New Music Reviews
The Unthanks, Songs from the Shipyards, Purcell RoomSaturday, 27 October 2012
When The Unthanks staggered into the spotlight with their haunting and beguiling Mercury Award-nominated 2007 album The Bairns, with bracing songs about infant mortality and child abuse, they became a folk band adored by people who don’t even like folk. They were spiritual sisters to brilliant mavericks like Antony & the Johnsons or Robert Wyatt (they did an album of covers of both artists' songs) while remaining firmly rooted in their native Northumberland. Read more...
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Chas & Dave: Last Orders, BBC FourSaturday, 27 October 2012
Chas & Dave’s run of hits up the mid Eighties made them an alternative to the gloss of Wham!, Duran Duran and Culture Club. They had three chart albums in 1983. But was there more to their “rockney” music than a first take suggests? Were they more than a cockney slanted, pie ‘n’ mash Wurzels? This programme, prompted by their 2009 retirement, made a valiant – heroic – attempt to elevate them to the level of the greats. Peter Doherty declared them “just like The Clash, The Smiths, Keats... Read more... |
Tampere Nights: Lost in Music Festival 2012Friday, 26 October 2012
Nightclub Tähti is on the seventh floor of an anonymous-looking building along Tampere’s main shopping street, Hämeenkatu. Black-suited security wave you into a lift which zips straight up there. After surrendering your coat at the cloakroom – obligatory in Finland - a walk around the bar reveals the dance floor. The couples occupying it are doing the Finnish tango, a measured, understated version of the dance. Read more... |
Grizzly Bear, O2 Academy BrixtonTuesday, 23 October 2012
If Grizzly Bear’s name is unfamiliar to you, you’ll certainly know some of the indie-folk bands they’ve influenced. These include Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes, two of music’s more unlikely recent successes. Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear never seemed to want that mass appeal. This autumn they followed 2009’s melodic Vecktamist with the rather more difficult Shields, whose songs suggested they might sound better live. Read more... |
Hello QuoMonday, 22 October 2012
We currently seem to be awash with rockumentaries. The Rolling Stones have yet another retrospective out, while Friday night on BBC Four would not be complete without dusting off the back catalogue of some mid-table band once adored by some nice middle-aged folk unable to find a babysitter. Read more... |
Chilly Gonzales, BBCSO, Barbican HallSunday, 21 October 2012
Chilly Gonzales is a self-mythologising huckster, a throwback to a vaudevillian tradition of entertainer. He’s had enormous success producing the likes of Feist, is in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest solo piano concert (over 27 hours), and starred in the "existential sports movie" Ivory Tower as the inventor of “jazz chess”. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Peter Gabriel, Stackridge, Ray Charles, Caro EmeraldSunday, 21 October 2012
Russ Coffey Read more... |
Ian Hunter, Shepherds Bush EmpireSaturday, 20 October 2012
Can a septuagenarian wear skinny trousers? It is not a question that I ask myself very often, but it was my first thought on seeing the frighteningly fit 73-year-old Ian Hunter stroll onstage at the Shepherds Bush Empire last night. Life in America clearly suits the Shropshire-born former frontman of Mott the Hoople, as he led a band young enough to be his children through a storming, age-defying 110-minute set. Read more... |
The Gaslight Anthem, O2 Academy, GlasgowSaturday, 20 October 2012
The Gaslight Anthem’s star has been in the ascendant for some time now - arguably since the release of their 2008 breakthrough record, The ’59 Sound. But nowhere has that change been more dramatic than in the evolution of their live shows. The Gaslight Anthem that commanded the stage in Glasgow last night was an altogether more confident, self-assured beast than the band that played the same venue in the summer of 2010. Read more... |
CD: The Bad Plus - Made PossibleThursday, 18 October 2012
Possessing one of the most recognisable sounds in jazz, US trio The Bad Plus don’t so much subvert genre as wrap it up in a little parcel and put an incendiary device under it. Jazz, rock, pop, country and classical all get thrown into their inimitable blender, as typified by album opener “Pound for Pound”, which traces a musical journey from Satie-like simplicity to an all-out rhapsodic assault on the senses. Read more... |
Peter Gabriel: So Pages
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