New music
Tim Cumming
Dylan’s 1980s weren’t great in terms of critical acclaim. As an emerging new fan, I knew that first hand from the scathing reviews accorded Shot of Love by the British music press when it was released in the summer of 1981, it seemed about as welcome as a door-knocking Jehovah’s Witness first thing on a Sunday morning. Saved’s proselytising may have tipped the balance. “The hand is in the hand” Picasso once remarked – describing the most reliable marker of an artists’ skill – and the hands raised up in the album art for 1980’s Saved stuck out in the wider culture like Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It may not be a totally new phenomenon, but just recently there seems to have been a rash of techno and electronica producers and DJs working with musicians of a psychedelic bent to record side projects of one kind or another. Stand outs include Amon Tobin and Stone Giants’ West Coast Love Stories and Nicolas Jaar’s Darkside album Spiral but without any shade of a doubt, Laurent Garnier’s new collaboration with Lionel and Marie Limiñana is a project that stands head and shoulders above all the others.The Limiñanas have been turning out their own twist on psych-rock for well over a decade, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Dazzling. That was the first adjective with which the illustrious Marian McPartland described Helen Sung’s piano playing, when she had the remarkable Houston-born pianist as her guest for an episode of the NPR radio show Piano Jazz in 2006.On Quartet+ (Sunnyside), Sung is celebrating “landmark women in jazz”, including McPartland (a new arrangement of “Kaleidoscope”, the theme from the radio show, worked in with a string quartet version of “Melancholy Mood”), and also Mary Lou Williams, Geri Allen, Carla Bley, and Toshiko Akiyoshi. “True pioneers and giants all,” as Sung describes them. Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
"I've seen things you people wouldn’t believe." It’s one of the most famous lines from Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, though in the past 18 months we’ve all seen things we would not have believed back at the start of 2020, when I originally secured my tickets for this show that had been scheduled for 26 March 2020.Set in 2019, Scott’s version of that year correctly foretold issues arising from overpopulation and the climate crisis, though instead of synthetic humans and flying cars, real-life 2019 saw the advent of a deadly virus and an ensuing global lockdown from which the UK Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Hey What is 47 minutes long and includes 10 tracks, it comes across as shorter due to its homogeneity. That’s not to say it all sounds the same, but that it has the overarching feel of a suite where the individual songs equate to movements within a long-form piece. It means that Low’s 13th full-length studio outing is an album as such, rather than a grab-bag collection of disparate compositions.Hey What is also astonishingly powerful. Metallic bursts of noise open the album. As they pass, “White Horses” emerges from the maelstrom. The pulse running throughout the first track suggests Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Hilarious, potty-mouthed and mesmerisingly beautiful, Nadine Shah is on superb form at the Ramsgate Festival of Sound’s closing evening show. And aside from the banter there is, of course, that remarkable voice – hugely powerful and somehow perfectly suited to this enchanting outdoor venue. In fact, this is the first time the Winterstoke Sun Shelter has been used for a gig – I doubt it will be the last. It was simply magical. We are here to listen to possibly the last live performance of last year’s critically acclaimed album Kitchen Sink. The whoops and cat calls of “Club Read more ...
mark.kidel
Martina Topley-Bird, who started out doing vocals for Tricky’s first single "Aftermath" aged 15, has matured. On her fourth solo album, self-produced, she builds confidently on the dreamy vocal lines that were essential to the Bristol sound of the '90s.On her previous solo ventures, it seemed as if she were in search of an identity, a rock chick one moment and a trance-weaver the next. She has definitely found herself: bathed in soft-edged dubby sounds that suit a sensual voice that makes a virtue of reverb, this is music that floats and supports Martina’s naked expression of vulnerability. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“She is a 20-year-old white New Yorker who sings like a 55-year-old black lady from Mississippi. The experts say she will do for soul pop what Dylan did for folk.” Lillian Roxon’s verdict on Laura Nyro appeared in her ground-breaking 1969 book Rock Encyclopedia, issued before Nyro’s third album New York Tendaberry.In January 1970, Life magazine ran a feature on Nyro which was headed “The Funky Madonna of New York Soul.” By then, New York Tendaberry was out. Her follow-up, Christmas And The Beads Of Sweat, was being recorded when the article appeared.Both descriptions demonstrate a unanimity Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Certified Lover Boy is not a mixtape, a playlist or a collection of loosies, but an Album. With a capital A. This is a distinction Drake makes when it’s time to get serious, when he wants us to sit up and listen intently. Unfortunately, Drake Albums often get bogged down in this seriousness. Both 2016’s Views and 2018’s Scorpion were slogs to get through. The spark of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late and cohesion of Nothing Was the Same felt missed. Yet CLB sees Drake loosen up the collar on his big-boy Album shirt. He leans into his sleazier tendencies whilst grappling with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Following the death last year from COVID-19 of keyboard player Dave Greenfield, it appears the The Stranglers’ five decade journey may finally be drawing to a close. They bucked all odds by maintaining a path after singer Hugh Cornwall left in 1990, and the last two decades, especially, have seen them hold steady, both as a live draw and with critically respected albums. Dark Matters, their eighteenth, is a decently wrought, sometimes elegiac conclusion to a career that’s taken them from pre-punk to post-everything.Eight of the 11 songs were recorded before Greenfield’s death but the single “ Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
From the first moment the military drums start pounding and the epic brass begins to build, you know you’re listening to the start of something exceptional. Something groundbreaking, important – a masterpiece. Opening track “Sometimes I Might Be Introvert” demonstrates the confidence and skill of Little Simz – now 27 – and represents a huge step forward from her highly praised album, GREY Area.It’s personal but not sentimental, angry but not full of hate, joyful and despairing all at the same time. Her delivery has developed – lightning-speed spitting is her forté – but here she shows Read more ...
joe.muggs
Iron Maiden are in very many senses as English, as camp and as ridiculous as Christmas pantomime, even down to the “HE’S BEHIND YOU!” looming of their vast onstage zombie mascot Eddie. Which is not to say there’s nothing to them: far from it. Just like pantomime, their durability shows how much they speak to something deep and archetypal in their audience’s spirit. In some senses it’s that Englishness that underpins it – on this, their seventeenth album, as much as ever. For all the finesse and flamboyance of their playing, there is the spirit of an old Englishman painting model tanks in his Read more ...