New music
Kieron Tyler
“If we want to keep this free and democratic Europe of ours free and democratic, we must enlist ourselves, our skills and our commitment to liberty and justice. The problems we face are too great to simply say let the politicians do it. I say this as a President.” Making this declaration in his country’s capital on the opening morning of 2016’s Tallinn Music Week, Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves stressed that the power for change is in all our hands and also confirmed the all-too prevalent view that the international political class is unlikely to address, let alone solve, the world’ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Turn the clock back to early 2007. It’s not so long ago, but at this point Nils Frahm had issued just one album, Ólafur Arnalds was about to release his first, Jóhann Jóhannsson was one year into what would be two-album relationship with 4AD, and Max Richter had made two albums for 130701, the British offshoot of FatCat Records. Christian Wallumrød was performing solo, but still recording collaboratively. What would become a recognisable genre-breaching, minimalist, post-classical groundswell hadn’t yet been quite codified but it was clear something was in the air.Hauschka was introduced into Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
PJ Harvey's ninth album is one with a message. I know this because it marks the first time that my pre-release copy of an album has come with a lyric booklet, despite the fact that it is perhaps the least oblique thing that the Dorset-born songwriter has ever recorded. Inspired by a series of trips to Washington, Kosovo and Afghanistan, and partly written in full public view as part of an art installation at Somerset House in the summer of 2015, The Hope Six Demolition Project is effectively a travelogue set to music: its lyrics, a series of postcards scrawled from a taxicab window; its music Read more ...
Andrew Cartmel
Anyone who has been to the movies in the past 30 years will have heard the work of Hans Zimmer. His music is part of the very fabric of our lives, as was dramatically demonstrated last night at the packed Wembley SSE Arena when the opening notes of The Lion King were greeted with a huge roar of appreciation from the audience. Zimmer, who moved from instrument to instrument with aplomb throughout the evening, was playing guitar on this one as Lebohang Morake and Zoe Mthiyane sang rousingly and woodwind maestro Richard Harvey accompanied them, piercing and lyrical, on the penny whistle. It was Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Hawkwind are one of rock's stranger institutions. Enigmatic too – despite inventing 'space rock', and teaching Lemmy his trade, they're still essentially known just for singing "Silver Machine". Yet search within their canon and you'll find real depth. Indeed, at their best Hawkwind's cosmic musings have the sense of humanity and society worthy of some futuristic folk music. You could call them prog rock's Fairport Convention.The Machine Stops looks at the tribulations of society, via an E. M. Forster short story with a very H.G. Wells theme. The story concerns a people Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Before the resurgence in vinyl, and the resultant pursuit of audiophile perfection on pointlessly expensive sound systems, was the musician’s fetish for vintage equipment and analogue synths. Live, this makes sense: sounds go direct into the audience's ear, air its only conduit. After the painstaking pathway that most recorded music has to take – downloaded onto a phone and compressed to flux through headphones made entirely out of snidely weighted plastic reputations – you wonder why they’d bother. Generator, the second album from Berlin-based producer Rodion, shows exactly why, boasting a Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Stones may have got the free festival thing right at last, returning triumphant from playing to around a million Cubans in Havana on Good Friday, and the world generally marvels more and mocks less the longevity of the band and the age of its original inhabitants. With a fresh batch of sold-out tours and new music apparently in the can, it would be churlish to deny them the self-pleasuring they reward themselves by mounting Exhibitionism at the Saatchi Gallery.Unlike any other group, the Stones stand as a cohesive motley of survivors from a world long lost, and when they go, rock'n'roll Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Around the turn of the century, when Brit Pop was infatuated with a Beatles-esque plodding beat, the Dandy Warhols were putting out some fine slabs of Glam-infused Garage Rock that often bothered the charts with a substantial dash of decadent swagger. A couple of decades on, and four years since the stripped-back This Machine, they’re back with a heady mix of driving electronics, power pop hooks, trippy psychedelia and garage rock attitude which suggests that the middle of the road is a long way off.Album number ten, Distortland may be full of many of the things that have made the Dandy Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Gregory Porter’s singing pedigree is impeccable. With a performing history in the American Church of God in Christ, where his mother was a minister, honed by several years before his breakthrough living in hipster-jazz heaven Brooklyn, and performing Off-Broadway, he’s in many ways the ultimate heritage act. He allies the gorgeous brassy timbres of 1970s R&B with a humane, secular spirituality that wears its heart on its sleeve, and recalls an era when jazz campaigned (more openly than it usually does now, at least) for social justice. All this is entwined in a voice that encompasses rage Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s been a lifetime in pop music since the Last Shadow Puppets’ debut album, The Age of the Understatement, went straight to number one in the UK charts. With Alex Turner taking a break from his day job with Arctic Monkeys, however, he’s finally got back together with ex-Rascals’ mainman, Miles Kane, to resurrect their side project for album number two. Cinematic orchestral beat pop may still be the order of the day on Everything You’ve Come To Expect, but there have been changes, and the melodramatic Scott Walker and David Bowie-like flourishes have been turned down somewhat to allow plenty Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Is greatness there from day one, does it evolve or suddenly strike? Do artists – in any discipline – develop in steps or arrive fully-formed? How does the quotidian become exceptional? With the new triple-CD set Highlife-Jazz and Afro-Soul (1963-1969), the man who would be dubbed the Black President has what amounts to 39 musical baby pictures made easily available for the first time. As to how this release answers any of these questions, it is a question of degree.First issued in Japan in 2005, Highlife-Jazz and Afro-Soul (1963-1969) was a pioneering collection of the bulk of Fela Kuti’s pre Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's an area in American music that is oddly under-reported given its scale. Somewhere between the garish mania of mainstream dance music, “EDM”, and the cool cachet of more underground sounds is a kind of “festival electronica”: very musical, often subtle and sophisticated, acts detached from nightclubs and often far more visible on the live circuit, where lasers and LED displays create epic backdrops for their sound. Acts like Tycho, Pretty Lights, Ratatat and British export Bonobo have, mostly through hard touring, built highly lucrative careers, and increasingly form a layer within the Read more ...