New music
peter.quinn
Soweto Kinch's set last night as part of the eXplorations mini-series featured gluttony, envy and a host of other vices. No, not A Life in the Day of an Investment Banker, but a tantalising glimpse of Kinch's take on the Seven Deadly Sins.Presenting material from Kinch's most recent release (The New Emancipation) in the first half, “Trying to be a Star” set the mood for the entire evening: a riotous mix of sax, bass, drums, pre-recorded material and spoken/sung elements, with Kinch flexing his singing voice on the chorus hook. From the outset, his rhythm section of bassist Karl Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Before The Beatles touched down there in 1964, British pop was barely a concern for America. The first in this three-part series took The Beatles arrival as the year zero for British pop’s conquering of America. An entertaining canter through an over-familiar slice of pop history, Go West was enlivened by some top-drawer talking heads including Paul McCartney and Jimmy Page. No Rolling Stones though.But it was great to see members of The Animals, Hollies, Searchers and Zombies given the chance to reminisce. American context came from veteran DJ Larry Kane, New York Doll Syl Sylvain, Jackie Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Elegantly riding an upswing that began with his return to touring in 2008, Leonard Cohen's first album in eight years finds him deep into his seventies and more than ever with mortality on his mind. Which makes it all the more delicious that the music for roughly half of these songs was composed by Patrick Leonard, the man who co-wrote Madonna’s “Hanky Panky”. Strange days indeed in the Tower of Song. We shouldn't be surprised. Despite his age and gravitas, one of Cohen's great virtues is that he makes no claim to be any kind of authority, musical, moral or otherwise. The title of the Read more ...
joe.muggs
I first heard Zed Bias's Biasonic Hot Sauce – Birth of the Nanocloud last autumn. He may have been one of the key players in the London-centric sound of UK garage, but he was never of that scene. Based in Milton Keynes through the first phase of his career, he releases through a Brighton label and is now resident in Manchester. This is key to understanding the connections in his tracks, which reflect the clubs in those cities that sidestep metropolitan scene micro-delineation and rave parochialism and lock into a wider soulboy set of connections.His sprawling album as Maddslinky earlier in Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It would be easy to begin with a reflection on how little the world has changed in the 100 years since the birth of Woody Guthrie; to draw parallels between the Great Depression and our own troubled economic times. Yet en route to last night's “Woody at 100” celebrations at Glasgow's Celtic Connections festival, I realised that to do so would constitute a disservice to undoubtedly one of the most important songwriters of the 20th century.For Guthrie’s centenary, his daughter Nora has once again opened up access to the thousands of uncompleted lyrics and writings curated by the Woody Guthrie Read more ...
howard.male
Whatever post-modern subtexts and layers of irony may lie behind the title Yes and Also Yes, the fact remains that Mike Doughty’s fourth solo album exudes a sunny positivism that makes a completely literal reading perfectly reasonable. From its opening lyric onwards - “You’re man won’t dance but I will” - this is largely a collection of bouncy, affirmative declarations of intent which find the one-time Soul Coughing front man more comfortable in his own skin than he’s ever been before.As someone who thought Soul Coughing were the best American rock band of the 1990s, I initially missed Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s about the bass and the drums. The choirboy high vocals and sugary melodies catch the ear first, but they’d be so much soufflé without the room-shaking, stomach-wobbling bass throb, the Chic-style disco drumming and its tsk-tsk-tsk hi-hat shuffle. Combined, the soft and airy, the propulsive and grounded make the audience move. Not tap a toe, but actually move – dance.Casiokids need that connection as, despite every other person at this sold-out show being Norwegian, there’s the language barrier. A rarity amongst Norwegian musical exports, Casiokids sing in their native language. There was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although they’ll still be filed under jazz, Portico Quartet’s third album takes them even closer to the ambient and trance they’ve been edging towards since they attracted attention in 2007 after the release of their Mercury-nominated debut, Knee Deep in the North Sea. It’s partly to do with the departure of founder member Nick Mulvey and his replacement with keyboard/percussion player Keir Vine, and also a natural progression.Much that’s familiar remains: Milo Fitzpatrick's pulsing, snappy bass, Jack Wyllie’s drifting, occasionally dissonant, sometimes squalling sax and the precision of Read more ...
mark.kidel
Folk music is about roots and place and while rootedness can provide a welcome balance to the vagaries of a virtual and globalised world, it can also raise some less salubrious spirits: the British folk movement expresses at times a folksy form of insularity, in which place or nation are made just a little too sacred and exclusive. The Cecil Sharp Project, which emerged out of a week of workshopping sponsored last year by the Shrewsbury Folk Festival, avoided these pitfalls with a great deal of deftness, a sense of irony as well as a dose of humour.The assembled musicians drew from the Read more ...
joe.muggs
I've seen some genre intersections in my time, but gangsta ambient takes the biscuit. Baghdad born South Londoner VersA Beatz began as a grime producer, but like many has moved from that genre's hyped-up energy into the slower, more menacing electronic “trap beats” of hip hop. This in turn has overlapped with a current American style of melancholic leftfield hip hop sounds pioneered by Clams Casino (best known as producer to Lil B and current sensation A$AP Rocky) to produce, in this free album of instrumentals, a narcotic sound that feels as if gravity has been loosened and the imagination Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The term "folktronica" always makes me think of that horror-porn abomination The Human Centipede. Two entities being joined together in a way that they should never be joined together. Finger-in-your-ear choral harmonies and groovy basslines? It should not work but it often does. Audacious outfit Tunng regularly cocked a snook at received boundaries and pulled off this unholy alliance with flying colours, so perhaps it is no surprise that frontman/founder Sam Genders repeats the trick with the debut release of his latest outfit, Diagrams. And then some.Black Light is the kind of album that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Whether it’s the British troupes which inspired It Ain’t Half Hot Mum or Bob Hope’s visits to Vietnam, the armed forces have long recognised that entertaining the troops is central to keeping on-going campaigns on an even keel. In 1971, the US army went a step further, using bands of serving soldiers both to entertain and as a recruitment tool. For the bands, it was also a way of avoiding being sent to Vietnam. The East Of Underground Hell Below box set, which collects the albums the army released, is more than a musical artefact. It offers a window on an until-now barely known aspect of Read more ...