sun 04/05/2025

New music

Lizz Wright, Cadogan Hall

There are singers who can dazzle with their technical mastery, those who welcome you into their musical world through a special communicative gift, and those who can traverse genres with absolutely no artifice. Rarest of all are those singers who...

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CD: Rachael Yamagata - Tightrope Walker

Rachael Yamagata likes to take her time. Tightrope Walker comes a full five years after the American songwriter’s last release, and it’s an album that demands to be listened to with as much care as clearly went into its creation. Like the French...

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theartsdesk in Reykjavík: Iceland Airwaves 2016

On the final night of Iceland Airwaves 2016, Polly Jean Harvey and her band are ranged in a line just inside the edge of the stage constructed inside Valshöllin, a sports hall south of Reykjavík’s city centre. The festival’s five days have climaxed...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: REM

Good grief, was Out of Time really 25 years ago? This was the seventh studio album from the li'l ole band from Athens, Georgia, and the one with which they finally cracked open the mainstream international market. This was when people still used to...

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Michael Wollny Trio + Andrew McCormack, Kings Place

This rambunctious German-Swiss trio is used to selling out much larger venues at home. Their overdue EFG London Jazz Festival debut, in an enthusiastic but not full Kings Place, introduced British audiences to an exhilarating take on the acoustic...

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CD: Martha Wainwright - Goodnight City

After four years, Martha Wainwright is back with her fourth solo album. While she’s been away she’s turned 40 and now says that on this outing she’s “a songwriter, but also just a singer and interpreter. This is perhaps the essence of who I truly am...

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Jazz Voice, Royal Festival Hall

Following the seismic events across the pond earlier this week, an outcome which has left the rest of the world blinking in disbelief, Guy Barker’s brilliant arrangements for this year’s Jazz Voice offered much needed balm for the soul. Creativity,...

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Billy Bragg & Joe Henry, St Georges Church, Brighton

The day after Trump won the US presidential election was always going to be an interesting day for a concert by Billy Bragg and his American cohort Joe Henry. Bragg’s 1986 song “Help Save the Youth of America” is, for instance, given added power by...

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theartsdesk Radio Show 16

After a hiatus, theartsdesk Radio Show is back with a new partner, Music Box Radio, hosted in their studio at the Market House in Brixton. Peter Culshaw’s global round-up of new and newly re-released discs jumps from Brazilian psychedelia to synth...

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CD: Sting - 57th and 9th

Even now, Sting's reputation as one of rock's most earnest men looms large. His last two projects consisted of a Broadway musical about Newcastle's ship industry and a "symphonic" retrospective of his greatest hits. Before that ...

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Leonard Cohen: Turning the Darkness Into Beauty

Leonard Cohen, who has died at 82, was one of those artists born with a wisdom and maturity that cut deep into the baby-boomer youth culture of his times. He provided the perfect antidote to the innocent optimism of the 1960s, a vision shot through...

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Psychic TV, Brixton Jamm

The last time Genesis Breyer P Orridge was in the UK, it was to touch down and talk about life, art, magic and strange encounters as part of COUM, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and PTV3 at the October Gallery's William Burroughs centenary show back...

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