New music
Katie Colombus
Laura Marling was one of the most active lockdown performance artists, doing her bit to play solo streams to a captive and culturally starved virtual audience.The simplicity of her uninterrupted sets, low production values and absence of small talk suits her so well that she’s continued the social distancing of just her and a guitar on stage in this, her first real life tour with actual crowds in four and a half years.Setting her intention to avoid pre-amble and simply capture her audience through mesmeric storysongs, "Take the Night Off" rolls into "I Was An Eagle” rolls into "Breathe". The Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Upon emerging onstage at the Barrowland, Fontaines DC took time to pass flowers into the crowd. Aside from the occasional thank-you later on, that was the only genteel note struck in a thrilling, compelling and often bruising set. Their last visit to Glasgow back in 2019 had been hindered at times by some dubious sound, but there were no such issues here. Instead, this was a group in control throughout, pacing the set well and sounding rousingly triumphant by the night’s end.A wider repertoire helped, too. The set was split nearly exactly between debut offering Dogrel and last year’s A Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I always thought those celebrity duets albums, recorded across the miles – or sometimes with someone who had long since passed to the great arena in the sky – were generally fraudulent, always cheesy and sometimes mawkish. Now Covid and 18 months of forced separation have legitimised them, and all sorts of other things to boot.Hearing about Elton’s new album in the abstract I’d hoped it would be the singer unplugged, sitting in his living room at the piano and singing into a posh recording device. An appealing idea. And having now listened several times to The Lockdown Sessions I can’t help Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Rufus Wainwright believes opera to be “the greatest art form that has ever existed on the planet” and of course he’s written an opera himself – Prima Donna, which has been described as “the work of a man who loves opera and the sensations it delivers, without understanding how it is paced, or how it generates dramatic tension”.Maybe so, but Wainwright certainly knows how to pace a concert, and the performance he gives borders on the operatic, pushing his voice to highs and lows that seem sometimes to defy the odds. And he knows how to be on stage, using his body to dramatic effect, most Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
From underground curiosity to cult icon, now label head and superstar, Atlanta’s Young Thug has continued to reinvent himself, as well as rap at large, for the better part of a decade. After being announced over two years ago, his new album Punk is finally here.It’s an album which sounds like previous Young Thug eras in conversation with each other. There are weird and heavy beats which could be taken straight from 2019’s So Much Fun, but mostly there are sombre plucked guitars, reminiscent of 2017’s Beautiful Thugger Girls. It’s enjoyable but, unlike Thug himself, kind of predictable. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Between August 1966 and November 1967, The Syn played 36 shows at London’s high-profile Marquee Club. In June and September 1967 they issued two singles on the happening Decca subsidiary Deram, an imprint scoring hits with releases by Cat Stevens, The Move and Procol Harum. The Syn’s singles were voguish: tracks included the flower-power referencing “Flowerman” and “14 Hour Technicolour Dream,” its title borrowed from the recent underground event at Alexandra Palace. Amongst The Syn’s members were Peter Banks and Chris Squire, who went on to Yes. Regardless of all this, The Syn did not click Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Wes Anderson and Jarvis Cocker do 1960s French pop – this frothy confection couldn’t be any more “art school” if it were smoking a gauloise in a black polo-neck. Truly, what a match made on the Eurostar! For one so thoroughly Sheffield born-and-bred, Mr Cocker has oodles of French chic (plus a French ex-wife and Paris-based son). He nails yé-yé, of course, but you can imagine he was weaned on the genre.It all started with his cover of the 1965 Christophe hit “Aline” made for Wes Anderson’s latest film, The French Dispatch (Jarvis told We Present recently that the director actually guided Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There is a three song segment midway through Manic Street Preachers’ set which suddenly ramps everything up. For this brief while, the performance and response in the sold-out, nigh-on-2000-capacity venue, elevates the concert from another decent gig on another tour in front of a devoted fanbase, to something more memorable and truly electric. It also sums up the Welsh rock stalwarts’ unlikely fusion of socially aware poetics and cheesy rock which, at its best, can be exuberant and touching.Having come onstage to what sounds like a looped house rejig of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s last proper Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Chris Martin has talked, not for the first time, of this finally being the Coldplay era of “no rules or fear”. Swedish pop producer Max Martin (The Weeknd, Taylor Swift) gives Music of the Spheres a contemporary, EDM-pumped veneer, with further demographic-heat-seeking pacts with Selena Gomez and K-pop stars BTS.But this ninth album merely deepens the band’s failure to find hard edges to their soft rock, or root their healing generalities in any recognisably bleeding, sweating, human individual. Instead, here are more hollow anthems for everyone. And if this is Martin laying it on the line, Read more ...
joe.muggs
This record is a heck of a metatextual experience to listen to. In releasing his debut album, 24 year old Finneas O’Connell is attempting to step out of the shadow of one of the biggest pop cultural behemoths of our time – his own sister, Billie Eilish, who he also writes and produces for – and mark out a creative lane of his own. And he’s documenting this in many of these songs, which touch repeatedly on his experience of fame, struggles with identity and the like.Struggles-of-success narratives (and make no mistake: as Billie ticks inexorably towards 100 billion streams, her brother is Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Time waits for no band, as Maximo Park’s lively singer Paul Smith opined early into his band’s set. “I am young and I am lost” he declared during "The Coast Is Always Changing"’s jangly guitar-pop, before drily admitting afterwards that he might have to retire those words soon enough. It’s over 20 years now since Maximo Park emerged as the thinking man’s indie rockers, all bursts of energy and romantic lyricism, and two of the quintet have departed along the way, in the shape of bassist Archis Tiki and keyboardist Lukas Wooller.Yet the albums and tours have continued regularly, save for the Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
With a few extra dates to her rescheduled UK tour, Scottish folk legend Karine Polwart returned to Birmingham Town Hall with some tunes from her latest album – Still as You’re Sleeping, an album of just voice and piano recording with jazz pianist Dave Milligan – plus a mix of earlier material, covers and traditional songs given her own signature twist. On stage with Polwart for this tour is her brother, guitarist Steven Polwart, and her neighbour and friend, multi-instrumentalist Inge Thomson. Opening with “Ophelia”, from the trio’s 2018 album Laws of Motion, the group at once performed with Read more ...