New music
Thomas H. Green
Helmut Geir has been around the block multiple times but, like an electro-sonic Batman, always pops up just when he’s needed. Never much moved by fads, the Bavarian DJ-producer has always kept a foot in pre-house music styles, notably punk, Eighties synth-pop and Seventies electronica. His new album, only his fifth in a 25 year recording career, is, without doubt, his meisterwerk. Titled after the German for “Music of the Future”, a Wagnerian term, it’s actually retro-futurist in tone, yet so startlingly original and ambitious it posits directions for not only electronic music, but pop, rock Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
While the 36 records reviewed below run the gamut of Wreckless Eric to Democratic Republic of the Congo Afro-electronica, this month there’s also a special, one-off section for modern classical. This is due to an ear-pleasing haul of releases reaching theartsdesk on Vinyl lately. Modern classical, often computer-treated, is on the rise, recalling the long ago days when tweedy collectors would have chests of classical to dig into on Sunday afternoons, place on weighty old stereos, and sit quietly, eyes closed, contemplating the eternal verities (well, I knew one older gent who did that, back Read more ...
mark.kidel
The river of sound from Mali never stops flowing. War in the Sahara and the constant threat of Jihadists haven’t stopped the ceaseless wave of creativity that surges through the West African country.The Malians speak of music giving courage, of song’s capacity to warm hearts. Vieux Farka Touré’s latest in a line of splendidly "encouraging" albums is guaranteed to move, get you up on your feet. and celebrate. The Touré family aren’t griots or praise-singers but members of the warrior caste, and their hereditary vocation is palpable in the great power of their music.A massive counterblast to Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Initially released to coincide with Record Shop Day (we’re in the UK so yes, it’s a shop, thanks very much), we’re a little late out of the blocks with the Miracle Legion frontman’s latest solo venture, but then, The Possum in the Driveway is an album that benefits from a little time to bed in and take root.Compared to 2013’s Dear Mark J Mulcahy, I Love You, Possum feels like a daring and deliberate attempt to reach further and broaden scope: to play many parts. “Stuck on Something Else” opens the album with a hushed reverence before Mulcahy’s voice takes hold: bold, purposed and drenched in Read more ...
peter.quinn
Almost 50 years since he started working on it, and following its world premiere in New York in February, it was a huge thrill to hear Jon Hendricks' lyricisation of the classic Miles Davis-Gil Evans album Miles Ahead at Kings Place.That the vocalese master not only got to finish, but also hear, his labour of love is thanks to a cat's cradle of happy circumstance involving a conversation between Hendricks and Pete Churchill at the Royal Academy of Music in 2010, the doggedness of Churchill in following up his offer to perform the work, the long-term commitment to the music of the incredible Read more ...
james.woodall
This is the most frustrating film. It’s probably no fault of the makers, but it’s rare to have to assess a documentary for what it doesn’t have. Over nearly two hours of celebrating the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Beatles period – late 1966 to their record label Apple taking off in 1968 – there is not a note of the group’s music.Well, alright, in the opening animated credits you detect a phrasal shimmer of George Harrison’s sitar-driven “Within You Without You”, but that’s it. The score, by Andre Barreau and Evan Jolly, is a confection of atmospherics and rhythms that could be the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On its release, Linkin Park's recent single, the ironically titled "Heavy", caused outrage among fans. It wasn't so much the warbling vocals, as much as the total reversal of the band's customary controlled rage. Some took to writing mock obituaries on Twitter; others wrote worse. So might this be the end of Linkin Park, or can change actually be a good thing?First things first – how does One More Light actually sound? In a nutshell, this is simply a sleek, occasionally R'n'B tinged, modern electro-pop album. And, other than the cognitive dissonance of it being a Linkin Park LP, there Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As the producer of the early Kinks and Who, Shel Talmy’s status as one of British pop’s most important figures is assured. He is, though, American. Despite being integral to the mid-Sixties boom years when the Limeys took over, he was born in Chicago in 1937.It didn’t stop with his two most successful clients. As the new collection Making Time: A Shel Talmy Production more-than amply demonstrates, his ears were always to the ground and the lesser knowns he worked with were as striking as the Top Ten acts. Pitch The First Gear’s sandpaper-rough version of “A Certain Girl” against The Kinks at Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Notwithstanding the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays’ underwhelming reunions, it comes as something of a shock to realise that the Charlatans are the last men standing of the early 80s Madchester scene. Bringing elements of acid house into indie pop, it was a serious shot in the arm for guitar music generally and before long, everyone was discovering the funky drummer beat and growing a fringe. Time, tastes and inspiration change for all musicians though and it is no different for Tim Burgess’ mob – who now sound far closer to the easy listening pop of Haim than the grubby funk of Shaun and Bez Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Finally, a new band that lives up to a fine name and great cover art. Then again, Shitkid do a whole lot more than that. Their music sounds like the antithesis of contemporary chart-pop, which is refreshing, but even better, also doesn’t do the usual things artists do when they want to prove, absolutely, that they’re anti all that stuff. Shitkid is 24-year-old Åsa Söderqvist from Gothenberg, Sweden, and most of this album sounds like it was recorded down the bottom of a well, but in the best possible way.Söderqvist’s M.O. is a punk-bored, sometimes cutesy, always teen-like, dry-as-the-Gobi Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Yasmine Hamdan has gone from being an indie star in Beirut a decade ago with her adventurous band Soapkills to being a bona fide solo star with a couple of sophisticated albums behind her, the latest Al Jamilat recently released.She sings in Arabic, is based in Paris, has a Belgian label and has a multi-cultural band and treads an inventive cultural tightrope between orient and occident. The melody of “Douss” sounds almost Chinese and could be sung in a Hong Kong karaoke bar but is actually about the let-down of the Arab Spring “feeding us lies, deceit and slogans”.The packed Read more ...
Matthew Wright
From a residency at a low-key Hollywood piano bar, jazz fusion collective The West Coast Get Down has seemingly launched a global takeover of jazz. First, saxophonist Kamasi Washington went stellar; currently four other members of the group are releasing their own albums. Of these, upright bassist Miles Mosley is possibly the slowest burn, but after collaborations with the likes of Joni Mitchell, Kendrick Lamar, and Chris Cornell, he, like Kamasi Washington before him, is in danger of being handed the saviour-of-jazz mantle. It’s passed around many a young(ish) cat with broad shoulders and an Read more ...