It's the first night of The Fall's four-night residency at The Garage in Highbury, north London, a suitably small venue to get the full visceral rub of the current group – Elena Poulou on keyboards, guitarist Peter Greenaway, drummer Keiron Melling, and bassist Dave Spurr. It’s the longest-lasting Fall line-up Mark E Smith has permitted in the group’s 40-year history, and they have a fabulous, wildly experimental and rough-at-the-edges new EP, Wise Ol' Man, and one of the best albums of The Fall’s latterday career – one of the best, full-stop – in Sublingual Tablet behind them.Much of the 75- Read more ...

Brian Eno has consistently explored the frontiers of music, bravely charting new territories of sound in a way that’s never left his audience behind. He can bring his finely attuned ears and inspiration to the likes of Coldplay or U2 while, with a sensibility that embraces the unashamedly popular, also creating installations in art galleries or playing with Cagean random selection.His new album, the first solo effort since Lux (2012), is refreshingly experimental, and yet rooted in the trademark soundscapes he painted electronically and which defined the ambient genre. Invention in the field Read more ...

The name of the Savannah Music Festival might sound somewhat vague in these days of specialist events, but this is an (almost) three-week sonic orgy which treats all styles equally, blending classical beside bluegrass, jazz next to African, and country side-by-side with the blues. Multiple venues are used, some more than others. All of them are within easy walking distance, around the centre of this historically-attuned southern States city.Landing down in Georgia from New York City, as did your scribe, the transition is immense. Down here, the traffic actually waits for pedestrians at all of Read more ...

Set in the grounds and rooms of the Master Shipwright’s Palace on the Thames at Deptford, Unamplifire brought together more than 30 artists over eight hours, with new and ancient folk and world music stirring from the riverside wing of the building – a stripped-to-the-plaster-and-floorboards palace, one you might find yourself in after a revolution. Built by master shipwright Joseph Allin in 1708, it’s a rich historical anomaly bordering the bleak remains of what was once the King's Wharf, established by Henry VIII in 1513, and about to be redeveloped by a Hong Kong investment company. The Read more ...

The new album from Wire consists of a hodge-podge of cuts originally composed for last year’s eponymous Wire album. Colin Newman, a lynchpin of the band, describes it as “less respectful of the band – or, more accurately, the band being less respectful to itself.” Which is to say that this is Wire, one of the 20 or so key outfits forged in the crucible of 1970s UK punk, relaxing somewhat from their reputation for the cerebral and artily calculated. Nocturnal Koreans, as its bizarre title hints, is possibly the sound of Wire having fun.It is, however, no unhinged party. With three original Read more ...

The immediate reaction to Close to the Noise Floor is “Why hasn’t anyone done this before?” This new four-disc set’s subtitle captures its objective in a nutshell: to collect Formative UK Electronica 1975–1984 – excursions in proto-synth pop, DIY techno and ambient exploration. While the stars include Blancmange, John Foxx, Throbbing Gristle and the big cult names Bourbonese Qualk, Legendary Pink Dots and Instant Automatons feature, the less well-knowns Sea of Wires, We be Echo and Muslimgauze are also collected.Close to the Noise Floor sets the moody electropop of Spöön Fazer’s previously Read more ...

In interviews, the Scottish songwriter RM Hubbert has described his new album as being the “mirror image” of his best-known work, the 2013 Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) Award-winning Thirteen Lost and Found. Like that album, Telling the Trees is a series of collaborations with other artists and musicians – but, this time, rather than hole up in a studio with his friends and collaborators, the musician known as Hubby reached out to people whose work he admired with new acoustic compositions and let them create something new, at a distance, in their own time.The process might have involved a Read more ...

It’s a nice dilemma. Cameroonian saxophonist and band leader Manu Dibango, who has a Ronnie’s residency ending tonight, helped create the disco sound with his 1972 single “Soul Makossa”. Since then he has ranged over the extended Afro-soul-funk-jazz family of genres with insouciant ease, his showbusinesslike gift for a glitzy riff leading his influence into pop, too. So how to consolidate this influence? Having blazed so many trails, he seems content to enjoy their warm glow through the rear view mirror on the evidence of last night’s pleasant but slightly underwhelming performance.Though the Read more ...

Listening to Everything At Once is like drinking a cup of PG Tips. It’s warming, comforting, gently familiar and distinctly British.The new album from the band that invented Coldplay, Keane, Snow Patrol et al, is like a gentle revision of a well-known sound. Opening with soft rolling beats, “What Will Come”, re-introduces us to the regular rhythms and unmistakable vocals of frontman Fran Healy.The album rolls on with the summer road-tripping playlister “Magnificent Time” which carries the mantra: “No regret, don’t you forget this magnificent time. Seize the day, don’t throw away this Read more ...

Prince Rogers Nelson was the most gloriously disruptive presence in popular culture from the very start to the very end. Everything about him was off kilter and wrong: it's not for nothing that the first major biography of him was called The Imp of the Perverse. His songs were full of deranged filth, skewed social comment with a conspiratarian edge, had a very individualist take on Jehovah's Witness spirituality and mysticism, and all manner of personal cyphers and in-jokes. He was a constantly self-creating work of art of the most esoteric and incomprehensible sort – yet for all that he Read more ...

It was one of those bright spring days when it seemed every other radio station was playing “Mr Blue Sky”. It certainly didn’t feel like 30 years since ELO toured. But the fans at the O2, last night, knew exactly how long it’d been. Some may even have been counting the years. And the anticipation of whether Jeff Lynne could still cut it, was palpable. In the lengthy queues and security checks, conversation naturally turned to how exactly the 68-year-old might manage the energy of those hits.The main man shuffled on just after nine, following a slightly syrupy performance from support act, The Read more ...

Beth Orton (b 1970) is a singer-songwriter who first came to prominence via her collaborations with the Chemical Brothers, at the start of both their careers. She recorded an album with the producer William Orbit in 1993 but it was her 1995 album, Trailer Park, a canny amalgamation of folk and electronica, that really put her on the map as a solo artist. Since then, spending increasing amounts of time in the US, she has recorded a series of critically acclaimed albums, the latest of which, Kidsticks, her seventh, appears in May. She will be performing two special concerts at the Brighton Read more ...