New music
Thomas H. Green
At the start of 2016 shouty Essex bedroom musician Jordan Cardy – AKA Rat Boy – was on all those media tastemaker lists of stars about to imminently explode. Maybe he’s been in major label development hell since. His debut album’s been a long time coming and, commercially, it will possibly need that lost initial momentum. But that’s for the streaming public to decide. In the meantime, SCUM is a bouncy, youthful, over-excited Labrador of a thing, distortion-amped, loud, flicking the Vs, and generally bringing the kind of party where crockery gets smashed.The obvious comparison is Jamie T’s Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Representing the best of the current psych revival’s many faces, the scuzziness of The Moonlandingz and overwhelming groove of Goat all seem initially out of place amongst the mock-Greek décor of the O2 Academy Brixton. With an audience that doesn’t stop bopping through both the bands and stellar DJ sets in between, however, the night feels far more transcendental than awkward.There is a third act on the bill that also deserves mention. The futuristic pop of British alt-folk perennial Jane Weaver is nothing short of immense. The unearthly soundscapes of her most recent album, Modern Kosmology Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Lyndon Morgans goes back a long way – in the 1980s he formed a band, Sad Among Strangers, instead of going to university. But then he turned to theatre, writing some award-winning plays which found an audience at the Royal Court.His playwrighterly credentials are much in evidence in his songwriting, to which he returned in 2000, when he put together Songdog and recorded The Way of The World, the first of a half-dozen albums which have drawn repeated comparisons with Nick Cave. It’s easy to see why, but there are a myriad other comparisons and influences discernible: Bob Dylan inevitably, Tom Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Camp Bestival 2017 was defined by the weather and how everyone reacted to it. DJ-impresario Rob Da Bank’s family festival, which reached its tenth edition this year, took place, as ever, on the Lulworth Estate in Dorset. However, where the previous nine have cast the grassland surrounding the rebuilt 17th Century castle in balmy, blissful sunshine, the tenth most certainly did not. The weather, then, is where theartsdesk starts and ends its overview, sandwiching a multiplicity of juicy reviews and other festival stuff…THE WEATHER (Part One)Friday and Saturday were dominated by an assault of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The blossoming of modern classical into a serious commercial contender has been an unexpected recent development. Then again, it should come as no surprise that in a world raddled by stuff to hear and look at 24/7, people are turning to music that offers contemplative peace and quiet, that’s all about eyes-closed, non-verbal beauty. For it is the floaty, gentle, soothing styles that are taking off, not a resurgence in Wagnerian opera. The likes of Ludovico Einardi, Max Richter, Joep Beving, Nils Frahm and Jóhann Jóhannsson, often with connections to cinema, are offering rich, mostly keyboard- Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Arriving on Thursday for the opening act Orchestra Baobab’s instantly recognisable mellifluous tones spreading out from the main stage over the Wiltshire countryside, it was clear that a high standard had been set for the rest of WOMAD. Whether it's in a small bar in Dakar, the Jazz Café in London, or playing to many thousands here, they are one of the great bands – fabulously musical without being flashy. Old-style Senegalese magic with hints of Latin and radiating immense warmth, they are practically critic-proof.While hundreds of global acts performed over the weekend, many of the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Kendal Calling is a lovely festival. Charmingly misnamed – it’s set 30 miles from Kendal in Lowther Deer Park, a couple of miles from Penrith, in the northern Lakes – it takes place over four days in spectacularly beautiful Cumbrian countryside. It has clearly been lovingly nurtured, but Kendal Calling has many natural attributes going for it: leafy woodland mystery, rolling hills, lakes, all that caper, plus a cosy, walkable site and a main stage set in a tree-fringed bowl which gives the feel of a shallow amphitheatre.Naturally, by lunchtime on Thursday the entire place is already a mud Read more ...
Liz Thomson
For an act that hasn't visited the UK since 2009, the Indigo Girls might have been surprised at the audience's familiarity with their work. It’s now a given that artists have to tour to sell records, but judging by the vigour with which the audience in Islington joined in with the songs, sometimes in an informal call-and-response, the UK must provide a good flow of royalties. And no doubt absence makes the heart grow fonder.Sunday night closed out a UK tour, the highlight of which was the long-established Cambridge Folk Festival, now twinned with the even longer-established folk festival in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Now in its 35 year, Womad is embedded into British festival culture, flying the flags of a musical multiculturalism that is about breaking down barriers and building new relationships. It’s not something you want to lose.Aside from pleasurable headliners – the likes of Oumou Sangare, Toots and the Maytals and Ladysmith Black Mambazo – it’s the names you don’t know who often leave the deepest impression. The BBC Radio 3 Charlie Gillett Stage hosted numerous full-flavoured festival debuts – the London-Greek sound of Kourelou, for instance, or Italian acoustic trio Vesevo’s folk tunes from Read more ...
Helen Wallace
"Everyone suddenly burst out singing"’ wrote Siegfried Sassoon in his paean to humanity amidst the horror of war, "Everyone Sang". And sing they did, all 180 of them, crammed onto Garsington’s modest stage for its new community opera Silver Birch by Roxanna Panufnik to a libretto by Jessica Duchen. Here were primary school children, teenagers, professional singers, members of a women’s refuge, ex-military personnel, and a waggy-tailed dog. Even Sassoon’s own great-nephew lent voice to a chorus of roof-raising passion and purpose.And though the poet’s ghost (an expressive Bradley Travis) Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Girl Ray. Man Ray. Geddit? Earl Grey, the debut album from London female three-piece Girl Ray isn’t as freewheeling as the art of the man whose name they rework, but it is strikingly reminiscent of a particular strand of introspective 1980’s British music which balanced thoughtfulness with an awareness of classic reference points.While Girl Ray aren’t making things overtly explicit, there’s the Laura Nyro/Todd Rundgren piano arpeggios opening “Stupid Things”, and an Elizabeth Fraser trill to “Just Like That’s” vocal. The epic 13-minute title track, coloured with electric piano, organ and Read more ...
Liz Thomson
On a dreary evening in what passes for summer, the news unutterably grim, an evening in the company of South Africa’s greatest export can’t help but lift the spirits. The nine singers that comprise Ladysmith Black Mambazo are mostly blood family, sons of Joseph Shabalala - who founded the group in 1960 following a series of dreams in which he heard traditional Zulu isicathamiya - their cousins and two friends, and what an amazing stage act they are.It’s not just their sound – instantly recognisable, fixed in the mind’s ear – but their look and their athleticism: leaping, high-kicking, dancing Read more ...