New music
Matthew Wright
TV’s Gareth Malone has been pounding the pavement from the Perranarworthal Handbell Ringers in Cornwall to the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band in West Yorkshire to curate a national expression of Christmas. Each group gets Malone’s motivational treatment, and the result is a shiny bauble of an album, ideal for engaging a broad family taste. Malone’s “British” selection of songs has an admirably cosmopolitan slant, embracing nationality in the sense of adopted experience rather than origin. From “Silent Night”, to the choral suite from the Disney hit Frozen, these pieces are part of Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Now the celebrity-drug-addict phase of Pete Doherty's career seems to be over the question remains as to what sort of artist he really is. After all, Doherty's best material always appeared to be inextricably woven into his chaotic lifestyle. The new album, Hamburg Demonstrations, on the other hand, was apparently recorded entirely drug-free. It's given fans pause for thought about where Doherty-the-phenomenon ends and Doherty-the-talent begins. Before Tuesday's show one punter gave me his opinion. "The drugs were really an irrelevance," he told me, "What matters is Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” makes you want to burn the nearest decorated pine tree and Michael Buble’s Christmas croons give you the urge to shove brussel sprouts in your ears, Pentatonix’s new festive album could be the perfect antidote to Xmas crabbiness.Known for their Christmas album of 2014 (in particular a hyper-hip version of The Nutcracker), this five-piece a capella group from Texas (Kirstie Maldonado, Mitch Grassi, Scott Hoying, Avi Kaplan and Kevin Olusola) offer up a few more festive songs with an unexpectedly cool twist. They sing in close harmony, combining Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Hailing a lift in torrential rain one night from an early 2000s Dylan concert at Docklands Arena – that long-gone ghost of a room – I fell into conversation with a fellow passenger who apologetically turned to me, admitting in old-fashioned Received Pronunciation, to booing the man at the Royal Albert Hall in 1966. You could see it now, I suppose, as a pioneering form of no-platforming – a safe space for the acoustic set. She was very polite about it, and I doubt if I would be able to pick out her RP boos on the latest two-CD set in the Official Bootleg series, The Real Albert Hall Concert. Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Live albums can be tricky beasts, often characterised by large excruciating dollops of self-congratulation and self-indulgence, and are only to be recommended to the most hardcore and forgiving of fans. Public Service Broadcast’s Live At Brixton is not one of those animals, though. Documenting the South London band’s gig at the Brixton Academy during their 2015 The Race for Space tour, it’s a fine sampler of PSB's recorded output to date, with added beef from JF Abraham’s bass and percussion, a 13-piece choir, and additional strings and brass. It is also a euphoric celebration by a band on a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Pictured above is Sweden’s Ralph Lundsten. He might look like a guru or mystic but is actually a multi-disciplinary artist most well-known on his home turf for his pioneering electronic music. His first album, 1966’s Elektronmusikstudion Dokumentation 1 (made with Leo Nilson), was issued by national Swedish radio’s own label and recorded at the station’s electronic music studio. Lundsten (born 1936) began making music for soundtracks in the 1950s and has issued at least 38 albums.Lundsten’s “Bön 5 – “Förlåt oss våra skulder” (Prayer 5 – Forgive us our Debts) from the 1972 album Fadervår (Our Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jean-Michel Jarre sometimes doesn’t receive the credit due to him from electronic music buffs. Whereas Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Vangelis are held up as ground-breaking innovators of the 1970s, Jarre’s breakthrough 1976 hit "Oxygene IV" is not attributed the same kudos. Perhaps this is because it’s so ridiculously, almost irritatingly catchy. More likely it’s because it propelled its parent album, Oxygene, to multi-million-selling success, making an opulent global star of its creator.Those who reject Jarre are doing him a disservice. It’s true that from the Eighties onwards his music Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The 37th studio album from the man dubbed “the godfather of grunge” is raw, down and dirty-sounding – like many of the problems Neil Young grapples with. Recorded over four days at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-la Studios in Malibu with Jim Keltner on drums and Paul Bushnell on bass, this is Young in full-on angry activist mode, “fighting for clean water” and “standing against the evil way”.The Dakota Pipeline battle – “raging on sacred land” all year – against the construction of an oil pipeline on Standing Rock Sioux territory at Cannonball, is Young’s preoccupation on Peace Trail, though Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Those with an ear open to loud experimental music of a certain stripe may already be aware of some of the members of Sex Swing. Despite being debutants here, all players already have day jobs knocking out tunes with a variety of cult noiseniks including Part Chip, Mugstar, Dead Neanderthals, Dethscalator and the mighty Earth.To call Sex Swing a “supergroup”, however, would stretch anyone’s definition of the term but it is something special when a group of musicians, with a myriad of other projects to keep them busy, turn out such a powerful collaboration. Like an improvisation on the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s a been a good year for the Stones as they play into their sixth decade – a free festival audience in Havana in March, preceded by an adulatory South American trek that saw some of the band’s best performances in recent times – down at the crunchy bottom end of Keef and Ronnie’s two-guitar dynamic, heard best on the new Havana Moon set, where the Cuban audience of one million warm-blooded souls see the Stones raise their game to make Havana their best live outing on record since the Love You Live set from the Seventies.It’s as if the over-produced, over-choreographed big tours of the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Performance poet Hollie McNish and composer Jules Buckley specialise in taking their respective art forms to new audiences. They’ve gone for a double whammy with this enterprising collaboration, the brainchild of producer Kwame Kwaten, bringing poetry to music fans and vice versa. The album was launched last week at Cadogan Hall, at a free event sponsored by ASOS Supports Talent, attracting the kind of young, female audience the venue usually can only dream of.Buckley wrote the music himself with Chris Wheeler from the Heritage Orchestra. Accompanying a solo speaking voice, there are obvious Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1970, The Who opened their Live at Leeds album with “Young Man Blues”, a hefty version of a song its composer Mose Allison recorded as “Blues” in 1957. Back then, it was the only vocal track on Back Country Suite, an otherwise instrumental blues-jazz album, the Mississippi-born pianist's debut long player. Allison had moved to New York in 1956 and a string of releases followed. The Who weren’t the only British band cocking an ear: in March 1965 The Yardbirds first recorded Allison's “I’m Not Talking”, plucked by them from 1964’s The Word From Mose.Mose Allison’s music was integral to the Read more ...