New Music Reviews
Flying Lotus & Infinity at ICAThursday, 19 August 2010
Steven Ellison is one of the most fascinating figures in modern music. Son of Motown songwriter Marylin McLeod and nephew to Alice Coltrane, he's inspired in equal part by his own musical heritage, the slow-and-low hip hop of his home state of California, and British electronica and drum and bass. Read more...
|
Edinburgh Fringe: Shakespeare - The Man from Stratford/ Mick Ferry/ John GrantWednesday, 18 August 2010
The premise of Jonathan Bate’s one-man play, directed by Tom Cairns, is simple but surprisingly effective: a trawl through the seven ages of Shakespeare, from babe to box, told through a mixture of biographical narrative illuminated by relevant scenes from Will’s work. Shakespeare – The Man From Stratford, Assembly Hall **** Read more... |
Toots and the Maytals, Academy, IslingtonFriday, 13 August 2010
The Academy was heaving, the floor was so sticky with beer that lifting one’s feet was an effort, and the crowd were beginning to lose patience. Frederick “Toots” Hibbert and the Maytals were late; a 9pm start for this London show was scheduled, but the appointed hour had come and gone, the minutes were ticking by, and the DJ’s efforts to keep us entertained with a string of ska and reggae classics were beginning to fall on stony ground. There was even some booing. Had it not been for the... Read more... |
Silver Apples, The LuminaireTuesday, 10 August 2010
One doesn't want to be prejudiced about audiences, but when you go to see a show by a “pioneer of electronic music”, particularly one in his seventies, you most likely expect a crowd that are fairly male, fairly unfunky and tending towards the middle-aged. And to be fair, there were a good few paunches and beards in evidence at the Luminaire – but there were also a quite startling number of young, dressed-up, attractive and really rather groovy twenty-somethings of both (and indeterminate)... Read more... |
Tinariwen, HMV ForumSunday, 08 August 2010
Back in June of this year, the international successful Malian blues band gave what felt at the time like a curiously muted performance at the World Cup Kick-off Celebration Concert in Johannesburg. But perhaps it was the effect of having their laidback hypnotic grooves juxtaposed to the in-your-face emoting and hip-gyrating of the likes of Shakira and Alicia Keys that seemed to somewhat mystify the stadium audience. Read more... |
Benda Bilili!Friday, 06 August 2010
I must confess that when I first heard about Staff Benda Bilili - a Congolese band partly made up of paraplegics – I felt a little uneasy. The last thing that one wants as a (hopefully) trusted critic is to feel compromised by an obligation to give a positive review, or feel guilty about lessening their chances of bettering their circumstances with a bad review. Yes, the vanity and solipsism of your reviewer has no bounds! Read more... |
Kris Kristofferson, Festival Theatre, EdinburghWednesday, 04 August 2010
“This song is for my kids – and all their Mommas.” Even at 74, Kris Kristofferson exudes the quietly satisfied air of experience of a man who has spent at least half his life drinking, shagging, smoking and strumming to his heart’s content, and now has a whole lot of good times (and plenty of bad) to draw from at will. Read more... |
Shellsuit, Dublin Castle, CamdenTuesday, 03 August 2010
During the 1980s, a major artistic response to the Conservative government came in the form of a sustained surge in music that was, on some level at least, politically engaged. Not necessarily in the classic agitprop manner either. For every band of Red Wedge-compliant rabblerousers, there'd be another act insisting that "the personal is political", as they made domestic power struggles or everyday banalities their preferred songwriting topic. With a Tory government once more, pursuing... Read more... |
Gruff Rhys's Separado! & Tony da Gatorra, BFI SouthbankSunday, 01 August 2010
Patagonia’s Welshness was a nagging issue for Gruff Rhys, mainman of Welsh psycho-nauts Super Furry Animals. His distant cousin, the folk singer René Griffiths, was born in the desert-filled southern reaches of Argentina, but visited Wales and appeared there on TV in the mid seventies. Remembering those appearances, Rhys decided to visit Patagonia to search for Griffiths amongst the region’s little-known Welsh-speaking community. Given a Rhys-hosted outing at the BFI yesterday, the resulting... Read more... |
Separado!/ Gruff Rhys, BFI SouthbankSunday, 01 August 2010
Patagonia’s Welshness was a nagging issue for Gruff Rhys, mainman of Welsh psych-nauts Super Furry Animals. His distant cousin, the folk singer René Griffiths, was born in the desert-filled southern reaches of Argentina, but visited Wales and appeared there on TV in the mid-Seventies. Remembering those appearances, Rhys decided to visit Patagonia to search for Griffiths amongst the region’s Welsh-speaking community. Read more... |
Pages
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take a subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Much Ado About Nothing, RSC, Stratford - Messina FC scores o...
Fragile egos abound. An older person (usually a man) has to bring the best out of the stars, but mustn’t neglect the team ethic....
Zsuzsanna Gahse: Mountainish review - seeking refuge
Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse is a collection of 515 notes, each contributing to an expansive kaleidoscope of mountain encounters....
DVD/Blu-ray: All We Imagine is Light
All We Imagine as Light focuses on the lives of three women in contemporary...
Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Isata Kanneh-Mason, Wigmore Hall review...
I came to Isata and Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s Wigmore Hall recital on Saturday armed with a certain degree of scepticism. Not about the siblings’...
Simon Boccanegra, Opera North review - ‘dramatic staging’ pr...
Opera North have recently pioneered a way of presenting some big works which they call “dramatic concert stagings”, performing in concert halls as...
Mahler 8, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - lights on high
Transcendence is everywhere in Mahler’s most ambitious symphony, from the flaming opening hymn to the upper reaches in the epic setting of Goethe’...
Album: Car Seat Headrest - The Scholars
Following a tradition that reaches back to the The Who’s Tommy, bands and musicians with serious artistic ambition have created rock...
Music Reissues Weekly: The Hamburg Repertoire
The blurb on the front of the double-CD set The Hamburg Repertoire says it collects “The original recordings of songs...
Philharmonia, Alsop, RFH / Levit, Abramović, QEH review - mi...
“Let the music guide your imagination” was never going to be the slogan of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival. Its 13 events...