New music
The Dandy Warhols, O2 Institute, Birmingham review - a silver jubilee jaunt with plenty of new tunesThursday, 31 January 2019
This week, the Dandy Warhols rocked up in Birmingham to begin the UK leg of their 25th anniversary tour with a gig in the Institute’s shabby but beautiful main hall, with its dusty neo-classical alabaster reliefs and almost comically antiquated... Read more... |
CD: MONO - Nowhere Now HereWednesday, 30 January 2019
Japanese band MONO have been around for 20 years, inhabiting a musical landscape that straddles post-rock and contemporary classical sounds. Not ones to let things go stale, however, their 10th album not only sees the debut appearance of drummer... Read more... |
CD: Girlpool - What Chaos Is ImaginaryMonday, 28 January 2019
Few bands have grown up in real time in quite as interesting a way as Girlpool. It’s partly a question of timing: Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker were barely old enough to play bars around the release of their precocious 2013 debut EP, with its sing... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Third Noise PrincipleSunday, 27 January 2019
A compilation on which Philip Glass and Terry Riley rub shoulders with Controlled Bleeding and Smegma is going to be interesting. Throw in Data-Bank-A, Dog as Master, NON and Suicide, and it becomes clear what’s striven for is an all-encompassing... Read more... |
CD: Sharon Van Etten - Remind Me TomorrowSunday, 27 January 2019
In 2016, Sharon Van Etten took a hiatus from music, and threw herself into other projects. She got her first acting role in Netflix drama The OA and, inspired by the intense emotional connection her fans had found with her songs, began studying to... Read more... |
Patti Smith, Roundhouse review – the priestess of punk has lost none of her powerSaturday, 26 January 2019
“Don’t love me yet,” replies Patti Smith to the first of tonight’s many excitable shout-outs. “Who knows, after 20 minutes you might be gone!” An unlikely scenario, given that this show – part of the Roundhouse’s annual “In the Round” series, which... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Composer Michel LegrandSaturday, 26 January 2019
“I want to be a man without any past,” said Michel Legrand, who has died at the age of 86. He had perhaps the longest past in showbiz. Orchestrator, pianist, conductor, composer of countless soundtracks, who else has collaborated as widely - with... Read more... |
CD: James Blake - Assume FormSaturday, 26 January 2019
There is an inevitable change that comes with moving from the realms of self-produced bedroom blubstep to slickly-produced West Cali smoothness that will cause chaotic realms of loss of self, fans and at some level, originality. But let’s not forget... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Shirley Collins - 'There was no way I could ever sing to be popular'Friday, 25 January 2019
When Shirley Collins appears at The Roundhouse next week, it will be 50 years since she last played there. On 30 May 1969, she and her sister Dolly were on a bill promoting their then label Harvest Records. When she plays there on 31 January, she is... Read more... |
CD: Que Vola - Que VolaFriday, 25 January 2019
Great music is often born of “what if”s. What if we played Beach Boys-style songs lo-fi, loud, at high velocity? What if we played indie guitar with a hint of Congolese rumba? What if we added a string section to late-Sixties pop-rock? What if we... Read more... |
CD: Trevor Horn – Trevor Horn Reimagines the Eighties (feat. The Sarm Orchestra)Thursday, 24 January 2019
Over the last decade or so, there have been a couple of noticeable trends in broad-based, popular music that have segued from mild irritation to disfiguring infection. The first is the fey cover version, the awful balladification of perfectly good... Read more... |
CD: Backstreet Boys - DNAWednesday, 23 January 2019
You’ve got to hand it to Backstreet Boys. Who would have thought that 23 years after their first, self-titled album, the finger-clicking fivesome would be the best-selling boy band in the world? They’ve survived the departure of one of their members... Read more... |
