New music
Pet Shop Boys, Royal Opera HouseThursday, 21 July 2016
Anyone remember the Boobahs? They were the less successful cousins of the Teletubbies, from the same production house. They were puffy, fat, primary-coloured humanoids who bounced endlessly around in bizarre choreographed dance routines. They were... Read more... |
CD: Ben Chatwin - Heat & EntropyThursday, 21 July 2016
Ben Chatwin's music speaks loudly of solitude. He lives and records on the coast of the Firth of Forth, just outside Edinburgh – not exactly the most isolated of spots, but it's not hard to hear in his waves of texture and simple repeated motifs the... Read more... |
Becca Stevens Band, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseWednesday, 20 July 2016
Becca Stevens’ limpid, luscious and artful fusion of Appalachian folk, jazz and indie rock found a perfectly empathetic setting in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, in an inspired choice for Lauren Laverne’s Wonder Women series of summer gigs. Stevens’... Read more... |
CD: Jim Causley & Luke Thompson - The Clay HymnalWednesday, 20 July 2016
Devonian singer and accordionist Jim Causley released Cyprus Well, settings of his relative Charles Causley's poems, in 2013. What may be his finest album to date, Forgotten Kingdom, came early this year, and now he has released a second album of... Read more... |
CD: Black Merlin – Hipnotik TradisiMonday, 18 July 2016
Dance music has, for millions of people, become synonymous with the very worst that the human race has to offer. Preening, vain, beach-body bumholes dancing like everyone’s watching, while keeping half an eye on their camera, making sure than the... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: The Hollywood BratsSunday, 17 July 2016
July last year saw the publication of Sick on You: The Disastrous Story of Britain’s Great Lost Punk Band, Andrew Matheson’s chronicle of his band The Hollywood Brats. The essential book was impossible to put down. It took in picaresque encounters... Read more... |
CD: John Martin - The Hidden NotesSunday, 17 July 2016
Few new releases come with quite such a specific technical claim as this double release from British saxophonist John Martin. His album title refers to his incorporation of multiphonics, an established technique in free improvisation, within his 11... Read more... |
CD: MSTRKRFT - OPERATORSaturday, 16 July 2016
Music is so often about context, some music more than others. Such is the case with the latest album – the third – from Canadian electronic bolshies MSTRKRFT. It’s wilfully obnoxious, caustic stuff, a battering techno-based assault that cares not a... Read more... |
CD: Bosco Rogers - Post ExoticThursday, 14 July 2016
Anyone looking for some psychedelic pop to at least give the illusion that we might now actually be in the middle of summer could do much worse than try out the debut album by Anglo-French duo Bosco Rogers. Their 21st century twist on the Monkees’... Read more... |
CD: Hedvig Mollestad Trio - Black Stabat MaterWednesday, 13 July 2016
Thirty-three minutes is not long for an album. What actually counts is not length but what is said and its impact. Norway’s Hedvig Mollestad Trio know what they are doing and over Black Stabat Mater’s 33 minutes they do it with such clarity, force... Read more... |
Stevie Wonder, Hyde Park BST FestivalMonday, 11 July 2016
Sixty-five thousand people came to Wonder. The final night of British Summer Time in Hyde Park was a sell-out. With a performance lasting four hours including an intermission, the Detroit-born legend and his band – and also the weather, which stayed... Read more... |
CD: Elliot Galvin Trio - PunchMonday, 11 July 2016
Ludic, ironic, kaleidoscopic, highly stylised, this follow-up to the Elliot Galvin Trio’s acclaimed 2014 debut, Dreamland, packs an exhilarating feast for the ears into its shortish 38-minute time frame. Like that greatest of musical magpies, Igor... Read more... |
