New music
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 ...
Tim Cumming
I’ve long cherished south London folk singer Lisa Knapp’s Hunt the Hare - A Branch of May EP, released in a limited edition in 2012, so to have Till April Is Dead: A Garland of May come in the full bloom of May is a charm indeed. It is her third album since her 2006 debut with Wild and Undaunted, and her voice, and the discrete musical settings featuring her partner and producer Gerry Driver, as well as drummer Pete Flood and Knapp on strings, organ, keyboards and hammered dulcimer, is layered in the fabric of birdsong, clock chimes, bells and Victorian-era barrel organs, mechanical devices Read more ...
mark.kidel
Contemporary music from Mali hovers delicately (and creatively) between purist tradition and more or less successful attempts at making things more attractive to a younger and worldwide audience. Oumou Sangaré’s first five albums for the British World Circuit label stuck mostly to the raunchy Wassoulou style, characterized by pentatonic style and irresistible loping polyrhythms; but her first with No Format, who have, paradoxically, distinguished themselves with very fine acoustic albums for Ballaké Sissoko, Vincent Ségal and Kasse Mady Diabaté, launches into new territory, the great singer’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Electronic music, feedback, imaginative identification with colours and art and unique sounds is our art-from. We feel we are contributing to the new ‘total sound culture.’ This culture will take its place in the world just as the Renaissance and Picasso’s blue period has.”The September 1966 press release accompanying The Creation’s second single “Painter Man” wasn’t shy. Its front page declared “We see our music as colours – it’s purple with red flashes.” If all that weren’t enough, the quote was attributed to Creation 1 v ii, as if the bible was being quoted.Just as the band’s name Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As if listening in on the heart of a robot, it begins with a throb over which a disembodied voice sings as a classic motorik rhythm kicks in. The song, “H>A>K”, perpetually builds and then abruptly ceases. It ends with “I Wish”, where a folky melody is underpinned by rattling drum machine, insistently strummed guitar and analogue synth wash. In between, songs of secret societies, a mysterious architect and attempts to find a destination by tracking the paths of butterflies which may or may not be there.Conceptually, Modern Kosmology is a triumph. Though inspirations are not hidden – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The two main commands coming from the stage at this evening's Brighton Festival event are “Everybody jump, jump” and “Put your hands in the air and go side-to-side”. The crowd are mostly under 30 and emanate dancing energy from the moment the doors open, as DJ Molotov warms up. The set-up is basic, a DJ and some mics, but that’s as it should be for, on one level, this evening takes hip hop back to its Bronx block party origins, away from all the bling nonsense that’s taken it over. On another level, it’s a very British affair.High Focus, a Brighton record label founded in 2010, are Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“Harry's new album is F*CKING INSANE!” tweeted Father John Misty recently, setting the expectation bar very high for a collection that, sources close to the former One Direction member had indicated, would be “deeply personal” (or, at least, as deeply personal as a Grammy-winning songwriting team would allow). Then, with the release of lead single “Sign of the Times” came comparisons to Pink Floyd and David Bowie. Not an overlong Robbie Williams piano ballad sung by someone with decent range, then? No. Pink Floyd. And Bowie.The comparisons and preposterous hyperbole seem stranger still on the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
That Pumarosa’s single “Cecile”, a Breeders-channelling monster, is not on their debut album says everything about their confidence. The 10 songs on The Witch have the heft of rock music, but also a more-ish femininity, both in the vocal department and the elasticity of their construction. They have a looseness, even an electro-pop funk on occasion, that’ll have student discos jigging to the likes of “Honey” or the seven-and-a-half-minute throbber “Priestess” (with its chorus of “You dance, you dance, you dance”).Universal subsidiary Fiction is generally home to indie-style bands that are Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I’ll never forget the first time: Saturday 17 June, 1978, Earls Court. The concert lives on in my mind’s ear still – those not fortunate enough to be there should listen to Live at Budokan (on which, that autumn, in Liverpool’s Probe Records, I spent more than a week’s grant money), recorded on the same tour. A month later, Saturday 15 July, Dylan headlined at the Picnic, at Blackbushe, which felt like our Woodstock.1978… The summer of Bob Dylan. I’d been a fan for years, when my classmates were screaming for the Osmonds and David Cassidy. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that summer, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title of this exhibition is typical of Pink Floyd’s mordant view of the world, not to mention their sepulchral sense of humour. Needless to say, the band that took stage and studio perfectionism to unprecedented lengths have pushed the boat out here, memorialising over 50 years of their collective history with thoroughness and fanatical attention to detail.The event was four years in the planning, with all three surviving members pitching in and giving it their blessing, and drummer Nick Mason attending “many a long meeting” as he coordinated the event with curator Victoria Broackes and Read more ...