New music
robert.sandall
As Terry Teachout makes clear in this terrific biography, the world that Louis Armstrong inhabited was anything but wonderful. It was, for most of his life, both profoundly racist and astonishingly bitchy. By the late 1950s, with his 60th birthday approaching and four decades of solid success behind him, Armstrong was still forced to sleep in a gymnasium while playing in segregated North Carolina, and denied access to a public toilet in Connecticut. In Knoxville, Tennessee, dynamite was thrown at the auditorium where he and his All Stars band were performing. “It’s just the phone,” he told Read more ...
rose.dennen
Everybody needs a daddy and the paternal focus of Battles is their drummer - nothing seems to be done without the say of John Stanier. This is no bad thing, a lynch pin is needed in every rag-tag mob. With Battles, last night, they seemed extremely comfortable in airing new material and, for the first time, fucking with their tried and true older material. Every other time they've played they've played by rote; as on the album as is on stage. Last night they elongated and morphed "Atlas" from their first and only album proper "Mirrors" and it felt like it was being played like Coney Island Read more ...
graeme.thomson
While we’re busy falling over ourselves in the rush to laud the latest beard-and-guitar export from Wisconsin tundra or Williamsburg tenement, it’s easier than ever to undervalue home-grown talent. Lau formed in 2006, a coming together of three British traditional musicians with outstanding individual pedigrees but little in the way of mystique. Featuring Orcadian Kris Drever on clear-blue vocals and beautifully fluid acoustic guitar, Oban-born Aidan O’Rourke on the fiddle, and token Englishman Martin Green, who proved there’s very little you can’t do on the accordion, Lau have won Best Band Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
An ongoing series celebrating musicians' birthdays.
12 December 1944: The unprepossessing-looking Rob Tyner was the lead singer of the MC5, who along with The Stooges were Detroit's finest rock bands. The best evocation I've come across of the era is Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me, an oral history of punk and its origins, which graphically tells the whole story by interviewing a cast of hundreds. Most of whom should have known better.
{youtube width="400" height="300"}iM6nasmkg7A{/youtube}Worth catching the introduction to the above programme, a period piece where Gail, the Read more ...
robert.sandall
After years of cultish acclaim and enthusiastic reviews, the American singer-songwriter and star of New York's “anti-folk” scene Regina Spektor has now reached a career tipping point where mainstream acceptance beckons - and her detractors begin to sharpen their knives. She is, depending on your taste, either an idiosyncratic, piano-charming genius, or a contrived and slightly irritating kook cut from similar cloth to that of Tori Amos. With her heavy red lipstick and mane of auburn hair she even looks like her.Unsurprisingly, the sell out crowd who filled the Hammersmith Apollo last night Read more ...
theartsdesk
This round-up of the freshest new music and most well-ripened classics we could find in November features everything from Miles Davis to Kraftwerk, Norah Jones to the actual Pope, via Toms Petty and Waits, Dubstep and related bass-driven electronica from Portugal, Angola, Denmark and Tanzania, and the soundtrack to Life On Earth. Our reviewers this month are Robert Sandall, Peter Culshaw, Adam Sweeting, Joe Muggs, Thomas H Green, Howard Male and Marcus O'Dair.
CD of the Month
Tom Waits, Glitter and Doom Live (Anti)
by Robert Sandall
When I saw Tom Waits at the Hammersmith Odeon (now Read more ...
alice.vincent
Common assumptions about the folk scene in Newcastle would conjure up images of regulars at busker’s night in the pubs around Ouseburn valley. Not so far from the truth, perhaps. But a new project started by Will Lang, who happens to be a tutor at Newcastle Universit, is revitalising the North-East’s traditional association with the genre. PBS6, a supergroup - if you will - of young, exuberant musicians from backgrounds varying from jazz to Irish accordion mastery, are launching their new tour at the Sage in Gateshead tomorrow. Building on the likes of The Unthanks’ modern take on Geordie Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Bob Dylan has reminded us recently, The Christmas Album is one of those music industry traditions more likely to deserve an ignominious burial rather than praise. Fortunately, Thea Gilmore has galloped to the rescue with Strange Communion, an artfully shaped collection of songs that shines flickering light into the mystical roots of the Yuletide season."I don't call it a Christmas album, I call it a seasonal album," she warns, with almost lawyerly caution, though there's no denying that two of the songs do have "Christmas" in their title (she refers to it as "the C-word"). But what she had Read more ...
joe.muggs
In a pirate television (pirate television!) broadcast from 1992, a large group of Russian youths in flat top haircuts and leather jackets discuss Depeche Mode's appeal. “It's romantic style,” suggests one with absolute assurance, “it's music for the lonely.” It is just one touching, funny moment in a film packed with them, but it also sums up what The Posters Came From The Walls is about. This “music for the lonely” by a band of awkward blokes from Basildon has brought this group of young people together, as it has all the legions of devoted lovers of the band that we see throughout the 58 Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Rihanna, Russian Roulette (Mercury)
I strongly suggest anyone who believes the sound of US mainstream pop is somehow homogenised and safe take another look at the current charts. Standing over them like android colossi are Lady Gaga and Rihanna - who not only look exactly as pop stars were always going to look "in the future", but sound apocalyptically insane. This song is in the standard melodramatic modern power-ballad style of writer/producer Ne-Yo, but the combination of Rihanna's piercing voice and the lyrics that circle in the non-specific manner of nightmares around death, obsession, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Little, it seems, falls beyond the musical compass of Ryuichi Sakamoto. After cutting his teeth with synthpop pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra, Sakamoto branched out like a one-man synthesis of Messrs Byrne, Bowie and Eno, investigating world and renaissance music, chamber pieces, orchestral works and movie soundtracks.Well versed in traditional Japanese and Okinawan forms, Sakamoto is also adept in multimedia and digital manipulation, and was even commissioned to write ringtones for Nokia. Recent collaborations with Alva Noto and Christian Fennesz confirm that Sakamoto's inquisitive spirit Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
An ongoing series celebrating musicians' birthdays.
2 December 1982: Britney Spears is 27. There is some resistance to Britney hereabouts, so I thought I'd post a version of "Toxic" sung acoustically by Galia Arad to demonstrate that she does have some terrific songs. If Galia - who with her cousin Lail, should become much better known in 2010 - loves Britney, who are we less cool mortals to resist her?
{youtube width="400" height="300"}9HVJTPtZkWk{/youtube}Of course Britney's production is also first-rate - those Egyptian film strings are awesome, no?
{youtube width="400" height="300"} Read more ...