New music
joe.muggs
This is where the delirium kicks in. Tired but happy, the attendees started the third day of Sónar festival slightly boggled by how to pick and choose from the strange delights on offer. Saturday was when the true musical variety of the festival was displayed: straight-up hip hop to eye-popping South African tribal dance displays, balmy ambient revivalism to apocalyptic techno, heartbroken electronica to deranged prog rock: it was all on offer...If day one was a warm-up, and day two when the energy levels peaked, this was where we just got swept along in the sheer diversity of the festival Read more ...
Russ Coffey
“If you’ve got the heart,” sang a suave Ewan Macintyre, “then you can be involved, you can be a part”. There was more heart in the room last night than you’d find in a whole tour of Mumford & Sons. And art. Nothing too flashy to begin, just lovely interwoven mandolins and fiddles, driven by guitar rhythms and their trademark bluegrass banjo. Southern Tenant Folk Union might have been playing in a boozer, but if people call these guys a jumped-up pub band, they've got it all wrong.Southern Tenant Folk Union was formed in 2006 in Edinburgh, by Pat McGarvey, who played a five-string banjo Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Tickets were like gold dust for this one and the stage was lit as if some of that dust had been sprinkled on the Festival Hall in a midsummer dream of a concert. The massed ranks of the Crouch End Festival Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra and a backing rock band magicked up on the Southbank to pay handsome tribute to the presiding Puck and genius loci Raymond Douglas Davies, alumnus of the William Grimshaw Secondary Modern School, in the manor of Muswell Hill. As the last night of the Meltdown series, curated by Davies, was it all hopelessly OTT? Short answer: yes. But it was also Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When I put together my book Rock Shrines, about places music fans go to pay tribute to their dead heroes, I was particularly struck by the story of Ben Cauley. He was trumpet player in Otis Redding's band, The Bar Kays, and the only person to be pulled alive from the freezing waters of Lake Monona, Wisconsin, after the light aircraft crash that killed Redding and the rest of the band in December 1967.I wanted to know what happened to him and my research eventually located him at Da Blues Restaurant in Memphis International Airport where Cauley was in-house entertainment. To my mind there was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Montréal natives The Arcade Fire sing in English. Yet 65 percent of the Québec city’s population have French as their first language. Les FrancoFolies de Montréal is Francophone Canada’s annual celebration of non-Anglo Saxon music. This year, big draws include French visitors Jeanne Moreau and Etienne Daho performing Jean Genet’s Le condamné à mort with musical accompaniment. Local legend Jean-Pierre Ferland is reprising his seminal 1970 set Jaune, the first Québec album to - controversially - fuse Franco sensibilities with rock dynamics. More than a festival, FrancoFolies is also cultural Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Duane Eddy will forever be identified with his deeply twangy late-Fifties/early-Sixties instrumental hits like “Rebel Rouser”, “Ramrod” and “Peter Gunn”, he’s never gone out of style. His 1958 debut album was titled Have “Twangy Guitar” – Will Travel. And he has – through time and space. He scored a British hit with “Play Me Like You Play Your Guitar” in 1975. It didn’t chart in the US. His 1986 re-recording of “Peter Gunn”, made with The Art of Noise, was Top 10 in Britain. Now, here he is again with a new album, recorded in Sheffield with big-time fan Richard Hawley. His homeland Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Sir Paul McCartney recently suggested that Ringo Starr missed out on a knighthood because the Queen was too busy dealing with Bruce Forsyth. At least Ringo got to go to the Palace though. Albeit the one in Hampton Court, where last night, as if by magic, a torrential downpour stopped just as he stepped on stage. At one point during the day it looked as if a Yellow Submarine would be needed to get this critic home. In the end my purple Volkswagen sufficed.Starr certainly looked in fine fettle. The trim, neat, black-clad 70-year-old has outlived his doppelgänger Yasser Arafat as well as two ex- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It's fair to say that The Bookhouse Boys are not one of those bands who spotted a successful trend and thought, I know what, let's adapt our sound to that. The London nine-piece are often compared to Ennio Morricone but there are really only hints of that emotive Italian film composer. Their brass flourishes and general mood of Mariachi melodrama recall the classic spaghetti westerns but particularly on this, their second album, the mood is tethered to dark, punching walls of guitar and they don't really sound like anybody else.The band are named after the masonic secret society in Read more ...
joe.muggs
“This is what Ibiza used to be like,” said the man dancing next to me. I've never been to the White Isle, so I have to take his word for it, but he presented a very convincing argument that the commercialisation of dance music's Mediterranean Mecca has led to a polarisation of its crowds towards either ostentatious spending or mindless drunkenness – whereas Barcelona's Sónar Festival attracts more diverse and discerning hedonists focused on music above all. Certainly a good cross-section of people were in attendance for the first day of Sónar. A large number of electronica nerds mingled Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The Meltdown Festival's tribute to Tony Wilson was a lot like the charismatic post-punk legend himself: funny, eccentric, obscure, populist; all over the place but never dull. Wilson died in August 2007 and this event was a reminder of his reputation as one of music's most fascinating post-punk provocateurs, giving the world Joy Division, Happy Mondays and more. It was also a reminder of his reputation, as poet Mike Garry put it, as a "knobhead". As someone who appeared on regional news programmes quoting Wordsworth while hang-gliding, Wilson could be spectacularly uncool.Proceedings, hosted Read more ...
peter.quinn
One of the great strengths of Manfred Eicher's ECM label is the way in which it has encouraged and documented many unlikely yet fruitful musical collaborations throughout its thousand-plus discography. First assembled for her season as artist-in-residence at Norway's Molde Jazz Festival in 2008, percussionist Marilyn Mazur's Celestial Circle quartet brings together stylists as individual as pianist John Taylor, bassist Anders Jormin and vocalist Josefine Cronholm (who makes her ECM debut here).Born in New York and raised in Denmark, Mazur, whose well-stuffed CV includes work with Miles Davis Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
What strange goings-on at this year's Spitalfields Music festival. One church is set ablaze by a female laptop trio; another is swamped by 17th-century collectivists; one man opens up a black hole with the back of his guitar; and a harpist becomes a stick insect, taking to his instrument with two bows.
At Spitalfields Church on Monday night, James Weeks and the New London Chamber Choir set about raising our spirits with three early American anthems by William Billings (1746-1800). How vigorous the round Wake Ev'ry Breath felt, as the choir filed in one by one, unleashing the wave upon wave Read more ...