New music
Barney Harsent
The career of Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, better known to us as Vangelis, has been as wide-ranging as it has influential. From his beginnings as one-third of the almighty Aphrodite’s Child, veering from light, classy psychedelic pop to triumphant, thundering progressive rock, to his later incarnation as a synth soundtrack wizard capable of being both visionary (Blade Runner) and unashamedly populist (Chariots of Fire).He has nothing left to prove, there is no need for him to grandstand, and so it comes as no surprise that his latest project, a composition written for and commissioned Read more ...
David Nice
"Total immersion", the term used for the BBC Symphony's one-composer days, takes on a whole new meaning in the Thames Tunnel Shaft now transformed – but fortunately not subject to makeover – under the mantle of Rotherhithe's Brunel Museum. All the more so with the pioneering Modulus Quartet, who presented the mostly consonant music of six collaborative composers with the main lights out, shifting colours on the performing space and films either to accompany three of the works or to let the creators speak in short, unpretentious introductions.The ambitious peripherals weren't perfect; Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a lot of neurosis these days about retro-ism and lack of innovation in music, as if the shock of the new is all that gives things value. Of course, this is something worth keeping in mind: we certainly don't want to end up in a Keep Calm And Carry On world of faux nostalgia for golden ages that never existed, ingested as an analgesic as the present crumbles around us. But taken as dogma, it becomes a very one-dimensional way of looking at things, and can stop us appreciating how much newness there is in our ever-complexifying relationships to the past.Many musicians mining the past – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
You couldn’t make Yello up. They’re a couple of wry Swiss synth-pop ironists fronted by a suave, moustachioed, septuagenarian multi-millionaire poker-player, golfer and industrialist. Everyone and their uncle makes electronic music now, but when Yello began at the end of the Seventies, they were members of an elite club – Kraftwerk, Human League, Gary Numan, OMD, Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the rest of that relatively small crew of innovators.Yello’s use of sampling was ahead of its time, and singles such as “Bostich” and “I Love You” (and, a few years later, “The Race”) bridged the avant- Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Fantastic Negrito, aka Xavier Dphrepaulezz, is a singer from Oakland, California. His music is steeped in the raw and urgent spirituality of the early blues, especially Robert Johnson. Yet he refuses to be pigeonholed as a blues performer, disdaining all talk of genre, and infusing his compositions with the grit and anger of punk, hip-hop and hard rock as well as the mournfulness of the blues, not to mention political protest that’s bang up-to-date. His current musical persona is what he calls his third incarnation, after a teenage major-label signing turned sour, and he spent years out of Read more ...
mark.kidel
Madeleine Peyroux made her name channeling Billie Holiday. White stars have never ceased to model themselves on African-American genius – Mick Jagger on Don Covay, Rod Stewart on Sam Cooke and Joe Cocker on Ray Charles. The resemblance is often uncanny, and yet there is always something missing - call it authenticity, roughness or soul. Peyroux has grown away from Lady Day, and found her own voice, but the jazz and blues that characterize most of the covers she sings with great skill and feeling, don’t quite have the edge of the originals.And yet, black vocalists have been as attracted to the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A couple of months ago the release of “Smile More”, the first song from Deap Vally’s new album, made it clear the female Los Angeles duo hadn’t mellowed. Almost all women hate it when blokes – especially blokes they don’t know – say, “Smile, love, it might never happen.” The song is a snarling response to such inanity. “I don’t want to be your reflection,” runs the chorus, “I don’t need your direction”. And if those clunky chancers didn’t get the point: “Everybody trying to tell me what to do/It makes me want to break some shit and sniff some glue.” The song boded well.Deap Vally’s debut, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1969, the Australian band Tamam Shud improvised as a film was projected onto the wall of a recording studio. The results were heard on the Evolution album. Playing original music live to accompany a film screening isn’t commonplace these days but eyebrows are no longer raised when it happens. Pere Ubu have played along with Carnival of Souls and It Came From Outer Space. Mogwai have done the same for the documentary Atomic. Of course, this was no surprise in the silent era and in the early Eighties Bill Nelson echoed the past by playing his soundtrack for Das Kabinett as the film Read more ...
Guy Oddy
While Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ last album, Push The Sky Away might almost be described as the closest to Easy Listening that the band are ever likely to find themselves, their new opus, Skeleton Tree is a different beast altogether. Written and recorded around the time of the tragic death of one of Cave’s teenage sons, it exudes all the hurt, terror and desperation that may be expected of such an erudite lyricist. Backed by droning blues that are loaded with apocalyptic imagery and creeping dread and piano ballads with ambient loops and down-tempo shuffles, Skeleton Tree sees Cave come to Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Lead singer and frontman Ed Robertson launches into a BNL-in-London rap, extolling the Roundhouse, “where they used to turn trains”, as well as the glories of Camden Market’s liquid-nitrogen ice-cream bar. The crowd, with its distinctly Cold Feet demographic, goes wild for the Ladies – if you’re not familiar with them, there are no women in this Canadian band – and their new album, Silverball, named in honour of Robertson’s pinball obsession, has been hailed as a buoyant return to form.The BNLs, who've been going for 27 years, are known for their melodic tunes and quirky, caustic lyrics, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Despite culminating with “Orphic Hymn”, a musical setting of Ovid’s text, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Orphée is not a literal interpretation of the Orpheus myth. Instead, the album uses retellings of the story – quoting the press release – to inspire “a meditation on beauty and the process of creation.” The result is a mutable series of 14 instrumental pieces preceding “Orphic Hymn” which describe the entire arc of Jóhannsson’s artistic character.Recognisably Jóhannsson’s work, Orphée – with its strikingly similar cover image to the 2010 ...And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness album by fellow Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Pianist Morten Schantz has been a prominent and pioneering figure on first the Danish, then international jazz and fusion scene for more than a decade. With saxophonist Marius Neset and drummer Anton Eger, also members of his new trio, he founded ground-breaking quintet JazzKamikaze in 2005, playing an exhilarating fusion of jazz, rock, funk and hip hop. Since then he has composed and performed across the full range of jazz-related fields, with ensembles including Unicorn, playing North African music, and Segment. He has recently formed a new trio, Godspeed, with long-standing Read more ...