New music
Kieron Tyler
Next Tuesday, 31 May, will be a day of difficult choices for fans of New York’s Sonic Youth. London is hosting three separate shows by band members and associates. That evening their mainstay guitarist, Thurston Moore, plays the Union Chapel. SY’s drummer, Steve Shelley, is at The Borderline, guesting with Chicago’s Disappears. And Half Japanese, who both Shelley and Moore have collaborated with, are headlining at The Scala.Moore is in town promoting his new album, the acoustic Demolished Thoughts, issued this week. The musicians who accompanied him in the studio join him live. His hand- Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Last week Villager-in-Chief Conor J O’Brien was awarded an Ivor Novello award (Best Song Musically and Lyrically, in case you’re curious) for the title track of his Mercury Prize-nominated debut album Becoming a Jackal. Several questions arise from this fact (one of them being: do they have an award for Best Song Musically but not Lyrically?), but the most pressing is this: just how many more gongs will O'Brien win before the decade is out?This man is a very exciting songwriter. The great thing about his compositions is that they rarely go where you expect them to. This sense of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Be different - take a festival break in Europe instead of the UK, and catch a different landscape. While artists in both new music and classical are constantly circling the world in search of more picturesque settings, you can find your alternative Glasto in Denmark or Belgium, or you can find favourite chamber musicians in Austria rather than London. theartsdesk brings you listings of this year's major European festivals: rock in Sonar, Sziget and Stradbally, opera in Bayreuth, Verona and Salzburg, dance in Vienna, Epidauros and Spoleto, visual arts in Istanbul, Zurich and Avignon. This Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A couple of years ago Morton Valence appeared out of nowhere with a fan-financed concept album, Bob and Veronica Ride Again, full of plucky imagination, indie sweetness and Nancy Sinatra vibes. It arrived with a CD-sized novelette and had a faintly burlesque feel that spoke of the group's background as resident band at the Soho Theatre Arts Club. It was an unexpected treat and I'm happy to report that their new one is more than its match.Where they were a duo - of Robert Hacker Jessett and Anne Gilpin - they're now a proper band and their sound has become fuller as a result, relying less on Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Subtlety is overrated. I've always thought so. Critical consensus too often rates nuanced, emasculated emoting over music that smashes you over the head with an iron bar. From hardcore punk to gabber to speed metal to the sort of dubstep that sounds like four-storey bass bins begging for mercy, music that's ballistic doesn't leave room for quibbling. You're either on the bus or you can piss off and listen to Bon Iver in your bedroom.Yes, yes, tonight's Balkan Brass Battle gig awoke the raw punk in me. It was completely relentless: no ballads, no pauses, just sheer demented high BPM Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The former Bee Gee Robin Gibb unveiled a plaque at the London home of Dusty Springfield a couple of weeks ago. At the ceremony he commented, “There’s been no one to match her. This includes the United States as well – they can’t come close to her. Today they just pose as singers.” Last October, Sir Elton John was at it too: “Songwriters today are pretty awful, which is why everything sounds the same. Contemporary pop isn’t very inspiring." Come off it, you two, great new music is out there. It’s constantly coming into view.It’s not just Gibb and John. Stick the words “why music isn't good Read more ...
peter.quinn
The first night of this weekend residency by the renowned bassist, composer and band-leader Charlie Haden celebrated the 25th anniversary of Quartet West and their new Emarcy release, Sophisticated Ladies. A winning mix of tender balladeering and coruscating instrumentals, the quartet's music-making – rather like the finest wines – seems to improve and deepen with age. While all groups are capable of whipping up a barnstorming fortissimo, it's only the great ones that operate as well at the other end of the scale. And the Quartet West pianissimo is nonpareil.Saxophonist Ernie Watts is the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's time to dust down your tent and ice-box and plan some summer breaks with theartsdesk's definitive clickable festival guide - listings and links for all the UK festivals this summer, from rock by the lochs to DJs in London parks, and catching classical and opera on the way. See theartsdesk's invaluable European festivals 2011 guide too. SCOTLAND Knockengorroch World Ceilidh, 26-29 May, Drumjohn, GallowaySecret Scottish streams and woods resound to roots music sounds, with Adrian Edmondson & the Bad Shepherds, Salsa Celtica, Horace Andy & Dub Asante, DJ Yoda, Russkaya Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There are often times when I dislike the smoking ban. Tonight was one such. A few years ago, a gig such as this would have been awash with marijuana smoke and that was as it should be. At a guess I'd suggest the crowd, who range from 16 to 60, or older, and seem thoroughly disparate, all have one thing in common: that they enjoy the odd toke.Such feelings are only accentuated when On-U Sound production don Adrian Sherwood introduces the night with a brief DJ set that fires up the mood with booming reggae pearls such Jeb Loy Nichols's "To be Rich (Should be Crime)" and Peter Tosh's "Babylon Read more ...
howard.male
When I saw Jim White perform at the Jazz Café a couple of weeks ago, he rather undersold his new album. But take no notice of the wilfully perverse Southern American singer-songwriter. Even if White appears to view this collection of songs for an adaptation of Sam Shepard’s play The Americans: Part 1: Lay of the Land as a bit of a side project, that doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of your attention. In fact, it might have actually benefited from not being over-worked in the way that a new album proper might have been.Without the overriding concern for making something self-consciously cohesive, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Monkees’ Head was their celluloid suicide note. They chanted that they were a manufactured band with no philosophy. The film caught an authentic psychedelic vision which came to life again last night. Post-interval, the show continued with a stunning run through of the Head soundtrack songs, most of which had never been played live. Reclaiming this maverick and wilful part of their career, The Monkees said last night that they were more than the puppets of those who had assembled them as TV-land America’s answer to The Beatles.This wasn’t the pop band known and loved by many, but the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Kate Bush’s musical legacy may speak for itself, but she’s more than just her songs. Her persona seems woven into the nation’s consciousness, and her time-lapse approach to making albums makes her every move an event. Her last record was in 2005, and before that 1993. Now she's made an album of covers of her own work. The question is, can it possibly live up to the expectations?Director’s Cut is a reworking of tunes from the The Red Shoes and its predecessor, The Sensual World. You can see why she would want to revisit them. As albums they always seemed patchy, but equally within those 25 Read more ...