New music
Matthew Wright
The echoes of last summer’s number one hit “Bang Bang” had hardly faded when Jessie J’s third album Sweet Talker was released to a largely positive reception last October. She’s been on the road on and off ever since, and though her act never seems short of either energy or self-belief, you might expect to see some signs of flagging after such a relentless display of girl power. Not a bit of it: her all-action show hit Hammersmith last night. Hammersmith is probably still feeling the aftershocks.Her act teeters constantly on the edge of sensory overload. She began with a string of romantic Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Zun Zun Egui, who emerged from Bristol’s indie-boho scene a few years ago, are one of those bands who come closest to the essence of their potential when playing in an intimate and sweaty small venue. Recording their frenzy for posterity has never been easy. This their second album treads a similar path to their first, Katang: it’s good but rarely evokes the incandescent fury and derangement of their performances.Front-man Kushal Gaya is originally from Mauritius, and his musical roots – midway between Asia and East Africa – continue to colour the band’s mix of non-Western polyrhythms and Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The more I listen to Steve Rothery the more convinced I am he possesses one of the fattest, juiciest guitar tones around. Rothery really should be seen as one of the more interesting stylists of his generation. The reality, however, is that he remains dreadfully underrated: his own Wikipedia page even faint-praises him as once winning an award for Yorkshire and Humberside’s best guitarist. Ghosts of Pripyat, Rothery's first solo album, may not remedy this. Fans, though, will love it. Assembled through crowdfunding site Kickstarter, and now finally on general release, this has Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Ghostpoet – aka Obaro Ejimiwe – released his first album Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam in 2010. He has since been named as The Guardian’s New Band of the Day, nominated for a Mercury Prize and toured the festival circuit with the likes of Metronomy. His third album Shedding Skin, due to be released on March 2nd, was the focus of Pias Nites at Shoreditch’s Village Underground.Featuring tracks like "Off Peak Dreams" (below) there's a roughness and edge to the sound, despite the soft-rock riffs and almost jazzy pockets, that goes well with his towny observations of mugs of tea and bacon Read more ...
Guy Oddy
While Julian Cope’s albums are usually fairly expansive affairs which employ a vast array of instruments, an audience with the Arch Drude is a more intimate affair these days. There’s no backing band and the man takes to the stage armed only with a 12-string acoustic guitar, a microphone and a few effects pedals. There’s also a big bass drum set up on stage with “You can’t beat your brain for entertainment” written on the skin – but that’s just a prop and doesn’t get played.Cope started up by launching into “I’m Living in the Room They Found Saddam In” from 2005’s Citizen Cain’d album, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Norway’s celebrated jazz colossus Jan Garbarek hadn’t played the north Norwegian city of Bodø for 15 years. Moreover, he and his group took the stage of the spanking new Stormen concert house as the openers of Bodø Jazz Open, the city’s four-day festival of all that is and isn’t strictly jazz. If there was any pressure, it didn’t show. Resolutely composed during his hour and three-quarters on stage, Garbarek also said nothing. Given his stature, the waves of power intermittently surfacing in the music and the nature of the event, there was only one possible outcome – a standing ovation. And Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Whether intentional or not, the third album by French chart-topping duo The dø is effectively a renewal of “Sweet Dreams”-era Eurythmics. The synth bubble-‘n’-pulse and vocal lines nodding towards the choral and gospel inescapably evoke what Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart fashioned in the mid-Eighties. Shake Shook Shaken’s third track “Miracles (Back in Time)” suggests so much of Eurythmics’ “Here Comes the Rain Again” that it’s possible Dan Levy and the Finland-born but France-dwelling Olivia Merilahti are actually paying tribute to Eurythmics.Shake Shook Shaken – with its bizarre sleeve Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Renegades of Jazz is the alter ego of German DJ David Hanke, whose blending of breakbeats, a distorted big band, rap vocals and electronica to create something billed to bring jazz back to the dancefloor would already be an unusual combination even before the addition of John Milton’s biblical epic Paradise Lost. The result is a brooding and initially rather puzzling release that after several listens reveals itself as addictive and original.The Miltonic connection seems at first to be interpreted very loosely, as a general theme, rather than specific set of references, some of which, such as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tyrannosaurus Rex: My People Were Fair and had Sky in Their Hair, Prophets, Seers & Sages: Angels of the Ages, Unicorn“I was just reflecting and talking about things most people thought or wanted to hear about at the time.” Marc Bolan’s comment about why Tyrannosaurus Rex became popular so quickly is heard in a brief BBC interview included as one of the extras on this new edition of My People Were Fair and had Sky in Their Hair, the summer 1968 debut album.Bolan himself, as the liner notes to the related reissue of Prophets, Seers & Sages: Angels of the Ages state, was astutely Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There have been Throbbing Gristle reunions at Tate Modern, and Psychic TV last played in London at the now-demolished Astoria in 2008 – the band in nurse’s uniforms, playing psych garage rock over projections of medical procedures and sex scenes – but it’s a long time since Genesis Breyer P-Orridge was in London.Combining a sort of spoken-word memoir with poetry and a closing Q&A upstairs at the October Gallery as part of its Burroughs centenary exhibition, Can You All Hear Me?, the first half was an hour’s impromptu talk about how Neil Megson became the pandrogyne figure there on the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Meghan Trainor may not yet be a household name, but you’ll be familiar with her feelgood hit of last summer. “All About That Bass” is many things: insistent, catchy, possibly anti-feminist body-shaming – but it also sparked a little debate on my Twitter feed in the hour or so leading up to the Bells on New Year’s Eve. If “bass” is, as is clearly implied from the accompanying technicoloured video, a radio-friendly term for a sizeable arse, then what on earth is “treble”?Before you start to wonder whether Title delves deep into such existential questions, I’d better make it clear: what the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Artangel continues to instigate extraordinary events in extraordinary places. Over the past two decades and more, directors Michael Morris and James Lingwood have helped generate major and ground-breaking work by Rachel Whiteread, Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson, Roni Horn, Jeremy Deller, Steve McQueen, Matthew Barney, Gregor Schneider, Francis Alÿs and many others. It's a long list. Their latest collaboration with PJ Harvey is no less thought-provoking and inspiring than the best of their unique collection of imaginative and risk-taking projects. Artangel has always excelled at finding new Read more ...