its three discs were a great listen and as essential as any of their albums - Soundtracks, Tago Mago and Future Days.Re-reviewing The Lost Tapes is unnecessary, but taking it as a yardstick for the year’s other reissues is, by turns, Read more ...
bruce.dessau
We're not doing a Best Gig of the Year chart on theartsdesk but if we did succumb to live listomania an unforgettable night in May would be certain to figure close to the top. One of pop's most mercurial figures, Kevin Rowland appeared on stage at the Shepherds Bush Empire and, more than three decades on from his band's incendiary beginnings, delivered the performance of a lifetime.Dexy's Shepherds Bush gig reinterpreted and revisited some of the band's early classics, but what was even more striking was that the new album, One Day I'm Going to Soar, performed in its entirety, more than Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In among the deluge of New Year Honours poured over Olympians (headed by Sir Bradley Wiggins, Sir Ben Ainslie, Dame Sarah Storey and Companion of Honour Lord Coe), there is a modest sprinkling over the arts world too. Roald Dahl's illustrator Quentin Blake becomes Sir Quentin, and another veteran entertainer, Jeremy Lloyd, co-writer of 'Allo 'Allo and Are You Being Served?, is made CBE. There are no arts Dames, but CBEs go to three well-known women, singer Kate Bush, artist Tracey Emin and choreographer Arlene Philips and to the less visible Cultural Olympiad chief, Ruth Mackenzie.Three other Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It feels a little like cheating to call Celebration Rock, the second album from Vancouver duo Japandroids, an album at all. Featuring only eight songs, the whole thing is over and done with in a little over 35 minutes. Plenty of bands these days would be happy to file that under "extended play".And yet, Japandroids squeeze so much into their alloted time that any more would be exhausting. This late in the year, it feels like giddy repetition to suggest that the album’s title is its mission statement; a summation as stark as the simple black and white cover art the band favours. The two-piece Read more ...