New music
theartsdesk
John Carpenter: Halloween II/Halloween IIIKieron TylerPeople celebrate Halloween in different ways, but the arrival of these reissues of the soundtrack music to two John Carpenter horror films is enough to put pumpkins, cut-out bats and capes in the shade. Both are landmarks in using electronic music for cinema, and both are a great, spooky listens. Even when divorced from the imagery.Carpenter had already worked with composer Alan Howarth on the music for Escape From New York (1978) and the pair reunited in 1981 to create a score for Halloween II. Howarth built the new music around Read more ...
peter.quinn
Surprising transitions, unusual segues, a myriad of I-wasn't-expecting-that moments. Saluting some of the iconic figures in Caribbean history and paying tribute to the tentacular reach of its culture, with House of Legends Courtney Pine has delivered one of the finest albums in his already well-stuffed discography.While his previous album Europa focused on the woody timbre of the bass clarinet, his fifteenth studio album features the plangent tones of the soprano sax exclusively, heard at the outset in a virtuosic flourish that announces a heart-wrenching ballad composed in memory of Stephen Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Leona Lewis has a whole new look: all mouse-brown hair, sullen expression and the oddest-looking facial jewellery since Kate Nash misappropriated the bindi in the video she made to accompany “Underestimate The Girl”. It really doesn’t suit her.Forgive me. I too find it pretty disrespectful when writers comment on an artist’s appearance before they start to consider what a work sounds like. But as I listened to Glassheart, the third album from one-time X Factor winner and ridiculously successful Lewis, it was the artwork I kept coming back to. The head-and-shoulder shot makes her look washed- Read more ...
bruce.dessau
To paraphrase Shakespeare, when albums featuring strident, post-feminist "I am woman hear me roar" naked cover sleeves come, they come not in single spies but in battalions. I'm not so sure about the motives of Christina Aguilera, but the recent album imagery from Martha Wainwright and Natasha Khan aka Bat for Lashes has offered an opportunity for prodigiously talented, modern singer/songwriters to lay themselves bare, literally as well as emotionally.Khan cites Patti Smith's early uncompromising incarnation, famously captured by Robert Mapplethorpe, as an inspiration. One just wishes there Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Donald Fagen's fourth solo album arrives 30 years after his first one, The Nightfly, though there can be no doubting that it's the work of the same artist. The quizzical chord sequences, supple instrumental interplay and teasingly cryptic lyrics will be instantly familiar to students of his work, and indeed of the later days of Steely Dan.Fagen and his partner Walter Becker have successfully rejuvenated the Steely Dan legacy by assembling a touring version of the group bristling with hyper-capable musical gunslingers, and Fagen has used several of them here, notably guitarist Jon Herington, Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Garland Jeffreys, a 68-year old singer and songwriter, is not simply New York City’s best-kept secret but American’s music’s most consistently underrated and overlooked talent. Garland is a remarkable talent and his latest album, The King of In Between, is musical dynamite. Oddly, he has remained largely invisible in Britain for the past 40-plus years.I first heard Jeffreys on Kiwi radio in 1977 when he had a minor, reggae hit called “Cool Down Boy”. The video showed a light-skinned black man who possessed a fine voice and a sensibility more New York than Kingston. Around the same time I read Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A lot has blown in since the last Scandinavian round-up. The most recent releases sifted here include singer-songwriter intimacy, various forms of electropop, several shades of jazz experimenta, joyous dance-pop and some distinctly non-Scandinavian flavours. High points are many. Satisfaction is a certainty.On their last album, 2010’s Magic Chairs, Danish moodists Efterklang gently embraced a more direct way of presenting their songwriting. Up to that point, their sepulchral melodies had intertwined with instrumentation that merged glitchiness with the organic. Magic Chairs smoothed the edges Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Styles and innovations in music, as in all the arts, change incrementally over time. Suddenly we can find ourselves in an unrecognisable landscape. Things moved on when we weren’t paying proper attention. Sometimes this is due to a wave of game-changing talent – exciting and all to the good. On other occasions we’re startled to awake in a mire. What’s worse, as in a nightmare, everyone around is carrying on regardless. Are their souls asleep? Listening to Ellie Goulding’s new album is such a moment.Goulding’s debut, Lights, was a big seller. It opened doors and she even played Elton John’s “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Being told that Magical Mystery Tour was a home movie is bit tiring. Self-evidently, The Beatles’ filmic response to the psychedelic experience was not that. They tried, and failed, to hire Shepperton Studios. Known artists like Ivor Cutler and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band were brought on board. Gavrik Losey, then hot from being an assistant director on Modesty Blaise, worked on it. Masses of extras were employed. Although a self-originated vanity project, none of this points to it being a home movie. The negative reception received at the time seems to have skewed the collective consensus. Read more ...
theartsdesk
B B King: Ladies & Gentlemen…Mr B.B. KingKieron TylerOne of the stranger manifestations of U2’s Eighties fascination with the iconography of American music was “When Love Comes to Town", their collaboration with B B King. As a single, it was a hit, something King has never chased. This smart, career-spanning box set is probably not going to have the same effect as U2’s patronage, but the still-constantly touring 87-year-old blues legend is unlikely to be fussed about that.Ladies & Gentlemen…, confusingly, comes in two configurations: a 4-CD, 77-track set and a 10-CD, 194-track Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Motherhood doesn’t always bring out the best in singer-songwriters. On the album Aerial Kate Bush, for instance, sings “luverly luverly luverly Bertie…you give me so much joy/ and then you give me more joy”. Yeuch. So when I heard that recent mum Martha Wainwright’s new album was to be called Come Home to Mama my heart sank. It needn’t have. If there’s one thing this album isn’t, it’s sickly.The title actually comes from “Proserpina", the album's only cover and the last song her mother, Kate McGarrigle, wrote before her death in 2010. In Roman mythology Proserpina was condemned to live the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Matthew Herbert (b 1972) is a leading experimental musician. His work is sometimes as much sonic exploration as music and mostly inhabits territory where the two realms meet. Recently made Creative Director of the newly resuscitated BBC Radiophonic Workshop (who have an open day at the South Bank’s Ether Festival on 7th October), he first came to public attention through Nineties electronic dance releases as Radio Boy, Wishmountain and Doctor Rockit, melding club beats to his own “found sound” field recordings. By the turn of the century he was a successful DJ/producer, remixing the likes of Read more ...