New music
Ellie Roberts
After his record-breaking and warmly remembered Love On Tour, Harry Styles is back with a fresh, slightly more experimental twist on universal, blockbusting live pop. The revision of his performance style is subtle enough that Together, Together feels comfortable and familiar but the minor rebrand that came with his latest album Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. sufficiently spices things up. Following a glittery, feel good singalong with Shania Twain to warm things up, “Are You Listening Yet?” opens the show, with tangible gratitude flying through the stadium from Styles in the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
La Sécurité are a Montreal supergroup… kind of; in that all members are involved in other projects which have had local success. In the case of bassist Félix Bélisle’s outfit Choses Sauvages and guitarist Laurence-Anne Charest Gagné’s solo career, cult success has spread further afield. “Cult” is the word, though, for La Sécurité’s tasty punk-funk stew is more-ish but likely too gnarly for mainstream success. Their second album is a smash’n’grab raid rife with pogo-party energy.At ten songs in around half an hour, it’s a set that makes its case with vim, then exits. The lyrics cover territory Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
The World Cup is everywhere in Scotland these days, even among the country’s gigging venues. Rolled up Saltires were visible on the balconies of the O2 Academy, a reminder that the Glasgow venue is hosting watch parties for the national team’s matches, and when Lola Young came back onstage for the encore she was serenaded by fans belting out “no Scotland no party”, to which the Londoner cheerfully joined in.Roughly an hour earlier, the 25-year-old had walked out to the sort of wild reaction that greeted John McGinn hitting the back of the net against Haiti, with screams and hollers from the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Lots of international superstar DJs end up making cosmic and exploratory records when they tire of – as the late Andrew Weatherall, albeit with tongue firmly in cheek, put it - “that ghastly oompty-boompty music.” Lots of them do quite well at it, too. But they are just daytrippers in the galactic expanse compared to Detroit hero Jeff Mills who is not only still bashing out the brain-jellifying techno to vast crowds week-in-week-out well over 40 years into his DJ career, but has been making out-there sounds for imagined futures in performances, collaborations and recordings for very Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Thirty years since the release of their breakthrough self-titled album and lead singer Bradley Nowell’s passing, sunburnt reggae punk rockers Sublime are back with an hour-long love-letter to their past, and their home. The band proudly states in their 1996 chill out track “Doin Time”, that they’re “qualified to represent the L.B.C”, a statement that has stood the test of time considering how little they have faltered. All of the same laid-back stoner rock, soaked in sunlight, Mexican beer and good times, but now, however, there’s a new man at the helm. Jakob Nowell, son of founding Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For many years Paul Weller had a conflicted relationship with the oldest parts of his back catalogue. It was rare to hear more than one of his pre-1990 songs in concert. Then he started slipping them in, but only a couple. Tonight, he’s clearly at peace with the whole of his long and varied career, playing seven songs by The Jam and four by the Style Council in a set well over two hours long. It’s a joy to hear these gems scattered with vital precision among the eclectic smorgasbord of what came after.Weller has always been a lean, urgent presence and he remains so. Chewing gum, iron-grey of Read more ...
Erin Lewis
It’s tempting to focus on the peripheral aspects of Olivia Rodrigo’s career, dissecting who a particular song is about in relation to her personal life. However where Taylor Swift, an early source of inspiration for Rodrigo, overtly ties her music to her feuds and relationships, causing them to bleed into each other, Rodrigo has seemed keen to maintain a degree of separation between art and life. This means that even though you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love is widely believed to be about Rodrigo’s British actor ex Louis Partridge, the album doesn’t feel preoccupied with minutiae of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“John Coltrane, he’s a major influence on this record. The instrumental on the A-side is an abstraction of the jazz musician named John Coltrane. That’s C-o-l-t-r-a-n-e.”The Byrds’ David Crosby was spelling it out on 28 March 1966 at a New York press conference called to promote – and explain – his band’s new single “Eight Miles High,” issued nine days earlier. His fellow Byrd Roger McGuinn told journalists that Allen Ginsberg had played them Coltrane: that he “wanted that to come out in our music.” A tape was made of what Ginsberg was urging them to assimilate.
Image Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
I just don’t get it. Jon Batiste, deservedly, has a huge career as pianist, composer, inspirer. The prospect of his forthcoming extended residency in various formations at KOKO in London is an exciting one. But after several attempts to reach the opposite conclusion, I still have no clue why someone decided it was a good idea to “drop” Black Mozart – Batiste Piano Series Vol. 2.The narrative from Decca is that it is part of a series which started with Beethoven Blues, and which is set to continue with two more droppings, both of them albums inspired by Thelonious Monk, in just a couple of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Enola Gay” is perfect pop, the ultimate party-uplift banger. It’s that rare song which only seems to grow better as the years, then decades pass. This is tricky to reconcile with the fact it’s about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (albeit opaquely). But, when Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark play it as the last song before their encore, the subject matter fragments amid its subversively joyous synth riff, as has been the case ever since it was a Top 10 hit, back in 1980. It’s greeted ecstatically, like the old friend it is.
Image
OMD’s set Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As I started to write this review, I found that Tucker Zimmerman died in January this year. This was news to me, sad news, made worse by the fact he died in a house fire at his home in Belgium, alongside his wife of more than five decades, Marie-Claire. I’d no idea and, as a fan taken by unhappy surprise, it likely affects my writing and perspective on this, his final album. At 84, Zimmerman was not young, and had decades of sporadically released, underheard music behind him, starting with his Tony Visconti-produced 1968 debut, Ten Songs (which David Bowie listed in Vanity Fair in 2003 Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Judy Garland's Carnegie Hall comeback concert on Sunday, 23 April 1961 has often been lauded as "the greatest night in show business history", though that judgment surely depends on where Garland sits in one’s personal pantheon. Elvis’s made-for-television 68 Comeback Special, the king lean in leather, must be up there, and likely Sinatra at Madison Square Garden in 1974. Whatever, the sold-out performance featured some 25 standards, Garland backed by a 40-piece orchestra conducted by Mort Lindsey. Marilyn Monroe, Richard Burton, and Julie Andrews were in the audience. The album, Judy at Read more ...