New music
Guy Oddy
Pram are an experimental pop band from Moseley in Birmingham, who specialise in creating quirky soundscapes, eerie songs and whoozy instrumentals using all manner of strange instruments. They are also unlikely to ever achieve a mass following. The Good, The Bad & The Queen, on the other hand, are a modern-day supergroup, made up of former members of The Clash, Fela Anikulapo Kuti's Africa '70, Blur and The Verve, who have seemingly tried to appropriate Pram’s sonic template to make music that is infinitely less interesting but is likely to be heard by considerably more people than our Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“That’s what we fucking do!” So says Maxim at the concert’s very end, surveying the sweating, raving carnage of 4,500 souls before him. One of The Prodigy’s two frontman, he stands still finally, after spending the rest of the gig pacing and rushing up and down the lip of the stage like a caged panther. We all know what he means. He means that his band have wrung us out, taken us to a fervour of devil-may-care limb-swinging derangement. The Prodigy always bring the party and, yet again, 28 years into their career, they wreak havoc in a way very few bands of any age or era can.The stage Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Wow, this is truly infectious! Feel-good music played so well and by a guy whose day job is as an actor. And not a bit-part player – this is the man who gave us David Levinson in Independence Day and Dr Iain Malcolm in Jurassic Park and who made his screen debut with Charles Bronson in Death Wish. He also had a cameo in Annie Hall, one of the most beloved of movies by another part-time jazz man. “I Wish I Knew (How It Would Feel to be Free)” is a nice nod to what is now a dual career.Take a bow Jeff Goldblum who, with a little help from friends Imelda May, Haley Reinhart, Sarah Silverman and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although John & Beverley Martyn and Mott The Hoople were both signed to Island, the connection went further than being with the same label. When Guy Stevens conceived the band he named Mott The Hoople, the producer saw them as uniting the essence of Bob Dylan with that of The Rolling Stones. On their eponymous first album, issued in 1969, Ian Hunter’s vocals are so like Dylan it edges into the preposterous. That same year John & Beverley Martyn made Stormbringer! in Woodstock. Two of its tracks featured The Band’s Levon Helm on drums. Dylan was a couple of steps away.Despite the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There are many layers of allusion that come with Marianne Faithfull’s powerful new album. The title is drawn from Keats, his formula for great poetry as opposed to instructive morality, and it’s towards a poetry of experience rather than the fixed wheel of morality that Faithfull bends her muse, just as she has always done.The album’s inside artwork features pictures of, among others, William Burroughs and a young Faithfull with a young Bob Dylan before his manual typewriter – totems of negative capability in storm-force creative conditions – and the album itself also features some musical Read more ...
Ellie Porter
“We will be taking you on a journey,” promises Caro Emerald at the start of tonight’s return to the Royal Albert Hall, which she last played back in April 2017 – and for the next 90 minutes, that’s what jazz-pop queen Emerald and her slick seven-piece band, the Grandmono Orchestra, do. Having bustled in from the cold and dark Halloween night, the audience is ready to be swept away to somewhere a lot more sunny.Prior to departure, however, is a sombre, six-song set by Loren Nine – not a nine-piece jazz combo but a diminutive Dutch singer-songwriter who sits down at her keyboard and smilingly Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The young Dublin folk trio fuse vocal harmonies with superb acoustic musicianship, primarily on cello, fiddle and Nyckelharpa. They bring together Irish and Nordic – specifically Finnish – folk traditions, building them to dizzying heights on a foundation of acoustic drones and group interplay. The trio brought their second album, Starfall, to the Southbank for the last date of a UK tour on Wednesday night. Fresh from touring their original score for Swan Lake with Teac Damsa dance troupe, they’ve also performed with The National and headlined The Gloaming fiddler Martin Hayes’ Masters Read more ...
joe.muggs
If there's anyone on this godforsaken planet who is fully entitled to emote their way through a mash-up of “Imagine” and “What a Wonderful World”, it's Barbra Streisand, right? This, after all, is the woman who was able to deliver “Life on Mars” as a Vegas showstopper, complete with the pronunciation “from Eye-beetser to the Norfolk Broads” and make it into a thing of wonder. This is the woman who has personified camp sincerity for decades, for whom no orchestra is too big, and no crescendo too grandiose. She is, quite often, beyond good and evil, musically speaking.One thing that is just Read more ...
Tim Cumming
You get plenty of Dylan for your buck these days, with the Mondo Scripto exhibition currently at the Halcyon Gallery in London, and a totemic and arrestingly beautiful set of Jerry Schatzberg's photographs of mid-Sixties Dylan in all his fuzzy glory just published by ACC Art Books. And now, following on from last winter's gospel-era entry into the Bootleg Series, Trouble No More, comes another generous hawl from the tape archives.At first sight, the prospect of a single album’s worth of sessions spread across six discs and 87 tracks – even if it is Blood on the Tracks – is a daunting one, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
One of the major abiding musical memories of the late 1990s for many wasn’t so much five Mancunians ripping off Beatles’ songs, but Keith Flint of The Prodigy, growling “I’m a Firestarter/Twisted Firestarter” while all kinds of electronic battery was let loose. The Essex Crew may no longer be the media folk devils of “Firestarter” and “Smack My Bitch Up” but they still pack a mighty punch and No Tourists, their first album since 2015’s The Day Is My Enemy and their seventh in all, is ample proof that Liam, Keith and Maxim have no intentions of sitting on their laurels anytime yet.Rocking a Read more ...
theartsdesk
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why. Baxter Dury, Etienne de Crécy and Delilah Holliday - B.E.D. ★★★★★ A small but perfectly sleazy work of sweary, cynical brillianceBob Dylan - More Blood, More Tracks ★★★★★ The fourteenth volume in the Bootleg Series is a keeperBrad Mehldau Trio - Seymour Reads the Constitution! ★★★★★ Prolific improvising pianist creates the apotheosis of the piano trioThe Breeders - All Nerve ★★★★★ Kim and Kelly Deal - plus Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Winter came to Birmingham this weekend but fortunately, so did a modern-day, multi-national Viking band of rockers, consisting of Corrosion Of Conformity and Orange Goblin, ably assisted by Fireball Ministry and Black Moth. With no intention of moping about, in the words of Orange Goblin lead singer Ben Ward, they came to “get drunk and get wild”, and that is exactly what happened.Neither Corrosion Of Conformity nor Orange Goblin are spring chickens, having been around since 1982 and 1995 respectively, but that didn’t affect their stride in any way, with both bands pumping out an energy that Read more ...