New music
Guy Oddy
Slipknot’s new album We Are Not Your Kind is to be let loose just as the band celebrate 20 years since their self-titled debut was released and five since .5: The Gray Chapter. Any idea that the misanthropic US shock-rockers might have turned down their shtick with time are far wide of the mark. Relentless tsunamis of guitar riffage and pounding drums with roaring vocals power such nihilistic monsters as “Nero Forte” and “Orphan”, as might be expected. However, there are also plenty of darkly psychedelic moments, like the quietly eerie “My Pain” and the whoozy jazz of “What’s Next” to provide Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The thing about Wilderness is that it’s just so jolly decent. Acres of decadence, sprawled safely over the yawning magnificence of Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire, combine to create a scintillating country fair reverie – a heady mix of good music, high end food, luxury outdoorsyness and companionable folk.Yes, their fashion choices might be bold, but there is no one here who isn’t game for a laugh, or on hand to help out a neighbour. Plus you’re far more likely to be worried about their judgement of how fine your wine is than whether or not they’ve nicked your camping cooker.Revellers have Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After 15 seconds, it’s obvious who The New Adventures Of… is by. PP Arnold’s instantly recognisable, slightly cracked yet melodic, gospel-informed voice weaves through “Baby Blue” like a bird navigating thermal air currents. The song itself is no slouch too. Moody soul-pop with a baroque arrangement, rolling rhythm and swirling strings in keeping with her first two albums, the opener of her third is lovely. It’s followed by the similarly arresting, equally swoon-some “Though it Hurts me Badly”.While The New Adventures Of… is Arnold’s third album, both its predecessors were issued in 1968. Read more ...
joe.muggs
Founded in 1998, the Los Angeles based Anticon collective has become one of the most curiously individual of 21st century groupings. Taking the wordiest and nerdiest tendencies of hip hop – notably the slam poetry-informed tongue-twisting of fellow Californians like Freestyle Fellowship and Blackalicious – and the wordiest and nerdiest tendencies of electronically enhanced psychedelic indie as their starting points, they built a world of introspection and frazzled wordplay that they still inhabit to this day via several dozen collaborative and individual projects.Why? was originally the stage Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There is every reason to celebrate Nile Rodgers. For his contribution to music as arranger, producer and performer over more than four decades. And also not least because he’s still around and still performing: he has, after all, pulled through after two bouts of serious cancer in 2010 and 2017. The twenty-sixth annual Meltdown Festival on the Southbank, which he is curating, seems a very good way to do him justice.The festival started on Saturday night with him doing a fascinating talk/Q&A, followed by a 90-minute set from the current Chic line-up. These were both sessions which put the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It was one of the great moments of Woodstock as Stephen Stills, amid the applause for “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”, tells 400,000 muddy people: “This is the second time we’ve ever played in front of people, man. We’re scared shitless!”Crosby , Stills, Nash & Young, in all their shape-shifting configurations, remain one of the great supergroups. A few bars of their peerless harmonies on such classics as “Teach Your Children”, “Our House” and “Helpless”, not to mention Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock”, and you’re transported back instantly to another time, another place. If only we could all “turn on Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Memória das Águas hasn’t figured in lists of great Brazilian albums. Its creator Fernando Falcão isn’t as celebrated as fellow countryman and musical maverick Tom Zé. The reissue of this arresting yet previously obscure album should help change these oversights.Although it was recorded in Paris in 1979, Memória das Águas came out in Brazil two years later on Poitou, a label which may have issued only one other record – a live album by a band called Synco Jazz. Falcão’s album was released to coincide with two shows he played at a São Paulo art gallery in April 1981. It was his first time Read more ...
Liz Thomson
On the face of it, the idea of “an East Anglian Americana collective” is a little weird, but then East Anglia’s an area that’s historically been host to a lot of Yanks and it was from one of the USAF bases that the late great Paul Oliver, the British polymath who chronicled the blues in so many ground-breaking books, first heard the sounds of authentic Americana. The flatlands there may not "shine like a National guitar", but hey...So here we are, a high-energy eponymous debut album from Morganway, a six-piece that’s been championed by Bob Harris and which began a festival tour last month Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The well-spring of certain musical genres and hometowns of certain influential musicians have long been a source of civic pride – and a boost to the tourist industry – in many clued-in parts of the world. One only has to think of the co-opting of Bob Marley’s life and influence in attracting tourist dollars to Jamaica or the raising of the Beatles to mythic status – bus tours and all – in Liverpool. Birmingham, arguably the birthplace of heavy metal through the music of the magnificent Black Sabbath, however, has been slow to give appropriate due to its own sons and rock’n’roll heroes. For, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
If you are between 13 and 17 years old, Mabel is pop royalty because she’s maintained a playlist/daytime radio presence for the last two years, culminating in her over-my-ex smash “Don’t Call Me Up” at the start of this year. With six Top 20 hits under her belt, two Brit Award nominations and a billion streams, she’s doing well. If you’re upwards of 35, Mabel is pop royalty because her mother is singer Neneh Cherry, her father is trip hop producer Cameron McVey, and her grandfather is jazz trumpet pioneer Don Cherry. If you’re in the former category, her debut album may satisfy. If you’re in Read more ...
Liz Thomson
There is a video, part of Greenpeace’s laudable Save The Arctic Campaign, in which Ludovico Einaudi sits at a Steinway atop a small ice flow performing his Elegy for the Arctic. As he plays a descending scale, the camera pans slightly to the right just in time to see a chunk of glacier break away and crash into the sea. Perfect timing! The pianist-composer presumably needed to quickly warm up his hands after his performance, which was observed by a seal, and it would be interesting to know what treatment the piano required – humidity is the everyday enemy of pianos but they do not take kindly Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This was a year of superb musical standards, smooth organisation and a real sense of celebration. In the last couple of years, WOMAD being more liberal and internationalist than nearly anywhere else, there was a sense in the air of a collective political shock - maybe the future wasn’t with our tribe of happy cultural globalists after all. This year, even with the new PM, there was a more defiant sense that the WOMAD spirit will prevail after the current nationalist neurosis blows off some steam. For WOMAD is not just about music - the considerable presence of Extinction Rebellion confirmed Read more ...