sun 17/08/2025

New Music Reviews

Reissue CDs Weekly: Lee "Scratch" Perry, Cud, Taj Mahal, David Cassidy

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Lee “Scratch” Perry and Friends Disco Devil The Jamaican DiscomixesLee “Scratch” Perry and Friends: Disco Devil - The Jamaican Discomixes

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Jeffrey Lewis and the Junkyard, The Haunt, Brighton

Thomas H Green

Astonishment is the emotion that creeps up most often when watching 36-year-old New York singer-songwriter Jeffrey Lewis. The term singer-songwriter does him an injustice, in fact, for these days it summons notions of strummed predictability, opaquely emotive lyrics and vulnerable falsetto-flecked whining, whereas he’s a whole different ball game. Take his history of the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Lee Hazlewood, T-Coy, Laibach, Boppin’ by the Bayou

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Lee Hazlewood A House Safe For TigersLee Hazlewood: A House Safe for Tigers

Graham Rickson

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Grandaddy, O2 ABC, Glasgow

Lisa-Marie Ferla

Jason Lytle has a “fervent appreciation”, he says, “for bands that don’t exist anymore”. It’s why he’s playing the cover of “Here”, by Pavement, that has become a staple of his band Grandaddy’s live sets on this open-ended reunion tour, although it doesn’t explain why the time is right for a Grandaddy reunion in the first place.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Green Day, The Ramones, Solomon Burke, Anthony Moore

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Green Day The Studio Albums 1990-2009Green Day: The Studio Albums 1990-2009

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Soul Sister, Savoy Theatre

Kieron Tyler

The fright wig is instantly recognisable. Even with her back turned, it’s obviously Tina Turner on stage. Except it isn’t. It’s actress Emi Wokoma playing the singer in a performance virtually guaranteed to turn her into a star. Casualty and EastEnders will soon be distant memories for Wokoma. Good for her, maybe, but she’s the best thing about the otherwise wafer-thin Soul Sister.

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Mittwoch aus Licht, Birmingham Opera Company

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Singing camels, paddling trombonists, airborne string quartets and a libretto so barmy it makes David Icke sound like Richard Dawkins. Birmingham, welcome to the world of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The German composer devoted 25 years of his life composing his giant, seven-day, operatic cycle Licht. We in Britain have only ever had the chance to see one segment when in 1984 Donnerstag aus Licht was premiered at the Royal Opera House.

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London Mela, Gunnersbury Park

Thomas H Green

The look for many young Asian guys in deepest west London appears to focus on how thin they can sculpt their goatees. Well-muscled, chiselled even, sporting either a bowl-crop or one of those spiky, gelled, junior estate agent haircuts, and clad in the ubiquitous sports casual that hip hop has wrought, it’s still their beards that draw the attention. These are pencil-thin lines from the ear to chin, interconnected by another over the mouth, part Errol Flynn, part Armand Van Helden.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Ride, Juliette Gréco, Krzysztof Komeda, Priscilla Paris

Kieron Tyler

Ride Going Blank AgainRide: Going Blank Again

Kieron Tyler

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Bloodstock Open Air 2012, Catton Hall, Derbyshire

Thomas H Green

It’s Sunday lunchtime and Swiss thrash metallers Battalion are hammering out jagged, smashed up riffage with gleeful ferocity. Indeed, every one of Bloodstock Open Air’s four stages contains bands playing the hardest metal. To aficionados this music breaks down into multiple sub-genres – death metal, power metal, prog metal, and on and on, ad infinitum - but to the rest of us it’s simply a fearsomely tough, ear-searing pummelling.

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