New music
Jasper Rees
Forty years ago Whispering Bob Harris made a documentary about Queen. He eavesdropped on them as they recorded the album News of the World and then followed them around America on tour. The film was never broadcast but the footage was exhumed for this anniversary and stapled together in Queen: Rock the World (BBC Four), the latest in the BBC's prancing cavalcade of recent documentaries about the band (see sidebar).The reason for the film's non-appearance in 1977 was not made explicit. The charitable explanation is that this was the year of punk and the BBC were alive to a shift in popular Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The latest of Peter Culshaw’s global music round-up of new and re-released sounds features new albums from veteran Afro-beat pioneer Tony Allen, an astonishing collaboration between revered string quartet Kronos and Malian traditionalists Trio Da Kali (pictured above) and adventurous South Italian acoustic tranciness from Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino. Other highlights include sizzling re-releases from Burkina Faso and Dream Theory From Malaya from a still futuristic-sounding Jon Hassell, plus a healing dose of carnatic vibes from Jyotsna Srikanth and monstrous funk from other points of Read more ...
joe.muggs
In a sense, the air of tedium that surrounds Sam Smith is a wonderful thing. This is a person who can talk about having fluid gender identity and make it sound as if he's simply unsure whether he prefers boiled or mashed potatoes: that is, he's somehow able to dip into one of the spiciest political topics of the age without scaring your gran. It doesn't, though, make him a great pop star.One imagines he'd like to be seen alongside the modern indie/soul likes of Sampha – both came through featuring on early 2010s bass/dance tracks, then emerged as obliquely emoting frontmen. But there's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The Babysitter” tells the story of a Scottish spy embedded with the Nazis during World War Two who has come home. His sister tells him that Unity Mitford is convalescing at a nearby cottage. Visiting, he finds that it’s a maternity home. The details are not revealed, but our spy duly becomes a full-time baby sitter: “The world is safe from an English orphan Hitler,” sings Mathias Kom of The Burning Hell. Mitford, real-life Nazi sympathiser and chum of Hitler, had in this tale been preparing to give birth to the Führer's child.Canadian trio The Burning Hell’s eighth album is a collection of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
After more than 35 years of subterranean bootleg life, Bob Dylan’s incendiary gospel shows and sessions from 1979 to 1981 are seeing the light of day as volume 13 of the Official Bootleg Series. Trouble No More comes as a regular two-CD and deluxe eight-CD/ one-DVD collection that exhaustively returns us to those three years of otherworldly fervour and rage against earthly corruption. And it starts, as it started for Dylan, with the hammer-wielding riff of “Slow Train”.“It was exciting because it was controversial,” says Little Feat guitarist Fred Tackett of those extraordinary three years. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s impossible to discuss TootArd without digging into the history of their region. They’re a funky desert blues outfit but they don’t derive from Saharan Africa; they were born and raised in the village of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights. This is the region Israel grabbed off Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967, then fully annexed in 1981, claiming it as Israeli territory. However, Arabic Syrians who remained were rendered stateless, given “Laisser-Passer” travel papers by the Israeli government rather than the passports of a full citizen. Hence the album’s title.The band, currently Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following the recent death of the band's co-founder Walter Becker, it seemed faintly remarkable that Steely Dan went ahead with this O2 show at all – it was the closing night event of Bluesfest 2017 – but Becker’s absence wasn’t allowed to detract from the sustained brilliance of the performance. The Dan’s surviving guru, Donald Fagen, has announced that “I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band”, and surely it has never sounded better.Becker and Fagen always loved the idea of the great jazz orchestras, not least Duke Ellington’s band, and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Mélanie De Biasio is a Belgian jazz singer, an album-charting artist in her home country, and rising star elsewhere. She is not a woman who takes the straightforward path. No album of Nat King Cole covers for her. No Jamie Cullum guest appearances on her third album, Lillies. Instead, she offers up her own moody take on alt-pop which, if she feels like it, as on the smoky slow late night piano title track, might sit within an immediately recognizable jazz idiom, but is equally liable to be something pulsing, electronic and very quietly groove-ridden, as on the single “Gold Junkies”.De Biasio Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dave Porter has a question. He wants to know where clouds go. “After they pass by, are they just like people, that go on and then die?” The figurative bit between his teeth, he wonders if small clouds “are lonely, like you and I? Do they just go to rain, or is that a tear from their eye? Sometimes I feel like a small cloud passing by, never knowing where I’m going and never knowing why.”Porter delivers his existential, melancholy contemplation in a voice brimming with defeat. He sounds as if he is about to lay down and surrender to the void; to an eternal abyss from whence he will never Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When the songwriting partnership of Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford returned two years ago, it was with a renewed sense of vim and vitality following nearly two decades away. The Knowledge continues that revival with a collection of songs that often read like short stories, bursting with detail, smart insight and, occasionally, sharp invective.“Every Story” and “Rough Ride” are two such songs. The former feels like classic Squeeze; two voices, one taking the low road, the other the high, both describing a world of scratch cards and big dreams in which “Kids think they’re adults and adults Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An encounter with Homer Flynn is disconcerting as the extent of his involvement in The Residents is unclear. He acknowledges that he speaks for the eyeball-headed quartet whose identities are unknown. As he talks, it's clear he has intimate knowledge of their creative process, their motivations and what they think. He discusses them as “they”. Occasionally the word “we” is used. But that could be taken as referring to being a part of The Cryptic Corporation, the outward-facing organisation which runs The Residents’ business affairs. Equally, the "we" could be acknowledging that he is one of Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Although primarily known for "Guns Don’t Kill People, Rappers Do", Goldie Lookin' Chain have actually been around longer than you'd imagine. The Welsh comedy collective was formed at the turn of the millennium, and Fear of a Welsh Planet is, staggeringly, their 20th LP. Back in the day, the boys would wear shell suits and rap about council estates. But that was years ago. Surely, by now, they've moved on?Not a bit of it. On the new album, the lads still sound like a Welsh version of Insane Clown Posse with added blue humour. The rudest track is "Sex People" which discusses "shooting each Read more ...