New music
theartsdesk
Been a while since you checked out the best and latest world music releases? theartsdesk’s global music expert Peter Culshaw's selects the best music released in the last month or so.His peripatetic wanderings take in hot New Orleans brass, Indian psychedelia, Ethiopian fuzz-tone guitar, Brazilian reggae, English folk, underground Congolese music, a bunch of Italian eccentrics, Senegalese funk and numerous stops in between, including a side project from everyone’s favourite south London rockers Fat White Family. Albums of the moment include those by Blick Bassy, Sacre Delone Cuore, Flavia Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Having come of age with their second LP, The Vaccines had developed a sound that, though borrowed, they wore with confidence. This, their third album, sees them wilfully discard it, which is, if nothing else, quite the surprise.If you’re a fan, "Handsome", "20/20" and "Radio Bikini" are the tracks that will be going on the playlist, as they’re the only ones that sound remotely like the Vaccines of old. Even then, there’s something distinctly (and newly) infantile about them. “Handsome” is McBusted playing the hits of The Jesus and Mary Chain, with the Reid brothers’ shiftless ennui replaced Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Benjamin Clementine’s idea of repartee with the audience is producing a clementine orange and smiling shyly. Clad in his trademark greatcoat-over-naked chest, with bare feet and outrageous pompadour hair, he sits at a spotlit grand piano and manoeuvres the fruit gently about before setting it down. It’s hardly even a gag but, given his between-song demeanour the rest of the time, this is the Clementine equivalent of prat-falling on a banana skin while making farting noises. His audience, however, are onside and audibly respond with affectionate laughter. He has created a consensus bubble of Read more ...
bella.todd
There’s an extraordinary moment, in Peter Strickland’s deeply sensual, desperately funny and feverishly powerful S&M love story, when a camera travels slowly into the darkness between a woman’s thighs. It’s an extraordinary moment in the soundtrack, too. In place of the golden strings and softly hovering choral notes, Brighton Dome suddenly fills with a monochrome electronic pulsing, as if an army of giant moths is flying over with wings of black sheet metal.Your eyes finally flick back to the other half of Cat’s Eyes. Faris Badwan has spent the performance tucked away behind a synth, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Brighton whooped as if she had never seen risqué entertainment last night, as cabaret veteran Joey Arias brought his Billie Holiday-meets-bawdy-standup show to the Brighton Festival. Able to switch between sincere tribute and brilliantly, cathartically filthy jokes instantaneously, he makes an audience unfamiliar with his style take a few minutes to calibrate their response. Once you understand that the Holiday is for real, and everything else tongue (or that’s what it looks like, anyway) in cheek, the evening makes curiously, but compellingly refreshing dramatic sense. The echoes Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Flavia Coelho once told me her parents in the favelas of Rio put an aluminium bucket over her head as the only way to calm her down. It was also a useful echo chamber to practise her singing. Her parents were hairdressers for drag queens. She still comes over an overactive child on stage and is one of the most dynamic live acts you are likely to see: she’s like a Duracell bunny on stage. She performed as part of a trio with a keyboardist and drummer, playing low slung guitar and bashing drums sporadically during her set, but the lean line-up seemed expandable – give her the cash and she would Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The pendulum of Róisín Murphy’s creativity has long swung wildly between massively pop and trickily artsy, right back to her hit-making millennial days in Moloko. She followed these with a wilful dive into the abstract, working with found sound techno maverick Matthew Herbert on her debut solo album. It was an intriguing proposition but one that never proved contagious. She followed it, however, with Overpowered, whose eponymous lead single should have been a massive hit but wasn’t. On that album, she allowed her inner Lady Gaga out for a frolic. The results were contagious, colourful fun. Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Remember how in the Eighties, lead-singer solo albums would consist of a few songs left over from the day job played on synthesisers? That’s how Killers’ Brandon Flowers' second solo effort feels. At first. The big difference is, back in the day, extra-curricular efforts by the likes of Freddie Mercury or Mick Jagger would exude a thrown-together air. Flowers’ record, on the other hand, has been polished like a Las Vegas hub cap.The net result, though, is much the same: The Desired Effect sounds like Flowers' main band but with (a fraction) less punch. The blue-collar vignettes are, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any album with a guest appearance from Eric Cantona is going to attract attention. The eighth track of Sophie Hunger’s Supermoon, “La Chanson d’Hélène”, is a sumptuous, string-infused reflection on identity with Serge Gainsbourg-style spoken interjections by Cantona. But it’s not the whole story of this by turns direct and subtle album.Head straight to what follows “La Chanson d’Hélène”. “We are the Living’s” jazzy swing and sparse arrangement suggests a liking for Jimi Hendrix’s pensive side. Elsewhere, on “Superman Woman,” Australian musical autobiographer Courtney Barnett is namechecked. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It takes a particular combination of talent, guts, perseverance and sheer bloody-mindedness for an artist to take the creative decisions that Thea Gilmore has across her approaching 20-year career and get away with it – thankfully, all qualities that the Oxford-born songwriter has in spades. Since the release of her debut album, Burning Dorothy, when she was still a teenager, Gilmore has won admirers ranging from Bruce Springsteen to Joan Baez, re-recorded an entire Bob Dylan album, pioneered fan-supported songwriting and even flirted with the UK Top 40 on her 14th album.If you thought that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bobby Womack: The PreacherCover versions of standards like “Fly me to the Moon” and “I Left my Heart in San Francisco” were hardly going to make a mark with a hip – or, for that matter, any – audience in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Nor was reinterpreting The Beatles’ “And I Love her" and “Something”. Chuck in the adaptations of The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’”, Jonathan King’s “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon”, Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” and Ray Stevens’s trite bubblegum-gospel hit “Everything is Beautiful” which pepper the first five solo albums from Bobby Womack, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Whether you view him with reverence as the Modfather or rather more sneeringly as the King of Dad Rock, there is no doubt that Paul Weller is a bone fide musical icon. Thirty-eight years after the Jam’s debut, In the City, there is still a sense of anticipation for many each time he releases a new album and Saturns Pattern is certainly no disappointment.“White Sky”, a collaboration with Manchester space-cases Amorphous Androgynous kicks things off, and initially comes on in a wash of swirling ambient spaceyness. It soon explodes into a howling blues rock stomper though, with Paul barking “ Read more ...