New music
Sebastian Scotney
It really is quite something to be admired, the sheer longevity and staying power of the Jools Holland franchise. The TV show Later...With Jools Holland, with the same core team running it, has just celebrated its 25th anniversary and put its 51st season to bed. That takes us all the way back to October 1992, just after the summer of John Bryan and Antonia de Sancha, of toes and Chelsea strips. Meanwhile, another part of the franchise, Jools' Annual Hootenanny, with a similar format has been running since New Year’s Eve 1993. Holland and his team have been building all this since his mid- Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Not since the 1960s has there been so much global shit to protest about! The Sixties, of course, gave us the protest song – and how well the best of them have worn. “Masters of War” and “With God On Our Side” are timeless classics. “Give Peace a Chance” can still be heard from the barricades.There’s no doubt Neil Young means well, believes passionately, but the agitprop – much as we all agree with the sentiments – does begin to pall. Much of the music doesn’t quite cut the mustard, though if it won’t stand the test of time perhaps that’s because it doesn’t need to – the goal here is to be Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Not since the 1960s has there been so much global shit to protest about! The Sixties, of course, gave us the protest song – and how well the best of them has worn. “Masters of War” and “With God On Our Side” are timeless classics. “Give Peace a Chance” can still be heard from the barricades.There’s no doubt Neil Young means well, believes passionately, but the agitprop – much as we all agree with the sentiments – does begin to pall. Much of the music doesn’t quite cut the mustard, though if it won’t stand the test of time perhaps that’s because it doesn’t need to – the goal here is to be Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Recorded at beautiful Bantry House in the far south-west of Ireland, The Blue Room is the debut of West Clare’s fiddle player extraordinaire Martin Hayes’ new quartet, comprising bass clarinettist Doug Wieseman, viola d’amore player Liz Knowles, and guitarist Dennis Cahill.It opens in spectacularly tranquil fashion with "The Boy in the Gap", a tune as beautiful as anything Hayes has ever recorded – and given his record with Irish-American supergroup The Gloaming as well as his long association with guitarist Dennis Cahill, that is a high bar indeed, over which his music seems to flow Read more ...
Russ Coffey
First, an admission. I've never quite got the appeal of the Gallagher brothers. In particular, I've found their claims that each post-Oasis album represents some bold new horizon a little risible. And yet there is something intriguing about the brothers' 2017 output. Liam's As You Were came out a few weeks ago and now there's Noel's new one. True to form, the brothers have been trading insults all month.They've also been taking every opportunity to claim their album's the best. That is a matter of opinion. But what's indisputable is that the two records take opposite approaches. Liam's Read more ...
joe.muggs
At three decades deep in the creative industries, it's fair to say Trevor Jackson is a renaissance man. He is a designer, filmmaker, music producer, radio and club DJ, compilation curator, label owner (he introduced Four Tet and LCD Soundsystem among others to UK audiences), professional grouch – and impossibly prolific in all those spheres. Most recently, after a lengthy break from releasing his own music, he's been mining his catalogue of unreleased tracks, starting with with the “Format” project in 2015, featuring dozens of tracks from old harddrives, followed 50 tracks over nine EPs and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Precious to me” is a high-carat gold nugget. A guitar-pop song with cascading, lush Everly Brothers harmonies drawing on The Searchers’ version of “When You Walk in the Room”, its immediate tune instantly lodges itself in the head.Instead of being from the Sixties, “Precious to me” was a US hit in Spring 1981, a period when punk had given way to the acceptable face of new wave. The commercial door for concise, classically styled songs was open. Phil Seymour, the song’s writer and singer, had a pre-punk résumé, knew all about pop and rode the moment. His music fit the power pop profile: the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The queen of R&B is no stranger to struggle – the Staples Singers, led by Pops, played a key role in the 1960s civil rights movement, emerging from the gospel circuit as so many great black singers did. Mavis’ first paid gig was with her family in in 1948. Almost 70 years later, she’s often to be found on the road with Bob Dylan, who was sweet on her back in the early 1960s when they sang often from the same stage. Where once she marched with Martin Luther King, today she puts her energies into Black Lives Matter.The Civil Rights Act was passed into US law more than half a century ago yet Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
For a band as big as Depeche Mode, in a venue as big the 21,000-capacity Manchester Arena, on a tour as big as their current Spirit tour, it almost doesn’t need saying that the pre-gig atmosphere is buzzing. A major presence on the British music scene since their 1981 electropop debut Speak and Spell, they’ve since tried their hand at goth, new wave, rock’n’roll, industrial music, and classical piano, all of which has helped birth this year’s politically-influenced Spirit. Now, stood before hordes of people who grew up with their music, they’d be praised no matter what they played. That doesn Read more ...
peter.quinn
As moments of transcendence go, Laura Mvula’s guest spot at Robert Glasper’s EFG London Jazz Festival show provided one of the year’s most transporting musical moments.Powered by the huge harmonic slabs carved out by keyboardist Travis Sayles and the vast backbeat of bassist Derrick Hodge and drummer George “Spanky” McCurdy, Mvula’s delicately outerspacious “Bread” was recast as a 10-minute meditation. The mantra-like repetitions of the refrain "Lay the breadcrumb down so we can find our way", together with the uniquely affecting timbre of Mvula’s voice, succeeded in uniting and lifting up 2, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Over the last few months Paloma Faith has been talking up her fourth album, The Architect. There were self-perpetuated rumours of her rockin’ out, going off at a completely fresh musical angle, with lyrical content that sidestepped pop's usual concerns in favour of tackling societal issues and the state of things in our fucked-up world. Sounded good. However, a couple of clips of chatting about our duty to the welfare state and such, one featuring the writer Owen Jones, does not a political album make. In fact The Architect is business as usual, a continuation of the last album and not really Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Four albums in, Detroit’s Protomartyr have built up quite a following over the last five years. From the now-hard-to-find No Passion All Technique to Relatives in Descent, their lauded new album, Protomartyr’s precise post-punk has remained as thunderous as it is rich. As part of their current European tour promoting the release of Relatives in Descent, the band have come to the Deaf Institute, one of Manchester’s coolest mid-size venues, to bathe us in its murky waters.Oh Boland, the sole support band, sound like the musical child of the Modern Lovers and the Strokes. With insistent drums Read more ...