New music
peter.quinn
14 Grammy Awards, over 30 million albums sold, immortalised in song by Bob Dylan. It's hard to believe that Girl On Fire is only Alicia Keys's fifth studio album, such is the extent of her success. The singer-songwriter's previous release, The Element of Freedom, successfully mined the juxtaposition of powerful beats and understated vocals. And, following the solo piano amuse-bouche of “De Novo Adagio”, Girl On Fire initially looks set to deliver more of the same.The slow burner “Brand New Me”, the futuristic, cut-up beats and wobbly analogue synths of “When It's All Over”, the warm ambient Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Frustratingly, the ramshackle rail service from Brighton deposits me at the crammed O2 20 minutes into Robbie Williams's set. After the eerie quiet of the airport-like walkways around the perimeters, the torrid atmosphere inside the gigantic arena is a shocker. It's packed to the rafters with women shrieking and waving their arms in the air while their men sit beside them, sheepishly mouthing lyrics. Williams, clad fetchingly in black, is playing in the round in the centre of the O2's huge bowl, and the first song I catch is his recent number one single, "Candy". This frankly irritating Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Any gig is partly defined by its audience. Brighton audiences, particularly Brighton Dome audiences, are usually a lively bunch but tonight’s crowd, at least until beyond halfway through, are still as dummies in their seats, quiet as mice. Looking around is uncanny, like observing a theatre watching a Strindberg play or some such. True, they’re mostly in their fifties but that’s a poor excuse. The last time I saw the Dome this dead was when Ultravox played a couple of years back. Matters weren’t, perhaps, helped by the production company’s disgraceful insistence that the bar – which is Read more ...
graeme.thomson
English singer-songwriter Steve Adey has taken six years to follow up his excellent debut album, All Things Real, and at first it’s hard to tell why. These 10 songs, simply constructed, are executed without any great fuss or ornament, but slowly their sense of depth and unhurried devotion to quality reveals itself. The album is aptly named. Adey doesn't do party music. “Are we laughing?” is the question posed during the second song, “Laughing”. Not on Adey’s watch, we’re not. Recorded in a 19th-century Edinburgh church, this is relentlessly downbeat midnight music. When a (terrific) Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Even their name, Band of Horses, conjures up something exotic. The Carolina five-piece’s lyrics may occasionally veer towards the angsty but their sound is firmly anchored in their sumptuous sweeping Americana. It earned their last album, Infinite Arms, a Grammy nomination. This year’s Mirage Rock takes that formula and shakes it up with a handful of grit.Last week’s Later with Jools Holland was a taster of the new live show. The band's tweets indicated Jimmy Page was impressed. Last night singer Ben Bridwell came out on stage in a denim shirt and baseball cap looking like a trucker and Read more ...
garth.cartwright
A decade ago I was wearing a T-shirt branded with the cover to Shuggie Otis’s Inspiration / Information album when an American woman approached me, loudly declaring “Shuggie Otis! His wife used to be my best friend! He was the worst junkie I ever knew!” I'd long wondered why Otis remained invisible – the 2001 reissue of Inspiration/Information on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label had attracted much media praise, but prompted no gigs or new material – so perhaps this was the answer.It's an appropriate moment for Shuggie to emerge from the shadows. His three solo albums have Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For those wont to say “that’s well dark,” at the slightest hint of edgy content, here is true darkness. The third album by London alt-folk oddballs David Cronenberg’s Wife is stewed in pitch-black lyrical themes and revels in dragging its listeners to truly uncomfortable places. If this album had been made by an artist with a higher profile, I suspect it would have been greeted by a chorus of disapproving voices from every side of the ideological spectrum.Musically, the four-piece plough a furrow not dissimilar to The Fall or LIARS, but only if both had joined forces to create a new and Read more ...
Tim Woodall
Squeezing nearly 300 events into the 10-day dash that is the London Jazz Festival, which has just ended required dozens of venues – many not regular presenters of jazz – to open their doors. From the 606 Club in the west to Oliver’s Bar in Greenwich in the east, the Finchley Arts Depot in the north to the Hideaway down south in Streatham, it is in the pubs, clubs and community venues of London that the jazz festival’s heart beats.The fringe also better reflects the continuing internationalisation of the London Jazz Festival. Where the Southbank and Barbican tend to present the American and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Gig-going in the winter can be a difficult business. Plummeting temperatures call for layers, thick coats and scarves - none of which are easily stowed away at your average club show. As the venue starts to fill up with similarly clad bodies the place gets sweatier and sweatier, but by the time you realise you really should have coughed up a couple of quid and the extra wait for the cloakroom you’re probably already hemmed in.It comes as something of a relief then that, following two support acts (Jim Lockey and the Solemn Sun, followed by Tim Barry, who played a jolly little song about a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No one would have believed in the last years of the 1970s that human taste was for concept double albums based on novels by HG Wells about invading Martians. No one could have dreamed that the era which spawned shouty gobshites in skinny trousers would also find house room for the alien union between late Victorian science fiction and pompous orchestral pop. Yet, across the gulf of time we can confirm that this did indeed happen. And much as they did in the flash-forward conclusion to the original album, the Martians are invading all over again.Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds, many of a Read more ...
garth.cartwright
As Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister heads towards his 67th birthday does he ever reflect on the strange and fabulous journey his 50 years as a professional musician have taken? I doubt it – navel gazing not being something Stoke On Trent’s most famous son is known for indulging in. Yet this fierce pensioner has worked his way from grafting on the 1960s Northern working men’s clubs circuit as guitarist with The Rockin’ Vicars through roadie for Jimi Hendrix to providing hippie blowhards Hawkwind with their most memorable moments then forming Motörhead only to find that punk’s toilet clubs were the only Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Next month, as has been the case for centuries, lovers of the poet and mystic Jalaluludin Rumi (known simply as Mevlana - The Master - in Turkey, Iran and Persia) will come together to celebrate the day of his passing, on the 17th of December 1273. Thousands gather for a week commemorating what Rumi called his “marriage to eternity” with a grand ceremony of whirling dervishes.I attended this impressive spectacle a few years ago, which took place in a basketball stadium (there were buses of Japanese tourists outside). In the last few years a more fittingly dedicated building has been Read more ...