New music
joe.muggs
It's easy to forget exactly how successful Norah Jones is, but with over 50 million records sold, she is a modern success up there with the Jay-Zs of this world. To see her come on stage last night, though, you wouldn't have known it. There were no fireworks, no build-up of drama, no crazed intro tape, no MC on stage to announce her entrance, just a band and singer walking on stage to play. Then again, that kind of matches the way Jones came into the public sphere, really: her breeze-light songs wafting into the collective consciousness without warning or ceremony, and then just staying there Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
At the age of 65, you would be forgiven for thinking that punk rock high priestess Patti Smith has every justification for winding down (the odd eccentric covers collection to keep the kids amused aside, of course). Indeed, her actions of the past couple of years - the highly-acclaimed memoir Just Kids, the self-curated musical retrospective Outside Society - bear all the hallmarks of an artist in reflective mode. Banga, Smith’s first new material since 2004’s Tramp, comes full circle in a sense: it was recorded at New York’s Electric Lady studios with many of the same personnel as were Read more ...
theartsdesk
There is film footage of those opening magical, transformative moments: of Brown intoning, “The time, the time is now. Do it now, do it now.” Film, however, could not capture the effect the band’s arrival had on the mood of the crowd; it was a jaw-dropping biblical reaction, of relief, amazement, worship and unadulterated joy. “It was like a massive pilgrimage to witness,” said Roddy McKenna, the man who had been instrumental in signing the band to Jive/Zomba. “It wasn’t a gig – it was a statement.” The resurrection of a day that for so long had threatened disaster began; the party was Read more ...
howard.male
“We didn’t have a real agenda. We just wanted to play some tunes and have a good time.” Thus spoke the immaculately suited but still mischievous-looking Mick Jones. And thank goodness he said it because, from the off - even before the off - I didn’t think anyone would. The interviewer (his ideological preconceptions crumbling) protested, so unfortunately Jones had to qualify his unguarded statement by saying he couldn’t of course speak for the other members of The Clash. But I wish he’d just left what he said as a big fat V-sign to all those set on creating a revisionist version of the Read more ...
simon.broughton
With the yelling and posturing, R.U.T.A. are clearly a punk band, but it’s like no punk band you’ve ever heard before. The lyrics are in Polish, for one thing, and there are no guitars, but Middle Eastern lutes, archaic fiddles and a battery of percussion. They only formed last year, but already R.U.T.A. – a jokey acronym for the Movement of Utopia, Transcendence and Anarchy - have stirred up controversy.The conservative Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (Law and Justice) party, second largest in the Polish parliament, tried to get them banned at a festival for being “anti-Polish and anti-Catholic”. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was already apparent from Melody Gardot's last album, My One and Only Thrill, that she harboured a more than passing infatuation with the music of Brazil and Latin America. "I love Brazilian music, it's one of my favourite genres," she said at the time. "I love the Stan Getz bossa nova years, I love Getz/Giberto, Jobim, Caetano Veloso... "Three years on, Gardot reaffirms her presence with The Absence, a disc on which her latin leanings have erupted into a full-scale rain forest of shimmering strings, lissome acoustic guitars, supple beats and feline melodies. At a recent showcase Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A few years ago the ultimate in post-modern bollocks appeared – Guilty Pleasures, a club night built around the notion that tepid crap from yesteryear is brilliant. So let’s go dig Toto, Go West, Andrew Gold, Dr Hook, any old toe jam. Of course, there’s no reason why anyone shouldn’t dance around to anything, and it’s refreshing, now and then, to give the po-faced Punk Year Zero thing a kick-in, but actively celebrating drivel is another matter. "Dreadlock Holiday" is not a guilty pleasure, it’s just shite. Move on.That aside, all music lovers have actual guilty pleasures, records we know are Read more ...
howard.male
This Tanzanian crew of eight youngsters play a galloping bongo-led music called “Mchiriku” that spews torrentially from the speakers, exhausting your reviewer after just the first couple of songs. Perhaps if the arrangements and instrumentation had been more varied and nuanced I might have felt differently, because there’s certainly much here that charms and intrigues. But that’s probably akin to suggesting that the first Ramones album would have been better if they’d done a couple of ballads and added orchestra strings to “Chain Saw”.But having said that, I’ve been a huge fan of producer Read more ...
joe.muggs
After a double set of live studio guests in our last show, it's just Joe and Peter this time, and thus a lot more music and discussion. Our intrepid explorers ponder whether there's anything new under the sun, looking at new-sounding folk and old-sounding electronica, angry British hip hop, Swedish jazz-punk, Mexican boutique hotels, murder blues and Crowley-referencing ambient music. There's an exclusive live recording of an acid folk band covering an acid house classic, a broad selection of sound due to come out in the next month or two, and a donkey joke from Peter that's not to be Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“You're a wasted face, you're a sad-eyed lie, you're a holocaust.” The devastation of Big Star’s “Holocaust” manifested the mood of the album it was recorded for, which was supposed to be the Memphis band’s third. Last night celebrated this classic musical evocation of fragmentation. Capturing that on stage was a tall order. Playing the songs along with a string section reading from sheet music could never be as spontaneous as the chaotic, booze-fuelled sessions that birthed what became Third.Even so, this extraordinary album was brought to life, a life it never had back in 1974 when it was Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Rumer has recently returned to public life. Her new album, Boys Don’t Cry, is a collection of songs from the Seventies by male singers such as Townes Van Zandt, Leon Russell, Tim Hardin and Jimmy Webb. Her interpretations, as with her 2010 debut album of original material, Seasons of my Soul, are coated in the icing of classic easy listening – the smoothness of The Carpenters or Carole King springs to mind – yet there’s the kernel of something pointed, heartfelt, even painful, at its core.
Seasons of my Soul sold well – over 500,000 copies – and Rumer was taken to the bosom of the Jools Read more ...