New music
Kieron Tyler
Head straight for Disc 2, Track 4. A drum thumps while spring-loaded guitar feedback pulses. Suddenly, a wall of cascading guitar hurtles forth like an electric hare pursued by greyhounds. A distorted, amelodic guitar solo contrasts with the sweet melody carried by a female vocal. The energy level is extraordinary. The whole has a lightness of touch. Then, abruptly, it stops.This beautiful, wonderful performance is “Crystal Eyes”, a 1990 single by the Dutch band Nightblooms (pictured below left). My Bloody Valentine were clearly inspirational, but the track sounds as fresh as if it were Read more ...
Katie Colombus
All eyes are on Daughter to see whether the indie-folk trio’s second album Not To Disappear can live up to the first. If You Leave (2013) was lauded a critical success, and the band fronted by North Londoner Elena Tonra earned a fiercely loyal following.There’s no great change in direction for their music but Not To Disappear is basically more and better. The tracks are immediately recognisable for their shadowy and intimate signature style but they are – not more mature, exactly – but kind of deeper, darker. Recorded in New York with Nicolas Vernhes (War On Drugs) the new album has Read more ...
Mary Finnigan
This extract from Mary Finnigan’s book Psychedelic Suburbia describes events leading up to the creation of the Beckenham Arts Lab, during the early period after David moved into her flat in Foxgrove Road, Beckenham in April 1969. The book was published by Jorvik Press on 8 January 2016 – three days before David died in New York. In early May, Hutch comes to stay for a few days and adds the dimension of his refined guitar skill to David’s compositions. David can strum to useful effect, but he has not learned to finger pick.I never get to know Hutch well, but on first impression he seems to be Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
That purveyor of everything from crazy cosmic jive and plastic soul to epic disco and elegant Berlin ambient gloom made a hell of an exit last week. His last release, his “parting gift” Blackstar, was a dazzling curtain bow unlike any other. He was a brilliant magpie, smuggling all kinds of ideas from Kabuki and Nietzsche to avant-jazz and cut-ups into impeccable, usually subversive, pop. Whether you saw him as a “major liberator” (Jon Savage) or were put off by the “smorgasbord of lachrymosity" (Julie Burchill), in the past week it became clear how many different types of people's lives Read more ...
mark.kidel
Lucinda Williams steers just the right side of mannered, with a voice that’s raw and bruised, and a slurring delivery that would do a barstool drunk proud. She is the deep South incarnate, evoking with resigned melancholia the mood of the swamps from her native Louisiana.Once again, in the latest of her very regular albums, she visits hurt, loss, love and death. She moves with great ease from the almost romantic feel of “Place in Your Heart” to the bitterness of “If Love Could Kill”. This is a mostly quiet album, less raucous than some of her early work – though she’s been getting Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It seems incongruous that this fine country-rockin’ band should come all the way from Canada to play a half-empty room above a pub on a chilly, January midweek night on the British south coast. That they do so with such gusto and aplomb is hugely impressive. By the end, they’ve filled the place with a whooping hoedown and made it feel like a honkytonk bar somewhere off a lost highway in a mythic America, yet with the wry, modern, liberal-minded twist of Corb Lund’s lyrics.Lund grew up on Canada’s endless prairie farmland and, indeed, he plays a couple of songs about cows during the set (one Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The waiting room is a despondent place. Wherever it is a staging post for is not bringing its occupants delight. Unsurprisingly, as it is by the perennially sombre Tindersticks, The Waiting Room is a grey-hued album which does not suggest imminent rescue from this predicament. After a brief rendition of the theme from Mutiny on the Bounty, the ensuing 10 tracks set lyrics of estrangement, loss and rootlessness to musical settings which could soundtrack a penumbral nightclub conjured by David Lynch.The album's resemblance to a soundtrack is unsurprising. Tindersticks have composed for Claire Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
All-female London quartet Savages’ debut album came raging out of the traps in 2013. It was a taut, driven dose of punk and post-punk bite, powerfully Banshee-howled by French frontwoman Jehnny Beth. Three years later, the follow-up swaps the constant tension and snap of its predecessor for something moodier and less immediate but with, if anything, an even deeper underlying fury, an emotional torment that’s marrow-deep rather than explosive.Adore Life is something of a concept album. The theme is love as pain, love as a wounding uncontrollable force, love as brutal catharsis. The opening Read more ...
theartsdesk
If each man's death diminishes us, we're all about a foot shorter today. When Elvis Presley died, his manager Colonel Tom Parker said "this won't change anything!", and he promptly set about ensuring his client's immortality by turning him into a production line of merchandise and memorabilia. This won't happen to David Bowie, because he had already seized control of his own myth. It will continue to be felt indefinitely in his influence on music, video, art and the the nature of stardom itself.Anyone who thought Bowie had made his last big artistic statement will have been confounded by the Read more ...
joe.muggs
He knew.18 months of dealing with cancer, and rather than withdraw and rest – as he'd done before – David Bowie knuckled down made a record as intense and disturbing as anything he's done before. The Next Day was a worthy return to the fray but Blackstar... Even before we heard the terrible news, just taken on its own merits, Blackstar was something else. And now, knowing that he knew, it's absolutely fearsome in its confrontation with death.I know something is very wrongThe pulse returns the prodigal sonsThe blackout hearts, the flowered newsWith skull designs upon my shoes(“Can't Read more ...
Matthew Wright
As a whole, J-Sonics are fairly new to the London jazz scene, but the members of this slinky sextet, assisted by vocalist Grace Rodson, have many years’ experience between them in other projects, which means they can sound both fresh and highly polished. Their debut album is a tasty cosmopolitan medley of originals and Brazilian classics characterised by the twining of smoky brass lines from twin horns of saxophonist Matt Telfer and trumpeter Andy Davies, fretboard acrobatics from guitarist Clement Regert and the propulsive bass of Mike Flynn, all tied down by the drums of Gabor Dornyei, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Though Soft Machine were the first band to suggest Canterbury could be musically noteworthy, the appearance of Caravan’s debut album in late 1968, Kevin Ayers' post-Soft Machine solo outing two years later, and the subsequent arrivals of Gong, Matching Mole, Hatfield & the North and the solo Robert Wyatt confirmed the city had a fertile scene. It was a fluid environment where musicians from one band played with others. The mutability was captured in one of the most entangled of Pete Frame’s celebrated Rock Family Trees.And at its top: The Wilde Flowers. The band formed in 1963 and Read more ...