New music
joe.muggs
From his days as a session musician in mid-Seventies Tokyo through global mega fame in Yellow Magic Orchestra and on, Ryuichi Sakamoto has always had a Stakhanovite work ethic. And that's still the case, even at the age of 65, and despite the fact he was not long ago given the all-clear from throat cancer. This year, Sakamoto has released the soundtracks to two South Korean movies, The Fortress and Rage, and performed two live commissions: one for Oslo's Ultima festival with dancer Min Tanaka and “fog sculptor” Fujiko Nakaya, and a live improvisation with long-time collaborator Alva Noto at Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Punk-blues veteran Jim Jones has been around since the mid 80s, but this year brought the debut album release by his newest combo, the Righteous Mind, and a record that may come to be regarded as Jones’ defining moment. Super Natural is shot through with gritty rock’n’roll, fuelled with fire and brimstone. Swaggering and sleazy tunes like “Aldecide” and “Boil Yer Blood” are urged on by Jones’ yelps and howls, Malcolm Toon’s screaming guitar, and Phil Martini’s voodoo beat. It’s incendiary stuff that goes straight for the guts with its raw and giddy ambience.2017 was generally a good year for Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I’ve only seen Olivia Chaney perform live a handful of times – once at a Copper Family celebration at Cecil Sharp House, 10,000 Times Adieu, singing unaccompanied with Lisa Knapp and Nancy Wallace, and at the nestcollective’s Unamplifire festival at the Master Shipwright’s Palace in Deptford one chilly St George’s Day. There, she performed solo, at the piano, and her voice and her music was sensational.She sang from her debut album of original songs, The Longest River, but I wish she’d chosen a few from the album she released this year with Portland, Oregon indie rockers the Decembrists. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The official reissue of The Beatles’ Christmas records is a major event. Since Live at the BBC was issued in 1994, archive Beatles’ releases have fallen into two categories. There have been releases devoted to or drawing from archive disinterments: Live at the BBC and its 2013 follow-up, the Anthology series, the unreleased studio sessions included in the recent Sgt Pepper’s package and so on.Then, there have been reconfigurations of existing releases: 2003’s Let it be…Naked, the egregious Love compilation, the satisfying Magical Mystery Tour box, a box set of mono albums and this year’s Read more ...
Russ Coffey
2017 was the year I began to feel my age. It started with mild fatigue and soon progressed to general world-weariness. I wasn't the only one feeling worn-out. This year everyone seemed tired and angsty. From Brexit to Harvey Weinstein, hardly a week went by without some section of society becoming upset. The world was in dire need of some old-fashioned peace, love and understanding. I got my dose from Yusuf's The Laughing Apple.I first heard the songs at the album's launch party in London where Yusuf was playing live. On the walls were a selection of photos from the Cat Stevens Read more ...
mark.kidel
“Passion! You gotta have passion!” I still feel the full force of Tricky’s conviction, as I was filming him in 1997, for my film Naked and Famous. He’s right: music works better than words when expressing the deepest emotions.This year has been a passionate one for me – for all kinds of reasons – and music has been a constant companion, from the start of my year in Vienna, writing a review of Eno’s brilliant album Reflection: waves of subtle electronic sound, bound in near-stillness. A subtly condensed passion, evoking – paradoxically – his deep love of the gospel shout.In tracks Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Monterey Pop Festival in California in mid-June 1967 was a key event in the history of festival culture. There had been music festivals before in the US – Newport Folk springs to mind – but Monterey marked the point where the whimsical trend for “renaissance fairs” combined with the rising first blaze of rock music, born of psychedelia, all marinated thoroughly in LSD-flavoured happenings and love-ins. And, of course, it was filmed by DA Pennebaker, making it a visual blueprint, ripe for imitation, influencing countless generations into the idea of festivals as miniature countercultural Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At two minutes and 39 seconds, Music For People in Trouble’s “Good Luck Bad Luck” executes an abrupt shift. An examination of whether a liaison would end up as “an empty cup” suddenly stops and the sound of a smoky jazz combo takes over with a melody bearing no relation to what preceded it. The composition unexpectedly passes into entirely different territory after Norway's Susanne Sundfør had been singing to her piano accompaniment, .“Good Luck Bad Luck” was, in part, inspired by Elizabeth Strout’s short story The Piano Player and the music forming the surprising coda conceptualises what Read more ...
Katie Colombus
2017 has been a time of change if not turmoil, on both personal and political stratospheres. So the music of two sisters whose jam is made up primarily of protest and healing songs, is the perfect antidote.When chaos abounds, the relentless positivism of this music from the new age RISE collective, soothes like prozac for the soul. Based between Southern Appalachia and New Orleans, Leah and Chloe Smith are independently produced multi-instrumentalists who take inspiration from their home and history as well as their travels. The result is a mesmirising mash-up of free folk, acoustic dance Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title Northern Soul's Classiest Rarities Volume 6 suggests this 24-track compilation might be a rag-bag; a collection of random musical floor-sweepings which couldn’t be collected under any other heading. Not a bit of it. Instead, every contribution is a gem. Anyone into soul – Northern, or any of its forms – will get a buzz from this collection.“High-quality dance records from across the Northern Soul spectrum – floor-fillers, chin-strokers, the esoteric and the sometimes obvious” are the words summing up the contents on the back of the package. This nails it though it’s hard to see how Read more ...
howard.male
I’ve long thought there should be an arts website called ‘On Second Thoughts’ where critics post their reconsidered opinions of albums, books, films or whatever, once they’ve been properly digested. After all, it’s often the case that either first-love euphoria turns to over-exposure ennui or vague curiosity grows into lasting admiration. But as things stand, the only opportunity one gets to write a postscript to an initial response is in these end-of-year round ups. Having said that, my enthusiasm for Arcade Fire’s Everything Now has neither dimmed nor brightened since the album’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Liam Gallagher is a great rock star. However, he often comes across as not a likeable person. He’s called himself “a cunt” on more than one occasion. But he bleeds inarticulate insouciance and arrogant rage. He doesn’t raise even half a smile throughout this whole gig. He carries himself with a chin-jutting, I-dare-you posture that adds up to charisma. And he can sneer-sing the hell out of a song. All that stuff used to be what we wanted from our singers before the post-Travis era of fleece-wearing, kindly, average-guy-next-door rockers.He comes on, parka zipped to the top, just like his Read more ...