New music
Katie Colombus
Patti Smith has been making rabble rousing punk rock for half a century. She’s spent a lifetime on the road with rock stars and poets, surfing the charts, bringing music and wisdom to the people in myriad ways from beatnik to mainstream and now here she is at London’s Royal Albert Hall – a gig she says her agent has been trying to land for years.Grabbing hold of the audience from the get-go with the spoken word “Piss Factory” which ends with those prescient lines “I'm gonna be somebody, I'm gonna get on that train, go to New York City… I'm gonna be a big star and I will never return, Never Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s been eight years since the first K-Music landed in London, courtesy the Korean Cultural Centre UK, along with world, folk and jazz concert producers Serious. Since then it has brought an eclectic range of bands and musicians from Korea to the stages of the capital, whether that’s the sorrowful storytelling tradition of Pansori, the sonic attack of bands like Jambinai or Black String, the multi-disciplinary music and dance of Noreum Machi, the extraordinary sound of the gayageum – part harp, part oud, part theramin – under the hands of composer Kyungso Park – as well as jazz groups such Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“How concerned are you?” asks a looped sample on “Alert Level”, the opening track on Ministry’s new album, and it is immediately clear that fans of the current economic and political status quo may not be the target market for this disc. That said, the optimal volume for playing Moral Hygiene would probably scare off most mainstream audiences too – as it really should be heard very loudly with the bass suitably jacked up for maximum enjoyment.In fact, while other musicians like Eric Clapton, Van Morrison and Ian Brown embarrass themselves by releasing reactionary anti-vaxxer anthems, these Read more ...
mark.kidel
40 or so years on from the first wave of London gigs by musicians from West Africa – many of them at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden – London’s connection with the music of Senegal, Mali and the Gambia has taken a new and exciting turn.The Balimaya Project, a 16-piece band which is taking the UK by storm, is led by percussionist Yahael Camara Onono a second-generation Londoner from the African diaspora. As well as creating a contagiously energetic and joyful sound, this is a music with a mission as well as a message.The great Africanist Robert Farris Thompson, author of "The Flash of the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
As Sam Curran leant into his microphone for the first time this evening, he announced “If you want any ear plugs, there’s some free on our merch desk”. Most of us were way too cool for that though and stayed where we were. It was a decision that some will have later regretted as we spent the rest of the evening with screaming ear drums.Imperial Wax’s return to live performance for the first time since late 2019 was like coming up against an unexpected howling storm. While the tunes from their debut Gastwerk Saboteurs album are a collection of gritty garage rock, rockabilly and hefty Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Windflowers showcases Efterklang at their most direct, its sixth track “Living Other Lives” is its most instant, most straightforward composition. However, the Danish art-poppers’ sixth studio album does not instantly makes its case as a full-bore adoption of up-front dynamics. Windflowers opens with “Alien Arms”, an understated reflection where vocalist Casper Clausen ponders whether the highpoints of the past can be reproduced in the present. Despite the restraint – and an intimate, Blue Nile-esque atmosphere – the flow is linear, the melody precise. “We’re moving through the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“There should be some kind of spirit there which is outside whoever is in the band. The spirit of the band, wanting still to play songs, real songs, wanting to play complicated music to a certain extent. Fairly dense arrangements, also difficult pieces of music, not to be difficult but just because that’s a challenge. To do all that and then also play with a degree of anarchy, chaos, and fire and spirit. That’s the spirit of Van der Graaf.”So said a drawn-looking, jumpy Peter Hammill on 17 June 1978. He’s on Austrian TV, sitting on an unmade bed in a hotel room, with a cigarette in his hand Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Jazz’s most popular expressions today stand on or just over its borders: Thundercat’s rubbery bass virtuosity and dreamy laptop soul, Robert Glasper’s improv R&B, Squarepusher’s spontaneous electronica, Snarky Puppy’s jam-band anthems, GoGo Penguin’s rave piano trio, or The Bad Plus’s rock covers. Jazz and hip-hop’s relationship was meanwhile deep-rooted long before Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) became the decade’s most important album for jazz, lifting collaborators such as Kamasi Washington into the stratosphere, and awakening popular interest in analogue instrumental Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Along with Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis is a key figure in the development of - to be loosely colloquial about it – trance and chill-out electronica. His 1970s work was proggy trip music, laced with classical aspirations that later came into their own. Artists from Sven Väth to Air to Enigma owe him a debt, as do those involved in the current boom in soothing electro-classical sounds. His output over the decades has teetered between overblown orchestration and ear-pleasing, pulsing synth symphonies. Happily, on Juno to Jupiter, the balance is mostly likeable.Of Vangelis’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When The Specials returned with their chart-topping 2019 album Encore, it was a wonderful surprise. As well as being their first in nearly four decades (excluding material by alternately named intermediary incarnations), it proved they were more than an endlessly touring heritage night out for ageing rude boys. Critics of their reappearance on the tour circuit claimed they were washed up without the band’s original driving force, Jerry Dammers. Encore, full of musical pep and socially conscious vim, proved this was not the case. Protest Songs 1924 – 2012 is an apt sequel.With the band now Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Tony Bennett has just turned 95, so it is no small miracle that this album has happened at all. Apparently he rang up Lady Gaga shortly before his 92nd birthday and said “let’s get this record done before I run out of birthdays.”The good thing about the new album Love for Sale (Streamline) is that it has a unifying theme. All ten tracks on the album – there are 12 on the “de luxe version” – are by Cole Porter. True, Bennett recorded less Cole Porter than Sinatra, but he is such an appealing character, and he can give such wonderful empathy to a lyric, that is perhaps the Read more ...
Alfred Quantrill
Here comes the bride. True to Kero Kero Bonito’s unique musical and visual style, a chaotic but masterfully executed fusion of Japanese kawaii culture, kaleiodoscopic synth and indie rock, the audience at Heaven were greeted by lead singer Sarah Midori Perry entering in a wedding dress complete with bridesmaid, while instrumentalists Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled both played the part of disaffected ushers behind their synth decks. Perry’s veil was lifted to the backdrop of the band’s new logo in the Aztec font of their latest, psychedelically inflected album, Civilisation.The album’s opening Read more ...