New music
Thomas H. Green
Behind and beside Canadian electronic noisies Crystal Castles are lines of strobes which they use relentlessly from the moment they arrive onstage. It’s hard to even look, such is the visual barrage, and when I do, for as long as my retinas can stand, I only see a manic silhouette, flinging itself around, long hair whipping about like a dervish having a fit. As opening song “Concrete” draws to a close, this proves to be pink-maned frontwoman Edith Frances who now, and throughout the whole gig, squirts bottled water over her head and on the front rows.On one level, it’s surprising Crystal Read more ...
Matthew Wright
There was an Italian flavour to the EFG London Jazz Festival programme at Kings Place on Thursday night. Enrico Rava is an eminent statesman of European jazz, who emerged in the 1960s as a disciple of Miles Davis. He was collaborating with young pianist Giovanni Guidi, also recorded on ECM, though best known for diaphanous soundscapes rather than free jazz at its most raw and bloody. They were joined by electronic music pioneer Matthew Herbert, who now has a distinguished presence across opera, theatre, film and books, as well as improvised electronica. Last night’s gig was the first Read more ...
graham.rickson
French horn players active in jazz are thin on the ground: there’s the long-deceased John Graas, and composer and polymath Gunther Schuller’s career took in collaborations with Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. Unlike most brass instruments, the horn’s bell faces backwards, potentially creating balance and coordination problems. Bandleader Stan Kenton tried to solve the problem by using an unwieldy hybrid instrument called the mellophonium; you can hear its piercing roar on his West Side Story album.Ex-RPO horn player Jim Rattigan solves any balance issues with discreet use of amplification, Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“One thing there's not is the big Metallica ballad – it's all pretty uppity,” said Lars Ulrich of Hardwired… to Self-Destruct, Metallica’s first album for the best part of a decade. If we ignore, for a moment, the Trump-esque grasp of language and assume he meant uptempo rather than arrogant, the drummer appears to be a master of understatement as soon as opener “Hardwired” tears out of the gate, all rabid intent and sweary barking.It’s a tempo that you’d imagine would be difficult to keep up for a group that’s made up of, in the main, men in their 50s, and you’d be right. So, after the Read more ...
peter.quinn
For fans of vocal jazz and fine lyric writing, this 75th birthday concert for the inimitable Norma Winstone offered a treasure trove of riches. From intimate chamber jazz to the gravitas of a full orchestra, the two sets seamlessly blended every aspect of Winstone’s artistry.As Nick Smart, the Royal Academy of Music’s Head of Jazz and our genial conductor for the evening, reminded us in his scene-setting introduction, we were celebrating not one but two anniversaries: it was in November 1966 that Winstone performed her first run at Ronnie Scott's as a band leader in her own right, opposite Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In a career that began just six years ago, Rumer has tipped her musical hat to such songwriting greats as Jimmy Webb and Hall and Oates while also finding her own voice as a writer. Now, with her fourth album, she pays homage to one of the great pop catalogues, that of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, in a collaboration with Rob Shirakbari, her musical and life partner, who worked as Bacharach's musical director. There are many who would disparage it as “elevator music”. Critic Nik Cohn described it as “tasteful, attractive, a bit gutless” and thought that between them Bacharach and Dionne Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It would be easy to create a neat dichotomy between Solange Knowles and her sister Beyoncé. Solange is alternative while Beyoncé is pop, Solange deals in intimacy while Beyoncé is about grand gestures, Solange – on this album more than ever – is about elegant musicianship while Beyoncé is about the weaponised possibilities of the modern studio. And all of these things are true, more or less. Solange does operate free of the constraints of being pop culture royalty, she has tended to be associated with quirky and cool musicians rather than megastars, and very certainly on this record she Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
She calls it “dirty samba”. Elza Soares, The Woman at the End of the World - to use the name from her last album - sat on a throne like a warrior from a fantasy sci-fi film at the back of the stage. Her regal, mythic aura has been earned in an epic life story and a series of albums that started in 1960.She has had hits in every decade - in that sense she is like Cliff Richard, an evergreen. Except while Richard is currently touting a tame retro rock 'n' roll album, Soares (pictured below) is still energetically pushing artistic boundaries at the age of 79. If Elza Soares was a little Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The music keeps coming thick and fast. There’s an emphasis on rock this month but, as regular readers will know, theartsdesk on Vinyl has no favoured musical genre. All music is welcome, as long as it’s cut to plastic.This month we open with a jazzy Vinyl of the Month from Kathryn Williams & Anthony Kerr but read on and there’s everything from techno to acoustic singer-songwriter fare to retro Brit-funk. We’ve also been sent a book for beginner crate-diggers, and those who simply like ticking lists. The subscription club Vinyl Me, Please, along with publishers Octopus Books, have let Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Little Mix, like Girls Aloud before them, have developed fast from TV talent newbies into impressively sparkly industry professionals. They won The X Factor in 2011 and released a flabby cover of Damien Rice’s moany fist-pumper, “Cannonball”, but they’ve since honed their act to laser precision. No longer ingénues (if they ever were), they’re a polished showbiz machine with songs to match. They first reached such a status with last year’s Get Weird album and its ubiquitous chart-topper, “Black Magic”. Their fourth long-player sees them snappily consolidate.Glory Days already has a No.1 hit Read more ...
peter.quinn
There are singers who can dazzle with their technical mastery, those who welcome you into their musical world through a special communicative gift, and those who can traverse genres with absolutely no artifice. Rarest of all are those singers who combine all of the above with a timbral quality that can touch your very soul. Lizz Wright is one such singer.From the very opening song, an unaccompanied take on Hoagy Carmichael’s “The Nearness of You”, the stunning beauty and emotive power of Wright’s voice carried all before it, and immediately set up an electrifying charge between singer and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Rachael Yamagata likes to take her time. Tightrope Walker comes a full five years after the American songwriter’s last release, and it’s an album that demands to be listened to with as much care as clearly went into its creation. Like the French daredevil Philippe Petit, for whom her latest album was apparently named, slow and steady wins the race for Yamagata: it’s there in its staid, rhythmic opener and title track; and it’s there in the atmospheric, but no less deliberate, “Money Fame Thunder”, which closes proceedings with another nod to its central character.Best known for the sort of Read more ...