New music
Russ Coffey
Context in rock is everything. Popular music is, after all, essentially a reaction to a moment in time. So, whilst in another year, an album like A Moon Shaped Pool may just have lurked in my top five, political circumstances propelled it straight to number one. It wasn't just that the piece was thick with feverishness and alienation. What really made it embody 2016 was the unmistakable whiff of fear. The album's emotional release began from the get-go. "Burn the Witch" was built on a series of rhythms that pulsated like a montage of Daily Mail headlines. Lyrics Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Paul Simon has always been as eclectic as anyone in popular music, tapping into latin music, gospel and reggae long before they dreamed up the term "World Music". Simon is now 74, but he's as restless and inquisitive as ever. For Stranger to Stranger, his thirteenth solo album, he picked up his metaphorical pith helmet and machete and trekked deeper into the hinterland of his private musical vision.He returned clutching a batch of cunning, allusive and questioning songs, constructed from many components but defying anybody to pin a nametag on them. Alongside the likes of Nico Muhly and Mark Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
New Year’s Eve has its rituals and, in the Russian-speaking world, watching the 1976 film The Irony of Fate is core to ringing out the old and ringing in the new. A television staple, it has the seasonal status of It’s a Wonderful Life, The Little Shop on the Corner and White Christmas. First seen in Russian homes as a three-hour, two-part small-screen production on the first day of 1976, it was subsequently edited and shown in cinemas.The Irony of Fate (the full title is The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!: Ирония судьбы, или С лёгким паром!) is a farcical and straightforward-seeming Read more ...
peter.quinn
Despite all of the challenges – more venues going to the wall, scarcity of funding, lack of column inches, and more – jazz in 2016 showed its seemingly endless capacity not only to survive and thrive, but also to innovate and invigorate. As one of 137 jazz writers invited to vote in the 2016 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll, both the range and vastness of the year’s output, from Old Locks and Irregular Verbs by poll winner Henry Threadgill (adding to his Pulitzer Prize earlier in the year) to Countdown by 13-year-old piano wunderkind Joey Alexander, offered a life-affirming jolt.Noted for its Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The unsinkable Dolly Parton turned 70 in 2016 and the new year marks the 50th anniversary of her debut album, Hello, I’m Dolly. Pure & Simple is her 43rd studio album, its genesis a brace of stripped-down concerts given at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium which were reprised at Dollywood. Such a back-to-basics approach is much favoured by country musicians – Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris and Loretta Lynn have trodden a similar path. Everything is relative, however: the backing quartet multiplied in the studio yet still Dolly describes it as “almost like a garage band”.As ever, Parton’s Read more ...
Katie Colombus
I am an official Sia wanker. If you tell me you love "Titanium", I’ll be all like “Yeah, I prefer her early work with Zero 7”, and if you tell me about a major Coachella gig you saw recently, I’ll tell you about when I was basically the only one in the audience at a set where she was shoved into the back corner of a dark tent at an obscure UK festival in the noughties.I got this T-shirt before any of you, and thus she is officially my favourite and the best and therefore, my Album of the Year. This Is Acting is full of songs that were written for a whole gang of pop stars including Rihanna, Read more ...
howard.male
A year on, what can be said about Blackstar that hasn’t been said already? The answer is: what I have to say about it. That’s not to claim any special insights, it’s simply because the artist designed it that way. Even though Bowie said not a word during the decade leading up to his death, the messages explicit, implicit and fancifully imagined were all there for the taking. One such message was the little blank notebook included with all the other paraphernalia in The Next Day Special Edition. Its blankness clearly said; there is no cohesive meaning to this record other than the one you Read more ...
Guy Oddy
2016 was the year that US underground titan Michael Gira began to wind down the current “iteration” of long-standing musical mavericks Swans and their final album, The Glowing Man, proved to be no whimpering exit. Intense and challenging sounds that still manage to convey a magnificent, if disturbed, beauty characterise the band’s swan song and it’s one that doesn’t let the quality dip for over two hours – despite several tracks of over 20 minutes.Lyrics often remain half-heard over a sonic palette that moves from dreamy but dark psychedelia to menacing Gothic country blues and beyond. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
French Pictures in London was a bolt from the blue. Issued in June, four decades after being recorded, it was a previously unknown, unreleased album better than most mid-Seventies rock offerings. It was also better than about 99 percent of albums retrospectively hailed as classics. However, it had escaped attention and its maker was barely heard of.It wasn’t meant to be this way. In 1975, A&M Records paid for the sessions and the album’s master tape was passed to pop star and Bensick’s fellow Ohio native Eric Carmen, who was meant to get it to music industry bigwig Clive Davis, the then Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Being the Jewish Elvis has never diminished Neil Diamond's Yuletide enthusiasm. His first seasonal offering was 1992's Christmas Album, featuring vocals as cosy as a log fire. Then came the sequel The Christmas Album II. Both have both been subsequently re-issued and repackaged. Now, however, Diamond is in more of a stripped-down-and-gravelly phase of his career. And he's inviting us around for an Acoustic Christmas.This time round things are a little less traditional. Certainly anyone looking for that rich baritone served up with all the trimmings may be disappointed. But nor is the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
2016 has been a big year for Tel Aviv’s burgeoning underground scene. Acts including Red Axes, Moscoman and Naduve have produced endlessly inventive music at an impressive pace and on a range of labels. Of these, Disco Halal, run by Chen Mosco and based at the Berlin record shop Oye, has been absurdly consistent in its releases, notably a series of re-edits that blend exotic Middle Eastern melodies with dancefloor beats and, in doing so, provide a groove for both head and heart.In May this year, they broke with their MO and released a mini-LP by Nadav Spiegel, better known as Autarkic. Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The future direction of jazz has been the subject of anxious discussion for at least 50 years, and the last few have seen particular fervent speculation, usually provoked by another tedious “death of jazz” article. Fortunately, such pieces almost always foreshadow a renaissance, and the recent prominence of jazz-sourced breakthrough artists such as Gregory Porter, Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper and Snarky Puppy has at least ensured the death-of-jazz polemicists have had to put down their poison pens. So far, so reassuring. Also American. As Shabaka Hutchings himself argued in an Read more ...