New music
Thomas H. Green
This Anarchy Arias consists of 13 operatic covers of British punk rock classics from the late Seventies and early Eighties, and it’s almost all skin-crawlingly horrific. Clearly, then, this review is going to be a predictable reaction, from a writer who rates the original versions moaning about how their ultimate mainstream co-option robs them of bite, fury and authenticity. Why, for instance, couldn’t I take a step back and listen from a broader perspective, observing the post-modern nuance, the skill involved and the “sense of fun”?The fact is, smirkers completely numbed by this century’s Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s the seventh Songlines Encounters festival, with musical meetings ranging from Portugal (Thursday’s Ricardo Ribeiro) to India (Friday’s Bollywood Brass Band with South Indian violinist Jyotsna Srikanth). Its closing Saturday night saw English folk singer, song collector and consort of the nightingale, Sam Lee, with Vindauga, a quartet of musicians from Norway and Scotland – singer Unni Lovlid, hardanger fiddler Erlend Apnesath, Scottish violin player Sarah-Jane Summers, Juhani Silvola on electric and acoustic guitar, and the harmonium of Andreas Utnem.Their repertoire ranged from swirling Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s now four years since the release of London Grammar’s debut album If You Wait, with its sublime and sophisticated chill-out tunes, and so their sophomore effort has been a source of some anticipation for a while. Unfortunately, the wait has born scanty fruit, and Truth Is a Beautiful Thing looks undeniably beige when compared to its predecessor.While Truth Is a Beautiful Thing maintains London Grammar’s down-tempo inclinations, it is the work of a band that have seemingly dumped many of the elements that made If You Wait really shine and instead find themselves fishing around for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fat cigar at hand, Jim Morrison is pondering the future of music. “Maybe it might rely heavily on electronics, tapes,” he says. “I can envision maybe one person with a lot of machines, tapes and electronic set ups, singing or speaking and using machines.” When that prediction was first broadcast in late June 1969, what he described may have seemed outlandish but it came to pass. He can’t be held responsible for Howard Jones, but whole genres of music evolved which revolved around solo artists utilising, indeed, machines, tapes and electronic set ups.However, at that moment, it’s unlikely many Read more ...
mark.kidel
There has been a rush of valedictory ‘last albums’, apparently made in the knowledge that the artist in question’s life was coming to an end: Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, and now Chuck Berry, who left us on 18 March of this year.While the first two wrestle with the demons at the threshold, and predictably offered a meditation on death, the king of the duck-walk and rock’n’roll, is in more celebratory mood, with a series of recordings made slowly, with much help from his family, over the last few years. This is a survivor’s album: “While I’m still pickin’, I’ll still play my tunes”, the old man Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Some say Alt-J represent a paradox, blending, as they do, consummate artsiness with some absurdly catchy tunes. It's precisely this combination of ambition and accessibility that's helped them become one of Britain's most universally acclaimed bands. Everyone, it seems, has a soft spot for them, except, possibly, hipster journalists who feel they've sold out. Relaxer is a slightly different proposition. It's more ambitious than ever, and in places sublimely pretty, just not as immediate.The songs naturally divide into two groups. Firstly, there are a handful that still evoke the spirit Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Roger Waters described The Final Cut, the last Pink Floyd album he appeared on, as “a requiem for the post-war dream”. Funnily enough, he could say much the same for Is This the Life We Really Want?, his fourth solo album. (The answer the title invites is of course supposed to be “No”).In “Broken Bones”, he explicitly lays the blame for what he sees as the world’s current morbid malaise on the aftermath of that self-same conflict: “When World War Two was over, well the slate was never wiped clean… we chose to adhere to abundance, we chose the American Dream”.As the album progresses, Waters, Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” said Samuel Johnson. It’s utter balls, of course. When someone’s tired of London, they’re probably just knackered and wouldn’t mind living somewhere with more trees, fewer people and in a house that isn’t partitioned off by papier-maché walls. For many, returning, like salmon to the counties that spawned them, is the obvious move. Sure, they know that they’ll die there, but there’s an almost magnetic force at work – an attraction that is both complicated and impossible to ignore.For Saint Etienne's ninth album, Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs Read more ...
graham.rickson
The best music is always ripe for reinvention, though for every disc of Kraftwerk songs performed in mambo style there's a collection of Beatles hits massacred on pan pipes. Happily, Sandy Smith’s superb brass band version of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells is a triumph. Mostly it's based on composer David Bedford’s 1974 orchestral arrangement, Smith adding details taken from Oldfield's various recordings. Oldfield's original is the product of one musician and lots of tape, but this one uses 28 brass players plus Hannah Peel on synthesizers. It lives, moves and breathes in a very different way Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hoyt Axton’s songs were heard most widely when recorded by others. Steppenwolf recorded his “The Pusher” in 1967. It featured on their early 1968 debut album but was most pervasive in summer 1969 after it was included on the soundtrack of Easy Rider. Axton himself didn’t release a version until 1971, when “The Pusher” appeared on his Joy to the World album. The title track, another of his best-known compositions, had charted earlier that year for Three Dog Night. Back in early 1963 "Greenback Dollar", which Axton had co-written, was a US hit for The Kingston Trio.While his songs could have Read more ...
peter.quinn
Two of the most impressive young musicians on London’s jazz scene, tenor saxist Binker Golding and drummer Moses Boyd hoovered up every award in sight following the release of their debut album Dem Ones, including a brace of gongs at the Jazz FM Awards 2016 (for UK Jazz Act of the Year and Breakthrough Act of the Year) plus Jazz Newcomer of the Year at the 2016 Parliamentary Jazz Awards.Recorded live direct to tape over two days in July 2016 – with no edits, drop-ins or studio trickery of any kind – the duo’s follow-up Journey to the Mountain of Forever is a big sprawling beast of an album, a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
There are not many bands who are obtuse enough to begin a gig with a 45 minute unrecorded song, especially when they are preparing to go their separate ways at the end of the tour and have no plans for further recording. Sonic adventurers Swans, however, have no such qualms. After taking to the stage with a minimum of fuss and looking like Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch gone feral in the backwoods of Twin Peaks, they pick up their instruments and launch into “The Knot”.Slowly building up a head of steam from a woozy and disorientating oceanic drone, the song builds and falls away again until Read more ...