New music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If you’ve ever found the idea of “cock rock” to be unnecessarily gendered, then the debut album from Ex Hex – an all-female trio who, between them, have created the best 35 minutes of ballsy rock 'n' roll I’ve heard since Sleater-Kinney’s “The Fox” – is for you. If you haven’t, and you’re just looking for something new to listen to that’s uncomplicated and up-front that will blow the cobwebs out from between your ears, then Ex Hex is also for you. And if you’ve been struggling to find a record that would match the giddy girl-rock high you got the first time you listened to Wild Flag’s first Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Bevis Frond: MiasmaMiasma wasn’t meant to have an afterlife. The Bevis Frond’s debut album wasn’t even by a band. Its creator, Nick Saloman, wrote all the songs, played every instrument and recorded it in a Walthamstow bedroom on a 4-track system which used cassette tapes. Saloman pressed the album in 1987 and had few expectations beyond, as he says in the liner notes included with this reissue, “giving it to friends and family and sticking the rest [of the copies] up in the attic forever.”Today, The Bevis Frond are still a going concern and a Saloman-fronted band as such. Their Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Towards the end of her set Caro Emerald performs “History Repeating”, a hit song from 1997 that revived Shirley Bassey’s cool quota when she sang it with successful big beat duo, the Propellerheads. It’s perfect for Emerald, just the right ratio of hip electronic touches and classic showbiz pizzazz. This is where she lives, musically, dipped in swing-era vintage, but lathered in modernist sonic frolics. It’s a shame the same cannot be said for public perceptions of what she does, as is born out by her Brighton audience. Their response for at least two thirds of the hour-and-three-quarters set Read more ...
Guy Oddy
No Romeo is the debut album by Nottingham-born, singer-songwriter Indiana. If this suggests acoustic guitars and warbling on in a vaguely folkie way, it is misleading. For while Indiana sings throughout, her musical accompaniment is electronica. Electronica that has no truck with 21st century hip hop beats or post-dubstep grooves, but often reaches back into the 90s for inspiration.“Never Born” sees Indiana rain curses on some poor unfortunate to a tune that is initially reminiscent of veteran trip-hoppers Lamb, before it whacks up the volume to a chant of “I will rise up!” “Solo Dancing”, a Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Bebel Gilberto seemed very tentative when she first appeared onstage; dressed in semi-Goth black, she kept saying how nervous she was. “Calm down, Bebel. It’s only the Barbican,” she muttered and we did get a sense of the terror and exhilaration of performing live to a big crowd. Her shambolic approach is in some ways, though, preferable to some slick operators who have their stage patter timed to the second. There’s a problem with a wire, she goes off-stage. Then she can’t work the mic stand and tells the stage hand to get her a drink. It’s all a bit of tightrope act, and there’s a sense of Read more ...
peter.quinn
Since self-releasing his debut album Heard It All Before in 1999, Jamie Cullum has gone on to become the UK's biggest selling jazz artist of all time. Since April 2010, he has also presented a weekly jazz show on BBC Radio 2, for which he won a Sony Gold award this year.Following the pop stylings of Momentum, Cullum's seventh studio album, Interlude, sees him return to the jazz repertoire. Available in both standard and deluxe versions, the latter includes a DVD of Cullum's performance at Jazz à Vienne plus an exclusive photo booklet containing tour and studio pictures, for which Cullum Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“Wildern” means “poaching” in German. That’s as in pheasant, rather than egg. On this album, German jazz singer Tobias Christl goes poaching (foraging might be more accurate) for iconic rock songs, which he adapts for his jazz quintet. Retaining on some level the basic emotional character of the song, he otherwise manipulates freely, to the point where in a couple of cases it’s not obvious which song he started with. We end up with familiar melodies made radically unfamiliar, with saxophone improvisation, eruptions of krautrock, distorted vocals and stretched rhythm turning familiar songs Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“Were we leaving Rio, or were we in New York?” Stacey Kent sings in “The Changing Lights”, the title song of her latest album, before moving on seamlessly to “Les Invalides, or Trafalgar Square”. The prosperous, wistful ennui that some of her recorded songs exude, propelled by her impeccable enunciation and glistening tone, is cosmopolitan with a slightly laminated, departure-lounge sameness. It can feel a little bit like a global franchise in polite enervation. The lyrics, by her regular collaborator, the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, are in fact leagues away in subtlety from the rhythmical Read more ...
marcus.odair
As the presenter of a regular music podcast for a national newspaper, I used to be in the happy position of interviewing one or two artists of my choice per month, provided they were signed to an independent label. So when Domino released a Robert Wyatt box set in 2008, I spent a glorious afternoon with Robert and his wife and creative partner Alfie, in their Lincolnshire garden. I enjoyed myself so much, in fact, that I set out to find an excuse to do it again.Different Every Time, my authorised biography of Robert Wyatt, didn’t take me all those six years to write, although it has certainly Read more ...
Russ Coffey
According to Johnny Marr people with gigantic egos are generally miserable. Jokes about Morrissey aside, it follows Marr must be a pretty contented guy. For what other guitarist with his reputation would have put vanity aside to spend 20-odd years as a gun for hire? Now, however, it seems the affable muso finally wants to be a solo artist. Last year he released the interesting, if patchy, The Messenger. Now he’s back with Playland. So what’s it like?In interview, Marr says it sounds just like “where he’s from”, and it’s true that some of the album feels like rain on gray Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jackson Browne's output has slowed since the mid-Nineties, and this arrives six years after Time the Conqueror. The latter was much preoccupied with the Bush administration and the Iraq war, and Standing in the Breach – with a sleeve depicting a war-ravaged African village – is still stamped with Browne's social and political concerns. "Take the money out of politics and maybe we might see /This country turn back into something more like democracy," he rages in "Which Side", an extended tirade about greed and political corruption he first played at the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2012. As Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Oasis: (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?Adding anything to a story so familiar, so raked over and one played out in public is tricky. Most probably, there are few revelations left about the Oasis of 1995, the year they released their second album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? In its slipstream they racked up a set of mostly unbroken records: it sold 347,000 in the week of release; 2.6m applications were made for tickets to their Knebworth shows.A large proportion of the latter figure must have bought the album, begging the question of whether it’s worth buying again 19 Read more ...