New music
Barney Harsent
It’s a far cry from his beginnings in a tight, no-frills power-pop-post-punk three piece, that’s for sure. Last May, Paul Weller took to the stage with guitarist Steve Craddock, a smattering of guest vocalists and the BBC Symphony Orchestra to perform a career retrospective with new arrangements by composer-conductor Jules Buckley.Career retrospective might be pushing it a bit, in fairness. The tracks here lean heavily into more recent releases such as True Meanings, On Sunset and Fat Pop, although there are pleasing nods to his time heading up The Jam and The Style Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The opening moments don’t suggest what’s coming. A solo flute is followed by a few spoken phrases from a treated voice. What’s being said? It’s impossible to work it out. Is it a warning? An electric guitar’s strings are stroked with a cello bow. Then, other instruments enter the picture – shimmering electric piano, a trio of saxes, pitter-pat, raindrop percussion, throbbing bass guitar. About five minutes in, a pause arrives after which hard-edged spiralling guitar tops a swirling musical vortex. The storm has arrived. A squall is in the air, and on the stage.“Sun on a Dark Sky” is the Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
After a two year hiatus (imposed for obvious reasons) Edinburgh-born Liverpool-based singer-songwriter Ross Wilson - AKA Blue Rose Code - is back touring with his full band and a new album, with a string of UK gigs this winter. Playing in Birmingham’s Kitchen Garden Cafe, in King’s Heath, Wilson with his band performed an honest and intimate set on Tuesday evening. It’s a charming venue, but even by pre-pandemic standards the gig space is a bit on the cosy side! I couldn’t put my coat on the back of my seat without inadvertently giving the man behind me a blanket for his knees. However, the Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Californian label Stones Throw has long specialised in inseparably folding together the most profound and most wilfully foolish Black American music. And that is truer than ever on these 17 tracks from Virginian singer / songwriter / producer / multi-instrumentalist DJ Harrison. As the title suggests, this is a politically engaged record, directly addressing the dark history of Harrison’s Deep South home, where Confederate generals’ statues still stand as a reminder that slavery is not only commemorated but celebrated by many. But it’s also full of sonic and lyrical kookiness, with every Read more ...
Paul Weller, Barrowland, Glasgow review - Modfather holding back father time with old and new tricks
Jonathan Geddes
There was a brief lapse in this lengthy set when Paul Weller stood up from the piano, walked towards centre stage and then pivoted back the way he came, having realised he was moving a song too early. “That’s the trouble with getting old, you forget shit” observed the 63-year-old drily, but the two hour set itself was a testament to Weller’s continued creativity, if also his stubbornness too.It was a sprawling trawl though his varied career, including a handful of tracks from his old bands, the Jam and the Style Council. The latter was represented early, and the blend of zestful melody and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The first of two December round-ups from theartsdesk on Vinyl runs the gamut from folk-tronic oddness to Seventies heavy rock to avant-jazz to The Beatles, as well as much else. All musical life is here... except the crap stuff. So dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHSimo Cell Yes.DJ (TEMƎT)The latest from French producer Simo Cell is a bass-boomin’ post-trap six tracker that doesn’t play it straight at all. These are the kinds of tunes that should be heard on a giant sound system so that the earth itself rumbles. The enormous head-annihilating spacious tech-dub of “Farts”, a highlight, sits easily Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although it’s indirect, the overall feel of In Order To Know You points to where jazz and soul meet – a space analogous to that occupied by The Rotary Connection, Seventies Curtis Mayfield, Neneh Cherry, the early Camille and the warmer end of trip-hop. It’s an impression fostered by shuffling drums, interlacing brass and undulating strings. Nonetheless Deep Throat Choir's second album is explicitly – as their handle acknowledges – about the voice, the merging of voices. Eleven voices. Sometimes in unison behind a soloist, at other times weaving in and out of each other.On the title Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Saxophonist Kenny G knows exactly what buttons he needs to press to upset the jazz faithful. He is quoted as having said of his new album New Standards (Concord): “The jazz community is gonna hate it. And that doesn’t concern me.”There is quite some history of antagonism here. Turn the clock back to 1999 and the album Classics in the Key of G, and we hear Seattle-born G, né Gorelick, playing over the classic Louis Armstrong recording of “What a Wonderful World”. Hackles were raised, to put it mildly. Guitarist Pat Metheny, for example, called it “a new low point in modern culture – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Signs of irrevocable change materialised in December 1965. On Wednesday the 8th, a new band named The 13th Floor Elevators debuted live at The Jade Room in Austin, Texas. Band members prepared for the experience by taking LSD in the run-up to the booking. Within a couple of weeks, they had a business card describing them as playing “psychedelic rock.”Three days later, on the 11th, another new band was seen by a paying audience for the first time. The Velvet Underground played in a support slot at Summit High School in New Jersey. Two numbers in their set were titled “Heroin” and “Venus in Read more ...
Guy Oddy
When those cold winter nights start closing in, there is really only two choices for facing up to the unpleasantness that this brings. Stay at home, batten down the hatches, whack up the heating and blow the expense. Or go out and immerse yourself in some hot and sweaty rock’n’roll.Clearly, the majority of us at theartsdesk.com favour the second option. So, when the raucous Pigsx7 finally made it to Birmingham to support their Viscerals album of 18 months ago, there really was no choice about what to do.It may have been cold and wet outside, but Pigsx7 weren’t going to be guided by that with Read more ...
joe.muggs
Alejandra Ghersi – Arca – is one of the most influential musicians on the planet in the last decade. Even aside from working with huge names like Björk and Kanye West, her ultra-detailed, high drama, electronic abstractions have set the pace for a legion of artists from very underground to ultra-pop. And the combination of mind-bending textural shifting in her sound, outré performance and collaborations with visual artists like the master mutants Jesse Kanda has created an archetype (Arca-type?) for a generation of queer and gender non-conforming artists who find analogies for transformation Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Adams has long been Robert Plant’s guitarist in bands including the Sensational Space Shifters, as well as working with fellow Space Shifter Juldeh Camara in the band JuJu. He is steeped in American Blues as well as its West African and Desert Blues roots, having worked as a producer for Rachid Taha and on some of Tinariwen’s finest albums. More recently, he has produced and performed with the outrageously energetic southern Italian Taranta band, Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, and it’s from that collaboration that this new set with CGS’s violinist and percussionist, Mauro Durante, stems.They Read more ...