New music
Thomas H. Green
Bananas is Malcolm Middleton’s first solo album to be built around guitar, bass, drums and all that stuff since 2009’s gorgeous Waxing Gibbous. Like any great artist, he soon became bored with pursuing the classic formulation that made his name (post-Arab Strap). He’s spent the last few years trying new ideas instead. His last album, Summer of ’13, was his take on electropop, there’s his Human Don’t Be Angry experimental albums and a collaboration with the artist David Shrigley. On Bananas, however, those who’ve been pining for his classic sound are rewarded.Middleton is a wordsmith, striking Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
During their original 1980 to 1984 lifespan as a recording unit, Soft Cell issued three albums, a mini-album, eleven singles and EP. There were also compilation appearances, bonus tracks on discs included with albums or singles (such as the 12-inch of Jimi Hendrix cover versions accompanying The Art of Falling Apart) and extended tracks which appeared on 12-inch singles. Everything could probably be collected on six CDs.The new box set Keychains & Snowstorms: The Soft Cell Story features 10 discs, one of which is a DVD. The albums and the Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing mini-album are not Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although he’s regularly performed it live, hearing the studio version of Glen Matlock’s take on Scott Walker’s “Montague Terrace (in Blue)” is a jolt. Back in September 1967, when Matlock was 11 years old, the song was first heard on Walker’s debut solo album. Now, this elegy to a pair of cocooned lovers appears on Matlock’s solo album Good To Go as a straight yet rock-infused reconfiguration. It’s impossible not to wonder whether Matlock had Richard Hawley in mind when he set out to capture his own interpretation on tape.Glen Matlock will always be defined by his less-than two-year tenure in Read more ...
mark.kidel
Formats are second nature to TV: the BBC and Eagle Rock’s Classic Albums will run and run. Like all formats, there’s always the risk that the medium becomes the message, and content suffers under the weight of form. But Classic Albums at least avoids the BBC’s slavish reliance on presenters, and makes possible programmes that draw the viewer in closer than when everything is mediated by the wall-to wall ego of an expert or celeb.Although we have the trademark moments when the album’s different tracks are teased apart at the mixing desk to reveal the architecture of a recorded song, the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The latest in Peter Culshaw’s occasional updates in the best of new global music features unreleased tracks from forthcoming autumn releases and re-releases dug up by eccentric crate-diggers. Even more lunatically eclectic than usual we have some Somalian funk, Bollywood-meets-Sakamoto (Anchorsong - main picture), French Tango and Turkish psychedelia. New music unleashed includes fabulous tracks of new albums by Susheela Raman’s gamelan fusion Ghost Gamelan (appearing at the South Bank September 21), Anglo-Brazilian star Nina Miranda’s trip-hop update with Daxuva, and new Brazilian Read more ...
joe.muggs
Implausible times call for implausible music, and it doesn't come much more unlikely than this. Hawkwind, the die-hard troupers of gnarly cosmic squatter drug-rock, have re-recorded highlights from their catalogue, arranged and produced by Mike Batt. Yes, Mike “Wombles” Batt. Mike “Elkie Brooks” Batt. Mike “Katie Melua” Batt. Mike “Bright Eyes” Batt. And yes, he's removed all of the dirt, grease, diesel fumes, sticky bong residue and guitar distortion from the band's sound – this is a full-on showbiz spectacular, ballroom dance rhythms, big band brass, orchestral swoops and all. And yet Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
So here we are. Over a decade since we all fell in love. So many light years from the rubble to the Ritz. From Sheffield to LA, where half the band is now based. And by the looks of the audience, a fair proportion has been along for the whole ride.Not that it’s always been easy to support them. Never mind the information/action ratio, what perhaps should concern us about the Arctic Monkeys is the genius/dross ratio in evidence since that first life-changing release. They could hardly be accused of churning out all-killer/no-filler albums. And the recent decidedly difficult (almost) concept Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Rachid Taha, rockeur and provocateur, died this week of a heart attack. He was one of the last of the rebel rockers, a devotee of both The Clash and Oum Khalsoum. He brought rock and Algerian music together in a fabulously invigorating way. And while many younger rockers do yoga and sip herbal tea, he was committed to the Rimbaudian derangement of the senses and was great fun to get trashed with - I spent a few memorable all-nighters with him in Paris. Apart from general sadness, reactions range from those mourning the loss of someone so young, at 59, and those impressed that Read more ...
Barney Harsent
2017 was a year in which Paul Weller reminded us all why he’s a force to be reckoned with. An impressive foray into the world of soundtracks (the score to Johnny Harris’s Jawbone) was followed by A Kind Revolution, which was, for the most part, a very impressive collection. This year sees yet another album from an artist who is clearly mining a rich seam of form. True Meanings is a surprising album. Let’s get one thing out of the way at the start: it’s very, very good – that’s not the surprise. Given his recent run, you’d expect this to be the case. No, the surprise is in the timbre Read more ...
mark.kidel
For nearly half a century, Loudon Wainwright III has trodden a path on the margins of American popular music. He is as much a wry and sometimes puerile humourist as he is the writer of touching songs about love. This new collection of unreleased material provides both an entry point for those unfamiliar with his work and a treasure trove for devotees.There is material recorded in the studio, on his laptop and at concerts – even a bootleg from a fan. The two CDs come with a nicely designed booklet with mementoes and drawings, all of which testify to the child-like qualities that provide Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Matt Johnson is a genial bloke with a trunk-load of songs that view the glass as not only half empty but too small. In the '80s and early '90s this pessimistic protest singer even managed to bother the charts a fair few times before quietly slipping out of sight until the release, a year or so ago, of his experimental Radio Cineola Trilogy album. However, the resurrection of The The didn’t end there and on an autumnal, but thankfully dry, evening in Birmingham, he took a crowd of 40- and 50-somethings on a trip back to the days when indie kids read the newspapers but didn’t get up and shake a Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Rivers carry our effluents away; they water the land, burst their banks, serve as borders, and as freight routes; their names are older than the towns built around them. They carry spirits and take lives, bring fecundity, and carry themselves inexorably to the sea. As such they are the perfect metaphor for Richard Thompson’s songcraft, and the river of song that makes up his latest set, titled 13 Rivers, is powerful if challenging, a self-produced album recorded in analog conditions over 10 days with his regular band of drummer Michael Jerome, bassist Taras Prodaniuk and guitarist Bobby Read more ...