New music
CD: Sarah Jarosz - UndercurrentSaturday, 11 June 2016
The fourth album from 25-year-old Texan singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz is a beautiful mope. It’s country-flavoured but is neither overflowing with syrupy emotion, nor honed to flinty Cash/Rubin desolation. Jarosz, who recently graduated from the New... Read more... |
CD: Train - Does Led Zeppelin IIWednesday, 08 June 2016
Led Zeppelin are an icon of musical class. Train, even their admirers must admit, are not. With this faithful, perhaps too faithful cover, the credit can only flow one way. Responses to this album have been a touchstone of journalistic identity,... Read more... |
Seasick Steve – A Myth UnravelsTuesday, 07 June 2016
Life and art have generally had a troubled relationship. In the case of former hobo and punk-blues singer Seasick Steve, however, it all seemed so simple. When he sang "Dog House Boogie" on his extraordinary Hootenanny debut nearly a decade ago, it... Read more... |
AC/DC, Olympic Stadium, Queen Elizabeth ParkMonday, 06 June 2016
The accepted wisdom from last month's relaunched Rock or Bust tour was that the substitution of Axl Rose for incapacitated singer Brian Johnson was as masterful as it was surprising. Whatever the Guns N' Roses man lacked in mischief, the story went... Read more... |
CD: Eli Paperboy Reed – My Way HomeMonday, 06 June 2016
Eli Paperboy Reed remembers a time when soul music didn’t just mean aping some of Michael Jackson’s old moves and wearing a daft hat: a time when Otis Redding and others on the Stax roster were making some seriously soulful music. Eli is also well-... Read more... |
Malcolm Middleton, The LexingtonSunday, 05 June 2016
The Scottish singer-songwriter Malcolm Middleton has always had a restless creativity, right back to his days in the Bukowskian indie duo Arab Strap. He announced a few years ago that he was sick of playing solo gigs, expected to strum an acoustic... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Adam and the AntsSunday, 05 June 2016
Adam Ant was one of the few who saw Sex Pistols’ first live show. On 6 November 1975, his band Bazooka Joe was playing Charing Cross Road’s St Martin’s School of Art. They found an uninvited support band had gatecrashed the evening. The impact of... Read more... |
CD: Xylaroo - SweetoothSunday, 05 June 2016
There are many ways to push musical boundaries. Some artists, from Albert Ayler to Can to Sunn O))) and far beyond, do it sonically. Xylaroo are not a band in this vein. Consisting of east London-based sisters Holly and Coco Chant, their music... Read more... |
John Cale, Festival of Voice, CardiffSaturday, 04 June 2016
“Are you enjoying Wales, John?” shouts a fan, eventually. Our returning hero has remained taciturn and all but static at his keyboard throughout an epic show that spans one of popular music’s most interesting and influential careers. Cale affects to... Read more... |
Alfresco Festival 2016, Royal Tunbridge WellsSaturday, 04 June 2016
I looked around at the grime-flecked warehouse and surveyed the brick parquet floor. Even the dappled sunlight and birdsong couldn’t soften the realisation – or the ground, for that matter. “We’re going to struggle to get a tent peg in this,” I... Read more... |
CD: Tom Odell - Wrong CrowdSaturday, 04 June 2016
This record passes the Rainy Day Greasy Spoon Test with flying colours. It's a vital one for any music that tends to the middle of the road: picture yourself in a cafe, mid-morning, mid-week, perhaps with a hangover, perhaps trying to avoid thinking... Read more... |
CD: Elza Soares – The Woman at the End of the WorldThursday, 02 June 2016
When producer Guilherme Kastrup asked this 78-year-old Brazilian icon what she wanted this album to be about she replied, “Sex and blackness.” Listening to the end result makes one wonder if she was referring to blackness as the colour of her skin... Read more... |
