New music
Sebastian Scotney
"Genius" is a word to be used sparingly, but Django Bates surely is one. “A musical polymath and prodigiously gifted composer” went the citation for his Ivor Award a few weeks ago. “Joyful, insouciant and insanely clever,” wrote Evan Parker in a sleeve-note describing his re-workings of Charlie Parker in Confirmation (2011), the second album with his Belovèd Trio.Last night Django Bates with the regular members of that trio, bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun presented a concert billed as “A double celebration: Evan Parker’s 75th birthday and a look ahead to next year’s 100th Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It was billed as a moment of musical history: two of the great icons of rock'n'roll sharing a double-headline. A dream ticket. Except, of course, everyone knows that only one of the two acts is still a conventional performer. And it's not Bob Dylan.Throughout the afternoon men in old tour t-shirts discussed concerts they'd seen and wondered what might be in store today. The sun was shining and a cool breeze blowing. If there was one thing everyone could agree on it was that Young was going to be ace.He arrived on stage a little after 6 (there were bands playing all afternoon) wearing his Read more ...
Katie Colombus
It’s a rare thing that musicians sound better live than they do on Spotify. But Florence Welch sings a note perfect set – even when jumping up and down like a pogo stick, whirling and spinning, or sprinting along the front of the stage to meet fans.Shining with androgynous, enigmatic beauty, she opens with the dramatic “June”, the line “hold on to each other” sung with gravitas as she stands on a tree-cloaked stage beneath the open sky. It’s a message that resonates from the onset – you can feel it, the connection with her hometown audience – the same way Flo seems to be feeling the crowd Read more ...
Asya Draganova
It’s been 20 years since Sabaton’s formation in 1999, and the Swedish power metal band have decided to mark their anniversary with an ambitious and energetic record dedicated to events and heroes from the First World War.Sabaton have always been about irresistibly catchy riffs and telling stories of violent historic conflict, but the concept album The Great War shows a new level of confidence. The WWI theme carries a great deal of responsibility and is both a promise for popular success and an opportunity to criticise the band for simplifying and commercialising tragic and complex historic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although British folk-jazz stylists Pentangle played their first official concert in May 1967, their name is borrowed for the title of Unpentangled, a box set of their guitarist John Renbourn’s work on album which kicks off two years earlier. It’s not the disconnect it might seem from the billing as the set includes his 1966 collaborative album Bert and John, made with Pentangle's other guitarist Bert Jansch. The band’s singer Jacqui McShee is heard on Renbourn’s Another Monday album, issued later that year. Their bassist Danny Thompson appears on early 1967’s Watch the Stars, which Dorris Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On “Truth in the Wild”, Erin Birgy sings “Never smother the mystical song that rests deep inside you.” Accordingly, its parent album Dolphine confirms she has no intention of suppressing her vision. Conceptually, the 11 compositions are linked by the premise a being evolved in parallel with humans after our distant ancestors left the oceans – the sub-aqua “dolphine”. The inspiration appears to be that spirits survive after death. Perhaps the cover's medical ultrasound image relates to this?The haunting Dolphine is US singer-songwriter Birgy’s fourth album as Mega Bog. It opens with “For the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Thom Yorke is frontman of Radiohead, a festival-headlining rock band who sell out stadiums all over the globe. His artistic aspirations, however, right back to Radiohead’s Kid A album 19 years ago, often seem to lie elsewhere, in the world of glitching, otherworldly electronica. He’s had mixed success in this area but with last year’s soundtrack to Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria he finally nailed it. Anima proves that album was no fluke.This is Yorke’s third solo album (excluding the soundtrack), and where its predecessors attempted, sometimes awkwardly, to staple classic song Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The first thing you notice when listening to the debut album from Austrian duo Molly (Lars Andersson and Phillip Dornauer) is that it is a collection lit with the glow of confidence. Introducing themselves with a delicately paced 15-minute Mogadon-prog epic denotes a certain slow-burning swagger, but it is surrounded by a sense of grandeur rather than the grandiose. Grandeur is an important theme here, musically at least. Informed as much by their local geography (the Austrian Alps) as the bands they will inevitably be compared to (Sigur Rós, Galaxie 500, Dungen), this is music with a Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The Montreal Jazz Festival is vast. It attracts an audience of between 1.5 and 2 million people over its 12 nights. It has been estimated to bring the city more revenue than the Canadian Grand Prix.And yet size, as we were often reminded in this year's 40th edition of the festival, is not everything. The festival has been an increasingly powerful vindication of its co-founders’ original vision which dates from the heady idealistic days when Montreal was thinking really big: in 1980, the year of the first festival, there had been the Expo and the Olympics; it was also the year of the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Keith Thornton is a big deal in the hip hop community, having forged a 35-year career with the likes of the Ultramagnetic MCs and under pseudonyms like Dr Octagon and Kool Keith. To many, however, he is primarily the voice of the incendiary sample that drove the Prodigy’s magnificent “Smack My Bitch Up” single. Anyone still doubting Thornton’s position in the hip hop pantheon are treated to Kool Keith emphatically staking his claim throughout KEITH. A lyrical and beat collage that takes in social reportage on the menacing “95 South”, anti-materialism on “Word Life” and racism, it also has a Read more ...
Owen Richards
Among the summer gigs being held in Caerphilly this summer, it seemed a tall order for electronic/math rock instrumentalists Public Service Broadcasting to pack out a castle. They may be more current, but the others (The Stranglers, Groove Armada, The Zutons et al) at least had notable commercial periods. PSB’s biggest singles have never troubled the UK Top 75. And though a £40 ticket price on the door seemed optimistic, the castle’s savvy booking became clear as we passed through those ancient gates. A large courtyard, very much packed.After three albums and several EPs, PSB have crafted Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“When I was a small boy growing up in the south of England,” says Frank Turner - pausing just long enough for the anticipated good-natured jeering from the Scottish crowd - “I dreamed of playing the legendary King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut.”It may sound disingenuous - it’s certainly not the first time that Turner, who barely six months ago sold almost 10 times as many tickets to sell out Glasgow’s O2 Academy, has played the city’s most storied venue - but the hollers in response are of a crowd who are in on the joke. This hastily-arranged stop filling in for a cancelled festival date is a rare chance Read more ...