New music
Russ Coffey
Even before listening to the third instalment of Green Day’s 2012 trilogy, it’s hard not to feel generously disposed towards it. Not only has poor Billie Joe recently had a stint in rehab, but after three quick-fire back-to-basics albums, few could deny their current work ethic is impressive.There are, of course, others who refuse to join in the enthusiasm. Many accuse the California punks of being middle-aged fraudsters with pantomime songs. But what’s so wrong with 40-year-olds singing teen anthems? Surely, the issue is quality, not age. Some have suggested, after the the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
In 2009 I interviewed Jamie Cullum about Dave Brubeck, who has died today just a day before his 92nd birthday. What follows are Cullum's recollections of falling in love with Brubeck's music, and later knowing and working with a jazz legend."My parents weren’t into jazz at all, but my dad did have a tape of Dave Brubeck and, as most people did, loved "Take Five". I heard that in the car long before my jazz awakening through Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters and In A Silent Way - swampy, odd music. Dave was on my radar long before that.I’m very fond of playing those stabbing, sharp notes, and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Theo Keating – AKA DJ Touché - has been creating club-functional tunes for over twenty years. His most high profile moment was as half of The Wiseguys whose song "Ooh La La" was unavoidable in the late Nineties, both in nightclubs and on TV ads. Nowadays he has a secure career on the global DJ circuit, grounded in his eclectic taste and turntable skills developed as a teenage B-boy, but he appears restless, always exploring new areas. His Black Ghosts project with ex-Simian singer Simon Lord, loosely based around the theoretical intersection of dance music and horror films, never came to much Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Elbow are responsible for a remarkable conjuring trick. Earlier this year their song “First Steps” stirringly soundtracked the BBC’s Olympic credit sequence, and then at the Closing Ceremony they serenaded the athletes into the London 2012 stadium with “Open Arms” and “One Day Like This”. Their musical message of harmony and celebration - of higher, faster, stronger, cheerier - ought by rights to sound like the most grating of bromides. But no, Elbow have found the secret recipe for banishing cynicism, boosting endorphins, spreading the love. It’s no coincidence that their star has risen Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Guitar virtuoso RM Hubbert is something of an unlikely champion of quiet music. In fact, if you haven’t yet heard the gorgeous Thirteen Lost and Found, the Chemikal Underground debut on which the guitarist invited friends including Aidan Moffat, Alex Kapranos and Alasdair Roberts to supplement the instrumentals with which he made his name, you might wonder what Hubbert - a heavily-tattooed onetime member of various Glasgow hardcore bands - is doing co-curating a festival with the unlikely label of Shhh!Shhh! was created by London-based promoters The Local who - together with Hubbert and Alun Read more ...
joe.muggs
Another week, another album of music with dubstep's soundsystem heft, an indie sense of melancholia, and skyscraping electronic orchestrations that seem to hark back to the most grandiose experiments of 1980s acts like The Cocteau Twins and Echo & The Bunnymen as much as to anything in the club music canon. Stubborn Heart, Stumbleine and Planas, and in a more subdued form Madegg, Kyson and Memotone, all to some degree hit this vein of sound. This kind of blurry area between electronica and indie songwriting has been made extremely popular by SBRTKT, James Blake and The xx, but there Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Before Glasvegas took off James Allan played professional football in Scotland. He did not quite make the highest echelon in his soccer career and after a blistering start, when his band was championed as the Next Great Guitar Group, things haven't been looking too hopeful in his music career either. Glasvegas was dropped by Columbia Records after their second album, and when I heard they were playing this small club in the run-up to the 2013 release of their third album, Later...When The TV Turns To Static, I wondered if maybe their record label had a point.How wrong I was. This brief " Read more ...
theartsdesk
The House of Love: The House of LoveKieron TylerAfter The Jesus & Mary Chain, The House of Love were Creation Records’ next most-likely sons. Their melodies had an epic sweep, they had a top-notch songwriter in Guy Chadwick and, with Terry Bickers, a fabulous guitarist. Yet, after signing to a major label their potential was never achieved despite regularly packing major venues. Their first, eponymous, album – reissued here, 24 years on – is their finest hour. All that said, as the liner notes reveal, Creation were more convinced stablemates The Weather Prophets were more likely to happen Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ah, Goth. It’s a difficult genre to take in any way seriously unless you’re feeling under-appreciated while going through puberty. Then again, like heavy metal, maybe it’s not supposed to be taken seriously, more an enjoyably melodramatic way of roaring angst at the universe through fantasy metaphor. Officers probably couldn’t give a damn one way or the other and almost certainly wouldn’t welcome the term – but that’s what their music is entirely run through with, and rather fine it is too.The four-piece hail from Leeds, a Goth Mecca, home to the Sisters of Mercy, and deal in computer-tooled Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Nostalgia is not what it used to be. With kids who were not even born when Mick Jagger first shimmied across the stage singing the praises of the Rolling Stones, it was nice to see an audience at the Shepherds Bush Empire, give or take a few young goths of no fixed hairstyle, almost perfectly fitting the expected Adam Ant demographic. Well-preserved women who loved the pop hits, bulkier men who liked the punk phase. I may have missed that meeting, but Antmusic clearly lives onThe end of the gig, however, found both sociological sub-sets united in one of the most bizarre Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It’s an expression of our collective souls coming together,” said The Beach Boys’ Mike Love of his band, in this celebration of their 2012 50th anniversary world tour and recent album That’s Why God Made the Radio. Subsequent to the making of Doin' it Again and during the ensuing global jaunt, Love announced he was ditching fellow Beach Boys Alan Jardine, David Marks and Brian Wilson, whom he had been sharing the stage with. Not much of a shelf life for this collective expression, with little chance of doing it again. Love’s own Beach Boys – without that trio – picked up the baton after Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ke$ha’s presentation is very shrewd. When she first appeared a couple of years ago, she seemed to be trashy, binge-drinking progeny of the Lady Gaga phenomenon. As time passed, the 25-year-old Californian singer tempered this version of herself with a musical self-awareness contrary to tabloid reports of global boozing and bum-flashing. Notably, she worked with Wayne Coyne of space-pop alt-rockers The Flaming Lips, contributing a track to, and appearing on the cover of, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends. More recently she’s been telling anyone who’d listen that her second album, Warrior Read more ...