New music
CD: Neil Young - Peace TrailSaturday, 03 December 2016
The 37th studio album from the man dubbed “the godfather of grunge” is raw, down and dirty-sounding – like many of the problems Neil Young grapples with. Recorded over four days at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-la Studios in Malibu with Jim Keltner on drums... Read more... |
CD: Sex Swing - Sex SwingWednesday, 30 November 2016
Those with an ear open to loud experimental music of a certain stripe may already be aware of some of the members of Sex Swing. Despite being debutants here, all players already have day jobs knocking out tunes with a variety of cult noiseniks... Read more... |
CD: The Rolling Stones - Blue & LonesomeTuesday, 29 November 2016
It’s a been a good year for the Stones as they play into their sixth decade – a free festival audience in Havana in March, preceded by an adulatory South American trek that saw some of the band’s best performances in recent times – down at the... Read more... |
CD: Hollie + Metropole Orkest - Poetry versus OrchestraMonday, 28 November 2016
Performance poet Hollie McNish and composer Jules Buckley specialise in taking their respective art forms to new audiences. They’ve gone for a double whammy with this enterprising collaboration, the brainchild of producer Kwame Kwaten, bringing... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Mose Allison, Georgie FameSunday, 27 November 2016
In 1970, The Who opened their Live at Leeds album with “Young Man Blues”, a hefty version of a song its composer Mose Allison recorded as “Blues” in 1957. Back then, it was the only vocal track on Back Country Suite, an otherwise instrumental blues-... Read more... |
Autechre, Royal Festival HallSaturday, 26 November 2016
At the Royal Festival Hall the cliché seemed complete. Milling around were white men, white men and more white men – all in their late thirties and older, most looking a little bohemian and a lot geeky, with a few of them a little more hardcore in... Read more... |
The Damned, Brighton Dome, 2016Friday, 25 November 2016
The Damned peak early tonight. They never really top a tribalistic crowd sing-along to the song “Ignite” about two-thirds of the way through the evening. Dressed, as ever, like a cool rockabilly undertaker, in aviators with a black glove clutching... Read more... |
CD: Vile Electrodes - In the Shadows of MonumentsFriday, 25 November 2016
Three years ago a debut album, The Future Through a Lens, by Hastings duo Vile Electrodes, announced the arrival of an A-league synth-pop talent. The pair have since appeared on stages around Europe supporting everyone from Eighties pop heroes... Read more... |
CD: Robert Earl Keen - Live Dinner ReunionThursday, 24 November 2016
Way back in 1996 Robert Earl Keen issued an unexpected career bestseller in No 2 Live Dinner, and this new double live set marks a joyous, star-stacked return to John T Floore’s place, 20 years later, drawing on three decades of songcraft, alongside... Read more... |
CD: Xam Duo - Xam DuoWednesday, 23 November 2016
Everything about Xam Duo’s debut album, out earlier this month on Sonic Cathedral, has a wonderful sense of self-indulgence: from the freeform, experimental feel, the stretched-out tones and resulting melodies that exist almost by implication, to... Read more... |
Wayne Shorter Quartet, BarbicanTuesday, 22 November 2016
At 83, and with 60-odd years on the road, Wayne Shorter could be forgiven for, in a musical sense, getting the slippers and pipe out and knocking out comfortable versions of his hits, the classic tunes he wrote for Miles Davis among them, like “... Read more... |
CD: Kuro - KuroMonday, 21 November 2016
Kuro is the brainchild and debut album of classically-trained violinist Agathe Max and bass-playing noisenik Gareth Turner, he of wigged-out psychedelicists Anthroprophh. If this seems an unlikely partnership, a shared love of “the drone” is where... Read more... |
