New music
Thomas H. Green
Caro Emerald first appears, spotlit, in one of the aisles of the Brighton Centre’s eastern balcony. Clad in a pleated knee-length black skirt and an eye-jarring yellow and red shirt that brings to mind Russian expressionist art, she kicks things off with the doleful, show tune-style paean to being a mistress, “The Other Woman”. It is a striking beginning and her concert grips the capacity audience by the scruff of the neck from thereon in. By the end of the song, after a twangy guitar solo instrumental break, she is down on stage with her supremely showy, talented, black-clad six-piece band. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
How many live versions of “Heroin” are necessary? The new four CD set The Complete Matrix Tapes includes, yes, four. One per disc. If that seems excessive, consider this: one version previously appeared, in the same mix, on last year’s reissue of the third Velvet Underground album; a second and third were included, in different mixes, on differing configurations of the 1969: The Velvet Underground Live album; an audience recording of a fourth was issued on 2001's The Velvet Underground Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes. All four versions are previously released.Overall, of The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After opening with a flurry of wobbly, woozy, Durutti Column-ish guitar, A Different Life travels through nine distant, foggy ruminations which suggest dissociation. Titles like “Far Apart”, “It’s Getting Better”, “Dive” and “Drive-by” posit Olivier Heim as a songwriter displaced from the day-to-day. And, atmospherically, his debut album reinforces the impression. With his sigh of a voice, it’s clear Heim’s music mirrors his moods. Indeed, on “Ocean”, he sings of a sleepy feeling he thought was left behind.A Different Life makes its case with sparse instrumentation: the treated guitar to the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
10cc were the closest the Seventies came to a Fab Four. They were multi-talented vocalists and instrumentalists, came from Lancashire, were technologically ahead of the curve, wrote classy, inventive pop songs in a bewildering array of styles, suffered from dodgy management, were lucky to find one another and calamitously split up far too soon. Since when they’ve cast a very long shadow indeed.Lol Creme was the John of the operation, a livewire art-school prankster. Eric Stewart was the equivalent of Paul, a souful pretty-boy lyricist. The parallel slightly breaks down with the rhythm section Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Their songs are some of the most joyous of the Sixties, their glistening doo-wop close harmony and pealing early rock 'n roll guitar sound heady with innocent romance and youthful energy. At the Barbican last night, Ronnie Spector, whose band The Ronettes haven’t been regularly releasing new work for nearly fifty years, effortlessly wound the clock back to the well-groomed early years of rock 'n roll when singing about mother kissing Santa was enough to earn her the title “original bad girl of rock”. She got everyone on their feet, and even though the audience was mostly about her age, there Read more ...
joe.muggs
It must be tough being Coldplay (bank balances aside). To hit a formula so successful that you essentially make all of pop music sound like you is quite a weight to carry. It wasn't just the obvious Keane/Starsailor/Snow Patrol copycat bands of the noughts, nor even the reformed Take That (their 'Rule the World' was the Coldplay template taken to pop perfection). It was the American megastar soft rock singers, the rap and R&B players from Jay-Z on down, and the mainstream dance producers like Swedish House Mafia, all cashing in by getting a plaintive white guy (sometimes even Chris Martin Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The arrival of Duran Duran is announced by a barrage of strobes, dry ice creeping about the stage, and the thunder-rumble of an approaching storm through the speakers. There is another noise too. It is the sound of female voices letting rip. They’re doing a loud, heartfelt approximation of the hysterical teen shriek that’s greeted boy bands from The Beatles to One Direction. Duran Duran, after all, are the top dog poster boys of their youth. However, these are women, not girls, and they are in their 40s and 50s so the pitch is lower and the tone less piercing. It is oddly poignant.Accompanied Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Recently, after listening to the over-polished tryhard that is Justin Bieber’s Purpose, I concluded that it was no Off the Wall. That still stands, but Love Sax and Flashbacks, the debut from Fleur East has a bloody good (horn) stab at providing us with a passable impression of it. A bit karaoke perhaps, but fuck it, karaoke’s fun. Or so I’m told.Fleur East is, as you may know, part of the X Factor alumni. Her key moment on the show was a rendition of "Uptown Funk" and album opener "Sax" sounds like the brief was: ‘Something like "Uptown Funk", but not "Uptown Funk". But really like "Uptown Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Last night Rebel Heart began to make sense. For over two hours, performing from the album, her back catalogue, and a couple of well-chosen covers, Madonna sustained both a diversity and intensity in her approach to singing about love and sex that probably no-one else could match. We all knew she could sing “Material Girl” or “Like A Prayer” till the lid came off the O2. When she followed those with Edith Piaf, sung to the ukelele, and held nearly 20,000 people in rapt silence, she gave us a much better idea of what makes her rebel heart beat.The first 40 minutes was a barrage of the new album Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Kannon, Sunn O)))’s (pronounced “sun”) first non-collaborative album since 2009’s epic Monoliths and Dimensions, is a doomy triptych that will make long-term fans of the American band very happy indeed. Taking inspiration from the Buddhist Guanyin Bodhisattva “perceiving the cries of the world”, walls of distorted guitars played very, very slowly provide a cosmic and crushingly heavy groove that suggests that Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson are still very much on top of the drone metal game after their recent, more avant-garde collaborations with Ulver and Scott Walker and almost 20 years Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
You want punk? You got it. The debut album from NOTS explodes into the room and all 11 songs fly by in a rampaging 27 minutes. The all-female quartet from Memphis have been signalling, via singles on their local scuzz-rock label Goner (home to Jay Reatard), that We Are NOTS would be taking no prisoners, and it lives up to such promise. Producer Doug Easley, whose work with Sonic Youth and the White Stripes may have recommended him to the band, does not polish, he merely marshals their fury to a caustic, garage-buzz edge.Occasionally NOTS recall long-lost British Eighties trash-goths We’ve Got Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It might sound hackneyed but Sculpture can only be described as truly psychedelic. They achieve this via a thoroughly original stage set-up. Dan Hayhurst, in a black tee-shirt and military cap, manipulates sounds on a laptop, with a rack of magnetic tape loops to his left which he carefully plucks up and sets on reels, but what makes the London duo a unique proposition is the zoetrope-style visuals of Reuben Sutherland.Moustachioed and clad in an eye-watering multi-coloured poncho, long stripey socks and what appear to be plus-fours, he places cards of images on a vinyl turntable with a Read more ...