New music
Russ Coffey
Joan Wasser – aka Joan as Police Woman – is known as a sophisticated songwriter and a pretty groovy person. But most of all it’s her gorgeously warm voice that's earned her a cult following. Over seven albums her angst-ridden vocals have explored heartache and compulsion with a blend of soul and indie-rock. Damned Devotion, her latest LP, has been particularly well received, earning mainly four-star reviews. Her UK tour starts next week in Glasgow.Wasser was not always a singer. She started off her musical career playing violin in various youth orchestras, and later with the Boston University Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two minutes into The Lookout, a couple of related parallels bubble up when the David Crosby of If I Could Only Remember my Name and Gene Clark at his most sparse spring to mind. It’s not that the album’s opening cut “Margaret Sands” sounds like either but that the creative outlook is similar: a country-ish singer-songwriter setting their composition in a baroque musical frame.The rest of The Lookout is similarly conscious of how the form of delivery can shape a song. Yet such suggestions of lineage – an awareness of the classic – soon vanish. Ultimately and satisfyingly, Laura Veirs’s 10th Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fairytales is lovely. It opens with a subtle version of Jimmy Webb’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” which merges Radka Toneff’s emotive and intimate vocal with Steve Dobrogosz’s sparse piano lines. The ingredients are minimal, there is no embellishment yet the performance is powerful.Over the following nine songs, the mood endures. Versions of Elton John’s “Come Down in Time”, Kurt Weill’s “Lost in the Stars”, “My Funny Valentine” and “Nature Boy” sit naturally alongside musical interpretations of Emily Dickinson’s “I Read my Sentence” and the Fran Landesman poems “Before Love Went Out of Read more ...
howard.male
This New York band’s first album for a decade is as good as anything else they’ve done, but what were they thinking with the track order? Things get off to an agreeable bouncy Blondie-esque start with first single “Pirates”. But after that there are several decidedly plodding, generic tracks before the party really gets started. Perhaps they have succumbed to the long-held received wisdom that only a dull four-to-the-floor beat will seduce the masses. But it’s always been their knack for combining novel polyrhythms with unusual chord progressions that’s made them one of my favourite 21st Read more ...
joe.muggs
Oh this is annoying. One really doesn't want to be mean about the People's Princess. Kylie is one of the great pop stars of our time: charming, witty, a survivor, with several dozen proper classic songs under her belt, she has never stopped sparking with star quality. And the way she talks about her creative process, it's clear she still cares, so it's very easy to believe that she still has an album in her that can stand with her best and cement her status as one of the best to do it.This isn't it, though. This is a country album, recorded in Nashville. Not that that's anything bad in itself Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Damned may very well be the last men standing from the first wave of UK punk – albeit with only Dave Vanian and Captain Sensible still there from the original line-up – but with their new disc they haven’t even thought of resting on their laurels and churning out endless variations on “New Rose” and “Smash It Up”. Clearly the musical heritage industry is going to have to wait awhile for them yet.Evil Spirits is only The Damned’s 11th album in 41 years and their first since So, Who’s Paranoid? in 2008. It sees Tony Visconti take on production duties and the return of early Eighties bassist Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It was 2011 when Gregory Porter made his first London appearances at Pizza Express in Dean Street. That club has a capacity just over 100, and yet it only seems like yesterday. Last night that same honeyed voice was filling the cavernous 5,272-seater Royal Albert Hall, on the first of 14 UK dates in big halls, with repertoire mostly associated with Nat King Cole, backed by his regular quartet, but also by the 70-piece London Studio Orchestra playing opulent arrangements by Vince Mendoza.Back in 2011, the buzz about the uniqueness of Porter’s voice was only just starting. The canny director of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Can you find a more extensive and comprehensive rundown of monthly vinyl releases than theartsdesk on Vinyl? We can’t. But then we would say that. Don’t believe us, though; below we surf punk, techno, film soundtracks, folk, major label boxset retrospectives, avant-garde electronica, pop, R&B and tons more. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHBelako Render Me Numb, Trivial Violence (Belako)Basque four-piece Belako create the most exciting new version of indie rock that theartsdesk on Vinyl has heard in a long while. In fact, it’s belittling to term it "indie" for this is a galloping hybrid that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Fenne Lily is a young Bristolian singer-songwriter whose voice will take her far. Her debut album is decent enough, and there are songs on it that reach out and grab you by the guts, but it’s her extraordinary, fragile voice that stays in the mind. Lily’s oeuvre is folk-acoustica but run through with electronics and reverb, putting her in a haunted place where she sounds as if she belongs in one of Twin Peaks' more peculiar scenes.The obvious comparison for much of this album is Lana del Rey, although Lily's voice is higher pitched. There’s something about the way she rides chords and rhythms Read more ...
mark.kidel
How many albums today feature a sorceress on the harp, an instrument more often played by winged angels? "La Bruja de Texcoco", a practising witch and healer, is one of several Mexican musicians who join Sonido Gallo Negro in their latest and very danceable exploration of Afro-American rhythms.Packaged with a handsome sleeve covered in esoteric hieroglyphics from Dr Alderete, this is music that offers healing energies to the listener. Drawing from the rich mix of traditional Indian and African influences that bathe the Caribbean, with lilting beats and a good deal of soul, the group continue Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“When I was singing at my best, I was the essence of English song. And that was all I ever really wanted.” It’s said without pride and in a matter-of-fact manner. The speaker is Shirley Collins in the documentary The Ballad of Shirley Collins. Issued on DVD in a package with a CD collecting music which defines parts of her world, the film tracks a person balancing certainty about who she is and was with an enviable level-headedness.The Ballad of Shirley Collins is also issued as an album – a quasi-soundtrack of the film. But the version to get is the book-bound CD/DVD configuration Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
R.E.M. surprised the music world this morning by announcing an imminent new studio album, Charged. It will be released on their own record label, Around The Sun, on Friday 6th April via Spotify and iTunes, as well as a vinyl version distributed through record shops.The announcement was made via singer Michael Stipe’s press office which shared the album cover art and released the following brief statement:“That bird in the sky. It is flying over America. Distorted, unclear, far away. As with the future. We will not be back long. We will not tour. We must say something. Then we will go. Love to Read more ...