New music
Tim Cumming
It’s a been a good year for the Stones as they play into their sixth decade – a free festival audience in Havana in March, preceded by an adulatory South American trek that saw some of the band’s best performances in recent times – down at the crunchy bottom end of Keef and Ronnie’s two-guitar dynamic, heard best on the new Havana Moon set, where the Cuban audience of one million warm-blooded souls see the Stones raise their game to make Havana their best live outing on record since the Love You Live set from the Seventies.It’s as if the over-produced, over-choreographed big tours of the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Performance poet Hollie McNish and composer Jules Buckley specialise in taking their respective art forms to new audiences. They’ve gone for a double whammy with this enterprising collaboration, the brainchild of producer Kwame Kwaten, bringing poetry to music fans and vice versa. The album was launched last week at Cadogan Hall, at a free event sponsored by ASOS Supports Talent, attracting the kind of young, female audience the venue usually can only dream of.Buckley wrote the music himself with Chris Wheeler from the Heritage Orchestra. Accompanying a solo speaking voice, there are obvious Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1970, The Who opened their Live at Leeds album with “Young Man Blues”, a hefty version of a song its composer Mose Allison recorded as “Blues” in 1957. Back then, it was the only vocal track on Back Country Suite, an otherwise instrumental blues-jazz album, the Mississippi-born pianist's debut long player. Allison had moved to New York in 1956 and a string of releases followed. The Who weren’t the only British band cocking an ear: in March 1965 The Yardbirds first recorded Allison's “I’m Not Talking”, plucked by them from 1964’s The Word From Mose.Mose Allison’s music was integral to the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
At the Royal Festival Hall the cliché seemed complete. Milling around were white men, white men and more white men – all in their late thirties and older, most looking a little bohemian and a lot geeky, with a few of them a little more hardcore in black bomber jackets, black jeans, black trainers and black baseball caps. These were London's electronica fanboys out in force for Autechre, the duo who, second only to The Aphex Twin, epitomised the moment the rave generation went weird and disjointed, and since the mid-Nineties have explored all the sonic abstractions that technology has to offer Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Damned peak early tonight. They never really top a tribalistic crowd sing-along to the song “Ignite” about two-thirds of the way through the evening. Dressed, as ever, like a cool rockabilly undertaker, in aviators with a black glove clutching the Shire Classic-style microphone, frontman Dave Vanian, his face painted cabaret zombie skeletal, prowls the stage, watching the crowd with a wry smile. Unreadable, his contained energy and rich bass voice is jointly at the heart of The Damned’s live appeal.Beside him is the band’s boundless energiser, Captain Sensible, who couldn’t look more Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Three years ago a debut album, The Future Through a Lens, by Hastings duo Vile Electrodes, announced the arrival of an A-league synth-pop talent. The pair have since appeared on stages around Europe supporting everyone from Eighties pop heroes Heaven 17 to Krautrock mainstay Manuel Göttsching, but they’ve remained a cult phenomenon, the analogue electro-pop musicians’ analogue electro-pop musicians. They deserve better for, as their second album shows, Anais Neon and Martin Swan’s ability to craft atmospheric productions with pristine depth and skill has only grown in the interim.In the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Way back in 1996 Robert Earl Keen issued an unexpected career bestseller in No 2 Live Dinner, and this new double live set marks a joyous, star-stacked return to John T Floore’s place, 20 years later, drawing on three decades of songcraft, alongside live cuts from his most recent studio set, 2015’s Happy Prisoner: The Bluegrass Sessions.Floores Country Store in Helotes, Texas, is a honky-tonk, barbecue café and bar dating from the 1940s, set on the Old Bandera Road up in the hill country north of San Antonio. As such, a line of cold beers, a quart of chili and a Saturday night crowd would be Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Everything about Xam Duo’s debut album, out earlier this month on Sonic Cathedral, has a wonderful sense of self-indulgence: from the freeform, experimental feel, the stretched-out tones and resulting melodies that exist almost by implication, to the mournful squall of the saxophone, buoyed by a stubborn sea of sound.The project, a collaboration between Hookworms’ Matthew Benn and Christopher Duffin of Deadwall, was born when the former was looking to expand what had, up until then, been a solo project. Much of this album is formed of the pair’s very first, completely improvised, session Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
At 83, and with 60-odd years on the road, Wayne Shorter could be forgiven for, in a musical sense, getting the slippers and pipe out and knocking out comfortable versions of his hits, the classic tunes he wrote for Miles Davis among them, like “Footprints” and “Sanctuary”. But instead, he went full tilt into a largely improvised set consisting of only five numbers in 90 minutes, most of them recent, and then a new collaboration, given only its second outing at the Barbican. There were a few times you thought you had heard some of these these musical conceits before - but that is mainly Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Kuro is the brainchild and debut album of classically-trained violinist Agathe Max and bass-playing noisenik Gareth Turner, he of wigged-out psychedelicists Anthroprophh. If this seems an unlikely partnership, a shared love of “the drone” is where their sonic worlds collide, and from this collision has come a spaced-out opus of quite uncommon beauty.Drawing on a sonic pallet that takes in the repetitive minimalism of Steve Reich, the drone of Sunn O))) and Ulver’s Terrestrials collaboration and dashes of Alice Coltrane’s trippy meditations, Kuro avoids easy pigeonholing. Its melancholy but Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1996, the NME ranked Super Furry Animals’ debut album Fuzzy Logic as the year’s fourth best. It sat between Orbital’s In Sides (number three) and DJ Shadow’s Entroducing. Beck’s Odelay took the top spot and Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go was at two. Fuzzy Logic was on Creation Records and the Oasis-bolstered label’s only other album in the run down-was The Boo Radleys’ C’Mon Kids (15). A run through the list suggested Britpop was over (Suede’s Coming Up was in there, but they were hardly Britpop) and grunge was on the shelf (Screaming Trees made the cut though they, like Suede Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A couple of years ago I saw an extraordinary outdoor concert where a rapper called Muslim (great name if you want to be hard to find on Google) performed at the Timitar Festival in Agadir in the South of Morocco to 80,000 delirious fans. The song which everyone knew was “Al Rissala" (The Letter) which called out corruption and ignorance in high places. The Festival acts as a kind of safety valve for dissent.“It’s a good way of letting off steam,” Reda Allali, the lead singer of Moroccan rockers Hoba Hoba Spirit, told me backstage. The festival was “a step in the right direction anyway – Read more ...