New music
Kieron Tyler
Pictured above is the label of an exceptionally important Pink Floyd record issued last November. Only a thousand people bought a copy. That was the amount that hit shops. Pink Floyd 1965: Their First Recordings was a double seven-inch set with a historic importance inversely proportionate to its availability. It was the first ever outing for the earliest recordings by the band and, as such, the earliest compositions for them by its prime songwriter Syd Barrett. He died on 7 July 2006 at age 60, and a look at this hard-to-find yet significant release is a tribute to his memory.The band is the Read more ...
howard.male
When David Bowie died in January, one person quick off the mark with a striking and respectful tribute was the American composer Jherek Bischoff with Strung Out in Heaven – a string quartet medley of half a dozen of Bowie’s songs. And in fact we‘re back in Bowie territory here in that these tentative yet austere instrumentals are full of romantic yearning and physiological unease reminiscent of the ambient sides (in vinyl terms) of the thin white one’s Low and Heroes.The main difference is that Bowie, Brian Eno and Tony Visconti utilised synthesisers and Bischoff has a preference for Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Another splendidly eclectic globalist radio show hosted by Peter Culshaw. The show's featured album of the month is the impeccable The Woman at The End Of The World by the veteran Brazilian songstress Elza Soares. We have remixed desert blues, Pakistani film jazz, Romanian brass mayhem, avant folk from Ukraine and a track from what promises to be the hit world music album of the summer - Calypso Rose’s Far From Home. Not to mention a world exclusive preview of Susheela Raman’s new album (a gamelan reworking of the Beatles psychedelic classic "Tomorrow Never Knows"). To listen Read more ...
Thomas Rees
£100 – £175 is a lot of money to pay for two hours of music, but that’s what it cost to see Pat Metheny at Ronnie Scott’s this week. The guitar great is in town with his new quartet, a dream team comprising British pianist Gwilym Simcock, bassist Linda Oh (a major name on the New York scene who I first saw performing with Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas’ Sound Prints quintet) and drummer Antonio Sánchez, a long-time Metheny collaborator and the composer of the acclaimed score to Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman.Shoehorned in at the bar, with the rest of the club packed to the rafters, I Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Every decade throws up a handful of guitar acts intent on capturing the mood of the age. The Noughties, for example, marched to the spiky rhythms of Kasabian and Kaiser Chiefs. Almost a decade on and the current crop have a somewhat heavier touch. Bands like Biffy Clyro, for instance, set out their intent – to speak with a serious rock voice – with impressive tattoos and heavy chords. Except Clyro also serve their heavy dishes with a side order of mainstream AOR, which makes some doubt whether it's really rock at all.A parallel might be drawn with Imagine Dragons' mega hit " Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Not every Glastonbury can be blazing summer. 2016 was hard work, with real world gloom permeating the already damp party bubble. But, as your teachers used to say, you only get out what you put in. The only way to take things was to go hard or go home, no quarter given and pay later.Thus, this report comes way after the rest. The contemporary media is focused on putting content online as fast as possible. A response after the event is commercial suicide, no longer an option. But how can you smear yourself in Glastonbury’s madness if you spend half your time in the Media Tent, a dead zone of Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Eighties revival in dance music started in earnest with the Electroclash subculture, the first records emerging around 1996. That is to say, the Eighties revival has now lasted twice as long as the actual Eighties itself. And if you think that the heyday of electropop – which is what we generally mean by Eighties sounds – really lasted from about 1978 to 1984, we're talking about a very long revival for a very short “decade”.The thing about dance music, though, is that its riffs and schticks seem particularly durable. Because they were aimed at a relatively unchanging physical environment Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The first I heard of Beyond the Wizards Sleeve was eight whole years ago. It was a tune called “Winter in June” and was a Lemon Jelly-meets-The Orb-style cosmic noodle with the added, and memorable, benefit of long-deceased BBC gardener Percy Thrower rambling over the top. It was exquisitely rustic English electronic weirdness. From their Viz-on-LSD name onwards, BTWS seemed to be just a passing fancy for Erol Alkan and Richard Norris, a couple of thoroughly imaginative DJ-producers with their fingers in multifarious musical pies, and it seemed unlikely they’d do much more with it.And so it Read more ...
Katie Colombus
I’m going to be honest, Metronomy isn’t really my bag. Perhaps I’m not hipster or highbrow enough, but I just don’t get their jam. I feel a bit like Jon at the beginning of Lenny Abrahamsson’s Frank – slightly bewildered by the depths of the intellectual pop he’s witnessing, recognising the genius in there somewhere, but somehow on the outside of the super-cool in-crowd.To me, Metronomy are basically saying “huh, yeah, it is all a big joke, like the lyrics are so simple but they’re funny and witty, but the fact that you’re laughing at them makes you the joke, unless you’re laughing Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Before playing a version of “Out of Time”, the lead single from Blur’s 2003 album Think Tank, Damon Albarn explains that “at Glastonbury, it really was out of time: there was a problem with our monitors and we were about a bar a half out.” Last night’s rendition at Royal Festival Hall was not perfect, but the Syrian National Orchestra’s backing was enough to earn a fist pump from Albarn, who skipped off the stage theatrically as if to underline his pleasure.The night’s imperfections – a rare frog in Albarn’s throat for The Beatles’ “Blackbird”, a couple of technical hitches, the odd bit Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It begins with “Never Never Let Me Down” by Formulars Dance Band. “You’re the only good thing I’ve got,” declares the singer of a garage-band answer to The Impressions over a rough-and-ready backing where a shuffling mid-tempo groove is driven along by wheezy organ and scratchy lead guitar. When the band unites to sing harmonies, the massed vocal is distorted: a sure sign of an overloaded microphone. If this were America, “Never Never Let Me Down” would have been an obscure independent soul release issued around 1966. But this was Nigeria and Formulars Dance Band – whose personnel are unknown Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Around the Summer Solstice seems a fitting time for Dylan Carlson’s latest solo album to appear under his Drcarlsonalbion guise. For Falling With a Thousand Stars & Other Wonders From the House of Albion is a collection of old folk ballads from pagan and rustic England and Scotland that deal with relations between humans and faeries and other supernatural creatures.It’s not an album that is likely to sit comfortably with the traditionalist folkie crowd though, as Carlson’s approach is to reinterpret tunes like “She moved thro’ the faire” and “Tamlane” as instrumentals played slowly as a Read more ...