New music
Kieron Tyler
The voice is unmistakably Icelandic. Fluting and dancing around the notes, the words it carries are broken into segments which don’t respect syllables. Although singing in English, Hildur Kristín Stefánsdóttir hasn’t sacrificed her Icelandic intonation.The music itself is also unmistakably Icelandic. As with fellow Icelanders múm, electronica has been assimilated bringing a glitchiness which knocks the lush, ebbing and flowing arrangements off balance. Yet the totality is folky and warmly intimate.Innra, the third album from Rökkurró, is a lovely thing – a musical postcard from a world where Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Röyksopp have mustered fantastic moments during their career, notably the awesome floor-filler "Eple", one of pop’s most joyous, bouncy instrumentals. Since appearing at the turn of the century from the creative excitement of Norway’s second city, Bergen, which was bubbling over with electronic mavericks at the time, they have released four albums, each riding enthusiastically, accessibly and imaginatively across the landscape of electronic pop, usually with a strong house flavour. Now, however, alongside the claim their fifth will be their final album, they give us a melancholic synth-pop Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Purple’s debut album (409) is loud, brash and full of beans, with a big smile and an eye on a good time. This lively three-piece come on like a Texan take on UK indie favourites The Subways, but without the angst, and their exuberant garage punk rock with yelping, over-excited vocals is just the tonic for a wet autumn.(409) is named after Purple’s East Texan area code and “Wallflower” kicks off with some serious swagger, as singer Hanna Brewer commands “I’m a girl. You’re supposed to be chasing me!” over Taylor Busby’s dirty riffs, while knocking seven bells out of her drum kit. This is just Read more ...
Mark Kidel
In reaching out to audiences beyond the African context, Malian musicians and singers have adopted performance styles that don’t always reflect the intimacy and personal communication so fundamental to the praise-singing at the heart of the region’s musical tradition. Kassé Mady Diabaté’s latest release, while not his first acoustic outing, avoids the world music festival staples of rock-tainted histrionics and takes us really close-up to possibly African’s greatest living singer’s warmth, generosity of spirit and deep-flowing soul. Kassé Mady is the epitome of the "cool", demonstrating Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Damien Rice released his last album in 2006, but it doesn’t take long, listening to the lyrics of his latest, to work out what he’s been doing in the meantime: feeling very, very sorry for himself. Rice’s relationship, professional and personal, with his cellist and then collaborator Lisa Hannigan ended 2007. Autobiographical connections are easy to suggest and hard to prove, but clearly something very traumatic has happened to Rice’s love life, and it’s taken many years of travelling and the meticulous attention of producer Rick Rubin to get these songs down.And yet there’s a lot in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Love: Love Songs The Red Crayola: The Parable of the Arable LandJust how much messing with a band’s back catalogue is acceptable? Should classic albums only be reissued as stand-alone releases, sometimes bolstered with bonus tracks but still allowed to stand on their own merits? These two reissues of music by prime psychedelic-era outfits Love and The Red Crayola raise these questions and more.Love’s third album Forever Changes didn’t attract a lot of attention or sales when it was originally issued in November 1967, but it’s gone on to be accepted as a classic: the nine songs by bandleader Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Sheryl Crow doesn’t do genres. She may have recorded her first authentically country album, Feels Like Home, in Nashville recently, but for her, the tag seems to mean little. “It’s country, but it just sounds like a Sheryl Crow record,” she told the BluesFest audience last night, and whenever the subject came up afterwards, she put finger-wiggling inverted commas around the term “country”. She gives her audience what she knows they like, and what she knows she likes, too.As if to emphasise brand Sheryl, new songs and back catalogue were cheerfully mixed from the start. “All I Wanna Do” got Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kill List is a great film. It doesn’t quite work but director Ben Wheatley’s warped sense of ambition makes it mesmeric. It attempts to meld together sinister occultism with the sensibilities of a geezer-ish Brit gangster flick. The result is disorientating and when the weird Wicker Man-flecked darkness arrives, it’s all the more unsettling for the curious cloak of displacement.So it is with the first album from Mysteries. Clonking along on wheezy electronics and threatening tribal drums that recall both Front 242 and Satanic midnight rituals, their amalgam of styles is unsettling and doesn’t Read more ...
fisun.guner
Georgie Fame opened the evening with a five-piece band, including the singer on his old Hammond organ. Favourites such as “Yeh, Yeh” were belted out to pleasing effect, as well as covers that included Van Morrison’s “Moondance” (Morrison played the packed-out BluesFest the previous evening). It was a strange, “extended” version that paid homage to a Paul Robeson number – Fame boomed out an African chant that bookended the song. I’m not quite sure the unusual arrangement worked, but the band were superb and Fame’s voice – it’s been exactly 50 years since “Yeh, Yeh" was a major hit for him – in Read more ...
Russ Coffey
These days, it's not just those of a certain age who remember Simple Minds early days. Fans and critics alike have been reappraising the group's New Wave phase. The band too. Jim Kerr recently said to one theartsdesk writer "maybe we shouldn't have cashed in". Which sounds like an appealing sentiment until you realise it would have entailed denying the world "Alive and Kicking" and "Waterfront".More pertinently, where you stand on the relative stages of the bands career will dictate what you make of Big Music. Like 2005's Black and White 050505, the album plugs straight into the New Gold Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Choosing the cutesy-pie “Fwends” – as The Flaming Lips have before – for the title rather than "friends" instantly suggests this track-by-track revisit to The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band isn’t going to be entirely reverential. It isn’t. And there’s nothing wrong with that. No music is sacred and reinterpretations can indeed be interesting and fun. Occasionally, they can even be revelatory. In this case, The Residents’ “Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life” is the exemplar: a cover version of a song from Sgt Pepper's which took The Beatles to places so far-out Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Earlier this year, bobdylan.com posted “Full Moon & Empty Arms”, a song associated with Sinatra and the popular music of America before rock'n'roll. Dylan’s new version seemed to presage an album of tunes of similar vintage titled Shadows in the Night, featuring the likes of “Melancholy Baby”, “On a Little Street in Singapore” and “Stormy Weather”. Those new recordings, however, have been pushed back to make room for another release, one so big and wide you’d need to tear out the door to bring it in.Six discs, 138 songs, 17 reels, five young men, one dog, and roughly nine months of Read more ...