New music
Tim Cumming
Four headliners, one bill – Sam Lee, Debashish Bhattacharya, Songhoy Blues and Mariza: it was an impressive line-up at the Barbican for a Monday as the world and folk music magazine Songlines hosts its annual awards bash. Now, these are readers’ awards, with nary an expert in sight when it comes to choosing the winners. As such, we are talking the same kind of democracy that Corbynistas go on about, and in the year when the cogs of Hard Brexit (sounds like a porn category) started turning, one wonders how the cultural/political frame around what we call world music will change as England Read more ...
peter.quinn
The human voice is as individual as a fingerprint: the emotional, melancholic pull of Billie Holiday; the slightly nasal, always ironic quality of Donald Fagen; the overheated melismas of Mariah Carey; and Michael Bolton, the aural equivalent of the Krakatoa eruption. Listening to “Carry On”, the lead single from her sixth solo album Day Breaks, Norah Jones's voice is characterised not only by its great tonal warmth but also by its conversational intimacy.The album is being billed as a return to the sound-world of her much garlanded debut Come Away With Me, which it is – to an extent. In fact Read more ...
Nico Muhly
Writing for two pianos is something that – until last year – I had not attempted. I was contacted by Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen, two pianists who have performed as a duo for many years, asking me to compose a duet for them to perform at the inaugural London Piano Festival. I met Charles back in 2014 when he performed my pieces A Hudson Cycle and Fast Stuff in New York. Time constraints led me to restructure and rewrite an existing piece in my portfolio, Fast Cycles, which I wrote for the late John Scott. Writing for two pianos was easy, as I know a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Kaiser Chiefs have been knocking out chart-aimed New Wave-ish guitar pop since 2004, and while they might have generally given the impression of leaning a bit more towards musical theatre than anything truly heartfelt, it hasn’t stopped them producing more than a few crowd-pleasing tunes over the years, like “Oh My God”, “Ruby” and “I Predict A Riot”.So it was something of a surprise to learn that their new album was to be co-written and produced by Brian Higgins of pop über-producers Xenomania: a crew with a track record of boosting the careers of Girls Aloud and Little Mix rather than Read more ...
Bernadette McNulty
Trying to pip the release of Mat Whitecross’s documentary Supersonic to the post, this brief hack through the BBC’s archive throws together a galloping overview of Oasis’s rise and fall, narrated by their own interviews and quotes. Arguably Oasis built a career on the consistent entertainment value of their soundbites rather than the long-term quality of their songs, so this wasn’t exactly a hard search, nor does it throw up anything you hadn’t heard before. Throughout, the music plays second fiddle, barely named or dated, flaring up in the background like an ambulance alarm, creating a jive- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What should a band called Les Panties sound like? Melodic, Ramones-like pop-punk? Dirty garage rock a la early White Stripes? From the name, either surmise seems reasonable. In the event, what reverberates through this incongruously named Brussels band is a love of cold wave, the Gallic take on post-punk. In the early Eighties, Les Panties would have been at home on Les Disques du Crépuscule, the Factory Records-related Belgian label which issued records by Antena, Josef K and Section 25. Fittingly, Cold Science is released by the reanimated Crépuscule.Over 40 minutes, Cold Science collects Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Regina Spector’s eclectic seventh album Remember Us To Life shows the Russian-born singer-songwriter’s brilliant knack for storytelling. Her style is stream of consciousness, melodic musings in poetic form which avoid extreme emotion in favour of intelligent observations and personal-political musings.The series of songs are partly character stories and partly existential reveries. "Bleeding Heart" is a nostalgic pop track about teen awkwardness with a synthy sound that descends into rock at the flick of a switch; "Older And Taller" simply a ditty about someone returning from the past (until Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Slaves’ 2015 debut album, Are You Satisfied? was a breath of fresh air in a music industry which seemingly had very little to say about the state of the country, as it kicked back at Austerity Britain with quite some relish. Take Control may see Isaac Holman and Laurie Vincent on similar ground but, as with the UK as a whole, there does seem to be a bit less zest and exuberance about the pair of them than there was 12 months ago.Sixteen hardcore punk songs belted out in less than three-quarters of an hour keep things motoring along with a hefty sonic dose of direct and muscular hardcore punk Read more ...
Bernadette McNulty
Justin Vernon hasn’t put an album out under the name Bon Iver for five years but you wouldn’t necessarily have noticed. Falsetto-strained, bearded, lumber-jack shirted folk introspection seems to have spread through music like Japanese knotweed, its aesthetic lingering over everyone from Mumford and Sons to the neo-soul school of Frank Ocean and even Drake. Plus, Vernon has hardly disappeared from sight, keeping up a steady work rate producing the Watford sister-act The Staves’ last album, and co-writing tracks on recent records with Ocean, James Blake and most infamously Kanye West, the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“If someone asked me what fado is,” says Ana Moura, in her introduction to “Lilac Wine”, “I would tell them that it means something like this song.” And with its notes of sadness, yearning and loss – fado means destiny or fate – this classic number is a beautiful way for her to connect a London audience with the melancholy Portuguese genre. Nina Simone is one of Moura’s heroes and "Lilac Wine" is the only English song on this novo fadista’s set-list, most of which is from her new album, Moura, produced in Hollywood by Larry Klein (Joni Mitchell’s ex-).Ana Moura recorded Mitchell’s “A Case of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Craig David’s comeback has been astonishing. Partly this is due to the reason his career stalled in the first place. Lampooning him was, famously, the core element of Channel 4 comedy show Bo’ Selecta!. That programme and his career wound down around the same time. Little did anyone realise that the affectionate memories of a generation who quoted Bo’ Selecta! in the school playground would eventually combine - in a very 21st century entanglement of irony and real enjoyment - with interest from longer-in-the-tooth millennial garage fans. Together, they were champing at the bit to welcome him Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sandy Smith’s brass band transcription of Tubular Bells is an improbable triumph. He draws heavily on composer David Bedford’s 1970s orchestral arrangement, along with Mike Oldfield’s two recorded versions. Musically the work holds up very well. But the original 1973 LP sounds distinctly murky in places: this was a live performance in which every strand was audible.These musicians ably demonstrate just how different a brass band sounds to an orchestral brass section: cornets, euphoniums and tenor horns subtly warmer, less abrasive than trumpets and French horns. Ear plugs were on offer to Read more ...