New Music Reviews
Muse, Emirates StadiumSunday, 26 May 2013
For all the video projections and pyrotechnics that accompanied it, Muse’s entrance onto the Emirates stage last night was disappointingly anticlimactic. This was partly because there was still so much daylight in the stadium but, mainly, it was down to there being so many empty seats. Maybe earlycomers had been driven to the bar by support act Dizzee Rascal’s constant refrains of "let's go fucking mental." Or possibly it was just a bad day on the tube. Read more...
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David Bowie - Five Years, BBC TwoSunday, 26 May 2013
Picking five creatively significant years was quite a smart way of tackling the huge career of David Bowie, though you could argue forever about whether producer/director Francis Whately had chosen the right ones. What about 1969 and the Space Oddity album, or 1970 and The Man Who Sold the World? How about a really bad year like 1987, which gave us Never Let Me Down and the egregious Glass Spider tour? Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Rodion G.A., Dudley Moore, Four Tet, Cheap TrickSunday, 26 May 2013
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Neko Case/Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, Village Underground, LondonSaturday, 25 May 2013
Neko Case wasn't about to launch a Yeah Yeah Yeahs-style pre-emptive strike aimed at the Village Underground's amateur camera-wielders. She doesn't mind the odd photograph, she said; just don't try to film her. It makes her feel a little uncomfortable. Didn't we all use to just remember? Read more... |
Praxis Makes Perfect, National Theatre WalesFriday, 24 May 2013
Almost before the dust has settled on their globe-spanning collaboration with New National Theatre Tokyo, National Theatre Wales embarks on a very different, if no less ambitious, partnership with the mercurial synth pop duo Neon Neon. Read more... |
Steve Earle, Royal Festival HallThursday, 23 May 2013
Steve Earle is country music's great polymath - short story writer, playwright, novelist, activist, actor, oh yes, and singer and songwriter of some of the most acutely intelligent and literate songs in contemporary country. He's adept at evoking the human cost of American history, American politics and the lay of the promised land, and on his latest album, The Low Highway, the first song takes a long, slow panning shot of the body politic. It’s not in great condition. Read more... |
Lubomyr Melnyk, Village UndergroundTuesday, 21 May 2013
Imagine the rising and falling piano cadences of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Then plug the gaps between each note with any of those which may have been encountered on the path to the next. Once that’s done, ensure that the playing is constant with each note bleeding into the next. Mesh the result with a similar composition played at the same time and you have some idea of how Lubomyr Melnyk’s “Windmills”, his final piece last night, sounds. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Scott WalkerSunday, 19 May 2013
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CD: Jamie Cullum - MomentumSunday, 19 May 2013
Jamie Cullum's sixth studio album is about as good a pop record as you'll hear all year. Newly signed to Island Records, the singer-songwriter has seemingly raided ideas from the entire history of pop music, such that low-fi vintage synth lines and jazzy piano breaks rub shoulders with heart-on-sleeve soul belters and subtle electronica. The kind of stylistic pluralism that directly reflects Cullum's own musical loves, in other words. Read more... |
Rock ‘n’ Roll Britannia, BBC FourSaturday, 18 May 2013
From being “a strange facsimile of the original” to generating the “first British record made by people who are 100 per cent convinced that they are doing the right thing”, Rock ‘n’ Roll Britannia breezily mapped the protracted birth of a British rock scene which could take America on at its own game. As Cliff Richard put it, what was created was “different enough to become European. Read more... |
Rodion G.A.: The Lost Tapes
Scott Walker: The Collection 1967-1970Pages
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