New music
mark.kidel
Toumani Diabaté is the world’s greatest and best-known kora player. Plugged in deep to a musical tradition that goes back over seven centuries, this griot or jali takes his custodial role very seriously, but he is also an adventurer who has stretched the repertoire of his ancient strings by listening avidly to music from an astonishingly wide range of sources.All of this was already obvious when he first came to Bristol in 1987, to take part in a number of WOMAD-sponsored activities which were the subject of a Channel 4 film I was making at the time. Toumani, a fresh-faced 22-year-old, came Read more ...
joe.muggs
The “remix album” has a patchy history. From bodged-together cash-in collections of already-released B-sides via showcases of hipness (hello Radiohead!) to focused collaborations (Mad Professor's reworkings of Massive Attack being the best known), the range of approaches is diverse to say the least. If anyone can get it right, though, it's King Midas Sound's Kevin Martin. An inveterate compiler, collaborator and shape-shifter with many years' worth of extraordinary sound experiments behind him from industrial metal to lovers' rock, he is unquestionably adept at forcing unlikely aesthetic Read more ...
david.cheal
It’s guitar rock, but not as we know it. Anna Calvi, the Londoner in her late twenties whose debut album created a stir earlier this year and earned her a Mercury Prize nomination, makes music that has all the familiar, recognisable elements of the music that we call “rock” – guitar, vocals, drums – but her treatment of it is idiosyncratic; she exploits the spaces between the instruments as much as the instruments themselves to create a dark mood, an atmosphere of heightened sexual tension.It takes a bit of getting used to. At a sold-out Shepherds Bush Empire, on the London leg of her UK tour Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The biggest surprise with Someone to Watch Over Me might be that SuBo has actually made it to three albums. Last year’s release brought relief that the Simon Cowell machine hadn’t broken her. But with this new one Boyle actually seems to be forging a career of sorts. So, now that she no longer has the novelty value of being a current "reality TV" phenomenon, and three LPs in, how does her music stand up?Considering Boyle’s act was the stuff of a prime-time talent show, it's hardly a revelation that this record offers a few saccharine moments with a general feeling that, because of its release Read more ...
theartsdesk
Earlier this week Pete Townshend asked whether “John Peelism”, the ethos of supporting and celebrating small, independent artists at a grass-roots level, could survive the internet. His implied answer was clearly "no". Townshend levelled the accusation that Apple, the owner of iTunes, is “a digital vampire Northern Rock” which doesn’t support or invest in the musicians whose work they sell, particularly the more independently minded ones, but rather sucks them dry before moving on. Claiming that “iTunes exists in the Wild West internet land of Facebook and Twitter”, he went on to suggest that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Molly had a red shirt/ Susie, she ripped her shirt off completely/ Danny poured the beer all over Sally/ We all ran around the back yard/ It was crazy clown time/ It was real fun”. The voice is strangled, high. A treated guitar phases in and out, puncturing moaning sounds. A simple beat thuds. David Lynch’s fun might not be yours or mine, but his new album packs a punch. Crazy Clown Time is nightmarish. Seductive, too.It oughtn’t to be a surprise that Lynch has made another album. More surprising is how long it’s taken him to do it. Music has always been integral to his art. His first full- Read more ...
Russ Coffey
You may know Harry Shearer better as Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons. His wife, Judith Owen, is as well known for her recent stage show with Ruby Wax, Losing It, as her own albums. But though they may have limited street recognisability, in the three cities they call home they are legendary for their hospitality. theartsdesk sampled some of this warmth in their London residence where, over tea, we discussed, amongst other things, dwarf choreography, mental illness and hanging out with Metallica.The night before Owen was giving a promotional concert for her new album, Some Kind of Comfort, Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Boy, do Arctic Monkeys move fast. There were 21 songs in their set at the O2 Arena last night and at one point they were racing through them at such a breathtaking lick I thought I would be on my way home within the hour. In the end their performance clocked in at around the length of a football match thanks to some pauses to swap guitars. Plus a break for Alex Turner to stand by the drums and ostentatiously comb his elaborate quiff. Some sections of the crowd might have questioned Turner’s surprising 2011 rug-rethink, but no one would dare question his ability to pen a brilliantly infectious Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There are two fundamentally opposing schools of thought on Florence Welch and her mysterious machine. For the believers, her music belongs to the tradition of questing, modernist pop with a pagan trim of the kind Kate Bush made before she started writing 14-minute songs about having sex with snowmen. To the naysayers, on the other hand, she’s both shallow and contrived, a paint-stripping belter desperate to lend her sub-Siouxsie Sioux shtick gravitas by grafting on a skin of borrowed poses and studied weirdness.Neither view quite nails it. In reality, Welch makes occasionally stirring but Read more ...
david.cheal
It’s a long time since I laughed during a show as much as I did in this one. And not, I hasten to add, in a snarky, narky, sarky way, but simply because it was fun. In another illustration of just how deeply competitive the business of the arena pop show has become, Britney Spears’s Femme Fatale tour is a formidable song-and-dance spectacle, with a full complement of dancers and hydraulics and epic visuals, and one that also features some damn fine music. But what makes this one memorable is that it's sexy and silly in equal measure.First, I laughed at the sheer campness of the opening Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This might not have been a bad album if Lou Reed wasn't on it, but its 95 minutes would still have been 50 per cent too long. Not being privy to the inner workings of the Metallica universe, I have no idea why the speaker-bursting veterans thought that working with Reed might be to their advantage, unless they'd fallen for Lou's own propaganda about Metal Machine Music being a masterpiece. In the end, the band gathered in the studio to whip up a batch of piledriver riffs and broody instrumental backdrops, over which Reed has been permitted to intone lyrics (said to be inspired by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
This wasn’t going to offer any surprises. Bernadette Nolan, Lulu and Stacey Solomon would deliver the questions they’d rehearsed. Manilow would respond, then deliver the relevant song. He’s a charmer, and you’d have to be made of lead not to be lifted by some of his songs. But he didn’t need this audience and format. The interaction added nothing. His fantasticness doesn't need restating.Barry Manilow will never be hip. His path is similar to Randy Newman’s, but his early liaison with Bette Midler always meant he was going to be broader, lean towards the bold, the brash. Answering a question Read more ...