New Music Reviews
One Direction, Murrayfield Stadium, EdinburghWednesday, 04 June 2014
The sheer scale of One Direction’s global victory march is something to behold. Last night’s stopover on their Where We Are tour was the biggest concert ever staged by one band on Scottish soil, with 64,000 fans pouring into the national rugby stadium (I didn’t conduct a scientific poll of the gender split, but it had certainly never been easier to use the Gents at Murrayfield.) Read more... |
Supersonic Festival, Custard Factory, BirminghamMonday, 02 June 2014
For those not in the know, the Supersonic Festival is Birmingham’s annual knees-up of noisy avant garde music drawn from a broad range of genres that is curated by local promoters and heroes, Capsule. This year, despite the event being reduced to two days from the usual three, there was doomy, sludge rock; electronic weirdery; pseudo film soundtrack music; screaming guitars; the legendary Bill Drummond and the mighty Swans. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Holland-Dozier-HollandSunday, 01 June 2014
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Emulsion III, Village UndergroundFriday, 30 May 2014
The third Emulsion Festival, curated jointly this year by Trish Clowes and Luke Styles, turned out to be more of a collage of original colours, when the second day of programming concluded at Village Underground last night. Read more... |
Just in From Scandinavia: Nordic Music Round-Up 11Thursday, 29 May 2014
Denmark’s Broken Twin take the lead in the latest of theartsdesk’s regular round-ups of the new music coming in from Scandinavia. Debut album May is melancholy. Minimally arranged, with lyrics addressing the pain brought by the passing of time, bleakness in the form of metaphorical references to weather and what happens after death, this is an affecting album. Read more... |
Caetano Veloso, BarbicanWednesday, 28 May 2014
Caetano Veloso gets more extraordinary. After his 2010 show in London, one critic (me) said that at 67 his “wings seemed a little clipped”. Maybe that show, which was quite short, wasn’t the best he’d ever given. But maybe I was wrong. At 71, this slight man has not a clipped or cramped or confined thing about him. He seems to have got younger. Read more... |
Arctic Monkeys, Finsbury ParkTuesday, 27 May 2014
Whatever “it” is, Alex Turner has it in his bones. From those first excitable live performances passed around online in the early 2000s, before Sheffield’s Arctic Monkeys rocketed to No. 1 success apparently overnight, to 2014’s triumphant Finsbury Park headlining residency, the frontman exudes charisma live. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: OasisSunday, 25 May 2014
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Pinise Saul/Adam Glasser/Marcina Arnold, Crazy CoqsSaturday, 24 May 2014
The veteran South African jazzers Adam Glasser and Pinise Saul transformed the gleamingly elegant Crazy Coqs cabaret den into a throbbing township jazz club last night, with an exhilarating programme of original South African jazz, seasoned with standards and township folk. Joining forces with the percussionist Marcina Arnold, a relative newcomer to their ensembles, they roughed up this venue’s urbanity with unfamiliar fires of passion and yearning. Read more... |
Emmylou Harris, Brighton DomeSaturday, 24 May 2014
Sometimes it feels as though modern music has lost its magic – that the more that's produced the more ordinary it seems. Last night, however, down the Bohemian end of one British seaside town, the crowd sat expecting something pretty special. They had good reason. These days 67-year-old Emmylou Harris, with her long silver hair not only looks Southern gothic but sounds it too. Read more... |
Oasis: Definitely MaybePages
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