New music
Matthew Wright
Three years ago Laura Mvula captured both hearts and minds with her intriguing and seductive debut album, Sing to the Moon. Last night she began again the nerve-wracking process of revealing new music, in this case her second album, The Dreaming Room, to be released in the summer.Though critics loved Sing to the Moon, it was hindered commercially by its subtlety and tendency to duck the big glitzy climax in favour of a left-field closure. With the arrival of drummer and producer Troy Miller, now Mvula’s musical director, to work on this album, there was a chance this collection would be more Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the run-up to the release of his second album Grapefruit, Kiran Leonard has revealed the musical touchstones which map out his world. Boredoms, Kate Bush, the jazzy French Canterbury-rock types Etron Fou Leloublan, Fela Kuti, Swans, Scriabin and Sleaford Mods all colour his prog-tinged vision of music. And he looks elsewhere for ideas. The album's “Ondör Gongor” takes its title from a Mongolian giant while “Half-Ruined Already” is inspired by a Werner Herzog film.Leonard has also declared that his liking for Bush is based on a surmise that her music is not spontaneous: she has, he says, a Read more ...
Martin Longley
The Tectonics festival concept began in Iceland, 2012, created by the Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov. Although, loosely speaking, it’s concerned with a modern classical programme, there’s a peculiar aspect to Volkov’s orientation that lends a special quality. Much of his chosen music is devoted to environmental shaping, stasis, ambience, stately processes, repetition, and a general questioning, if not confrontation, of the accepted staging stance, and sometimes volume, of a performance. Volkov’s players and composers are frequently interested in jazz, rock, electronic and improvised sounds, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Tad Doyle was the mainman in grunge first-wavers Tad, who helped to put Seattle firmly on the rock’n’roll map in the late ‘80s with such fine discs as God’s Balls, Salt Lick and 8-Way Santa. He’s now back in action and back on the road in the UK and Europe with his new outfit, Brothers of the Sonic Cloth: a sludge rock beast whose self-titled debut album showcases some truly heavy music with real soul.GUY ODDY: I remember seeing your first group, Tad, on the first Nirvana tour of the UK in 1989 and to be honest, I thought that you were the more entertaining act. Did it frustrate you that you Read more ...
joe.muggs
Once upon a time, techno was the future, and Orlando Voorn was right at the heart of building that future. The Dutchman was in early on the late-1980s wave of Detroit electronic production – in which small groups of black Americans surrounded by decaying industry drew the natural link between Kraftwerk and funk, filled themselves with equal quantities of utopian and dystopian visions, and set a blueprint that would irrevocably alter the sound of music worldwide. Indeed, he worked with and for many of Detroit's finest, and his tracks were very often some of the most stunningly beautiful of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although The Kinks’ world was turned upside down from the moment “You Really Got Me” hit the charts in August 1964, the band’s main songwriter Ray Davies still had songs to spare. Some of his compositions ended up with singers like Dave Berry, Leapy Lee and Mo & Steve. Ray’s brother Dave even found that one of his songs was recorded by Shel Naylor. This extra-mural world fascinates Kinks fans.Even more enticing are the recordings by other artists to which The Kinks actually contributed. Leapy Lee’s 1966 single “King of the Whole Wide World” featured Dave, Pete Quaife and maybe Mick Avory Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
News that Richmond Fontaine were calling it a day with one final album and tour was not itself a surprise: across latter-day releases, from at least 2009’s We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River, the music had become progressively incidental, an increasingly subtle backdrop to frontman Willy Vlautin’s surprisingly widescreen storyteller’s vision of small-town Americana. Their decision to tie up loose ends with one final album, described by Vlautin as “an end piece for all the characters who inhabited the world of Richmond Fontaine over the years”, is not one most bands would take Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Back in the Seventies, Sniffin’ Glue kicked off a punk and post-punk trend for fanzines. By the following decade this had become a deluge, surrounding the burgeoning, self-consciously “alternative” indie music scene but also offering thousands of otherwise unheard voices a chance to rage at Thatcher’s Government in smudgily typed, crudely stapled, photocopied A5 pamphlets. The whole thing had an invigorating energy about it, connected to the times. The drive and feel of Sleaford Mods: Invisible Britain has something of that lo-fi, politically raging, high excitement.Those wanting a Read more ...
Katie Colombus
I love Gwen. I really do. She is a Queen. And I love that she's on a journey, falling in love with The Voice co-star Blake Shelton after what we thought was one of Hollywood's most stable marriages to Gavin Rossdale fell apart. But there is much about her new album that is difficult to vibe with.This Is What The Truth Feels Like is a soundtrack to love the second time around, the songs a mix of reflecting on the past and looking towards the future. There's nostalgia in the fun, bouncy and hooky "Make Me Like You" with echoes of Cardigans Love Fool and a hark back to Kylie Minogue in her Stock Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Grime is having an ongoing moment. The current profiles of Skepta, Wretch 32, Stormzy, Novelist and others make this very clear. There at the beginning, along with Wiley and Dizzee Rascal, was Kano, as his new album Made in the Manor reminds us, harking back with bittersweet nostalgia to the scene’s earliest days as if they were decades ago. Brighton’s tight-knit urban hip hip hop community loves him for it and they’re out in force at the Concorde 2 tonight, representing as loudly and energetically as possible. The bullish ardour with which they greet him is something to behold. Whoops, “ Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Despite her best efforts, Jasmine Lucilla van den Bogaerde aka Birdy is, probably, still best known for covering Bon Iver's "Skinny Love", aged 14. Like a John Lewis ad that never was, the song possessed a winsome sophistication that won her a diversity of admirers.It also prompted the question, "what next?" Would Birdy go on to tread a gentle folk-rock path like Laura Marling – another well-heeled ex prodigy from Hampshire? Or would her sound develop into something altogether more idiosyncratic? Birdy's first self-penned album Fire Within failed to settle the issue. Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Adele is resting her eyelids as the audience spills in, packing the 02, a huge video projection showing off those luscious eyelashes and dark eyeliner that have become synonymous with Adele style. Her eyes open as we hear the echoes of "Hello" before she appears on a small square stage in the middle of the auditorium, resplendent in a long, black, glittery gown. It's a spine-tingling, faultless rendition of the first hit from her most recent album.This live show combines the three albums, 19, 21 and 25 - Adele's greatest songs, sung to great effect in her hometown of London. Walking to the Read more ...