New music
Thomas H. Green
Absolute heartbreak has been part of country & western since before Hank Williams pined that he was so lonesome he could cry, way back in the 1940s. There’s a strand of country that’s an endless paean to the cowboy’s (and cowgirl’s) wandering soul, to messy lives lived among empty bottles and broken relationships. Texan Hayes Carll falls very much within this tradition and his fifth album, from its title onwards, is a warm bath in melancholy and broken-heartedness.In truth, it gets a bit much over the whole ten songs, drifting into the realms of the maudlin but, taken in smaller doses, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The youthful old master of European jazz raps on the Doors of Perception for his latest album, Beauty & Truth, with his piano trio of drummer Eric Schafer and bassist Chris Jennings. Their subject for analysis is The Doors’ “The End” and “Riders on the Storm”, delivering distilled and deconstructed versions of the band’s music and the singer’s intent – both dark, apocalyptic Sixties tone poems of dread and release, and both led by Shafer’s superb drumming, with Jennings’s supple double bass tacking between that and Kühn’s finely fractured piano lines.Around them, he and ACT producer Siggi Read more ...
peter.quinn
Masterly improvising, outstanding compositions, a complete understanding between the musicians. On every count this was an exceptional set, as emotionally engaging as it was lovingly delivered.Working for three years in her late teens with the great Vinicius de Moraes and the singer-songwriter Toquinho, the Sao Paolo-born, New York-based pianist, vocalist and composer Eliane Elias grew up with bossa nova. So it seemed entirely appropriate that her trio, featuring Marc Johnson on bass and Mauricio Zottarelli on drums, kicked off their set with a sparkling arrangement of the Jobim/Moraes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“If we want to keep this free and democratic Europe of ours free and democratic, we must enlist ourselves, our skills and our commitment to liberty and justice. The problems we face are too great to simply say let the politicians do it. I say this as a President.” Making this declaration in his country’s capital on the opening morning of 2016’s Tallinn Music Week, Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves stressed that the power for change is in all our hands and also confirmed the all-too prevalent view that the international political class is unlikely to address, let alone solve, the world’ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Turn the clock back to early 2007. It’s not so long ago, but at this point Nils Frahm had issued just one album, Ólafur Arnalds was about to release his first, Jóhann Jóhannsson was one year into what would be two-album relationship with 4AD, and Max Richter had made two albums for 130701, the British offshoot of FatCat Records. Christian Wallumrød was performing solo, but still recording collaboratively. What would become a recognisable genre-breaching, minimalist, post-classical groundswell hadn’t yet been quite codified but it was clear something was in the air.Hauschka was introduced into Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
PJ Harvey's ninth album is one with a message. I know this because it marks the first time that my pre-release copy of an album has come with a lyric booklet, despite the fact that it is perhaps the least oblique thing that the Dorset-born songwriter has ever recorded. Inspired by a series of trips to Washington, Kosovo and Afghanistan, and partly written in full public view as part of an art installation at Somerset House in the summer of 2015, The Hope Six Demolition Project is effectively a travelogue set to music: its lyrics, a series of postcards scrawled from a taxicab window; its music Read more ...
Andrew Cartmel
Anyone who has been to the movies in the past 30 years will have heard the work of Hans Zimmer. His music is part of the very fabric of our lives, as was dramatically demonstrated last night at the packed Wembley SSE Arena when the opening notes of The Lion King were greeted with a huge roar of appreciation from the audience. Zimmer, who moved from instrument to instrument with aplomb throughout the evening, was playing guitar on this one as Lebohang Morake and Zoe Mthiyane sang rousingly and woodwind maestro Richard Harvey accompanied them, piercing and lyrical, on the penny whistle. It was Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Hawkwind are one of rock's stranger institutions. Enigmatic too – despite inventing 'space rock', and teaching Lemmy his trade, they're still essentially known just for singing "Silver Machine". Yet search within their canon and you'll find real depth. Indeed, at their best Hawkwind's cosmic musings have the sense of humanity and society worthy of some futuristic folk music. You could call them prog rock's Fairport Convention.The Machine Stops looks at the tribulations of society, via an E. M. Forster short story with a very H.G. Wells theme. The story concerns a people Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Before the resurgence in vinyl, and the resultant pursuit of audiophile perfection on pointlessly expensive sound systems, was the musician’s fetish for vintage equipment and analogue synths. Live, this makes sense: sounds go direct into the audience's ear, air its only conduit. After the painstaking pathway that most recorded music has to take – downloaded onto a phone and compressed to flux through headphones made entirely out of snidely weighted plastic reputations – you wonder why they’d bother. Generator, the second album from Berlin-based producer Rodion, shows exactly why, boasting a Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Stones may have got the free festival thing right at last, returning triumphant from playing to around a million Cubans in Havana on Good Friday, and the world generally marvels more and mocks less the longevity of the band and the age of its original inhabitants. With a fresh batch of sold-out tours and new music apparently in the can, it would be churlish to deny them the self-pleasuring they reward themselves by mounting Exhibitionism at the Saatchi Gallery.Unlike any other group, the Stones stand as a cohesive motley of survivors from a world long lost, and when they go, rock'n'roll Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Around the turn of the century, when Brit Pop was infatuated with a Beatles-esque plodding beat, the Dandy Warhols were putting out some fine slabs of Glam-infused Garage Rock that often bothered the charts with a substantial dash of decadent swagger. A couple of decades on, and four years since the stripped-back This Machine, they’re back with a heady mix of driving electronics, power pop hooks, trippy psychedelia and garage rock attitude which suggests that the middle of the road is a long way off.Album number ten, Distortland may be full of many of the things that have made the Dandy Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Gregory Porter’s singing pedigree is impeccable. With a performing history in the American Church of God in Christ, where his mother was a minister, honed by several years before his breakthrough living in hipster-jazz heaven Brooklyn, and performing Off-Broadway, he’s in many ways the ultimate heritage act. He allies the gorgeous brassy timbres of 1970s R&B with a humane, secular spirituality that wears its heart on its sleeve, and recalls an era when jazz campaigned (more openly than it usually does now, at least) for social justice. All this is entwined in a voice that encompasses rage Read more ...