New music
Russ Coffey
In 1987 Def Leppard released Hysteria, a high-water mark in the history of soft rock. Not only was it gloriously infectious but there was also a moving backstory. To recap: the band’s drummer, Rick Allen, lost an arm in a road accident during recording. The group’s response was to help Allen build a custom, digital drum kit and carry on. This new set-up forced them all to tighten their focus, and the result combined technical excellence, good taste and real passion. Sadly, it was arguably the last really decent record they ever made. Def Leppard attempts to recapture those Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
From the second song, “Teenage Icon”, the Brighton Centre crowd are in the palms of Vaccines’ frontman Justin Young’s hands. It’s not a capacity crowd but they sing along to the perfectly crafted indie-pop stomper as if they were. “I’m nobody’s hero,” Young roars, clad in black, wearing his own band’s tee-shirt, but it’s not true, he’s clearly everybody’s hero here. His audience are mostly late teens and early twenties but there’s a hefty smattering of older faces and loads of women. The latter is striking as so often gigs are just hordes of men. The Vaccines clearly have a wider appeal. By Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Eska Mtungwazi (b 1971) was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in Lewisham, south London, her early musical tastes inspired and shaped by her father’s vinyl collection, and her experiences singing both church music and in classical ensembles. She studied Maths originally, and has built a career incrementally, spending ten years as a session musician, and accumulating generic and stylistic influences which have shaped her hugely varied act. She released ESKA, her debut album, in April this year, and has found rapidly increasing acclaim for her unique blend of soul, jazz and folk, tinged Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The anticipation for Adele’s new album has been building for months. It’s been nearly five years since her last, 21, which became the biggest-selling album of the 21st century, shifting over 30 million copies.Numbering the ages at which she wrote most of the material, 25 is a make-up album where 21 was a break-up and 19 just plain ol’ heartbreak. There’s no question about whether or not 25 will live up to the hype of the absurdly successful former albums – the first single , "Hello", shot straight to the top of the UK and US charts and was viewed an average one million times an hour on Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Heading into the final straits of 2015, it’s pleasing to read announcements by the BPI (British Phonographic Industry), the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and Nielsen Soundscan that the year has been the biggest for vinyl sales this century. The sales figures are, respectively, a year-on-year rise of 35% and 56% in the US and the UK, with Europe following the pattern. We might expect the market to mainly consist of middle-aged men but, again, research by respected music business analysts MusicWatch runs counter to that, with nearly half of all sales to under-25s and 44% to Read more ...
Thomas Rees
“I’m sorry I’m late,” said Cassandra Wilson to a half empty Royal Festival Hall, after a sulky rendition of “Don’t Explain”, the opening track from her Billie Holiday tribute album, Coming Forth By Day. It was an hour and fifteen minutes since the singer was due on stage and half an hour since the directors of concert promoter Serious had arrived in her stead – amidst boos and irate whistles – to tell us she was refusing to leave her hotel room. A good chunk of the 2,500-strong audience had gone for their trains, demanding refunds on the way out and venting their frustration on Twitter, and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As you all know by now, Friday is D-Day for Adele's new album 25, and part of the all-media Adelathon is Friday night's show on BBC One, Adele at the BBC. It's a mix of live performances and taped sequences linked together by chunks of interview with Graham Norton, and makes the perfect relaunch package for the reclusive superstar. It opens, aptly enough, with her performing "Rolling in the Deep".It probably won't surprise you to learn that a visibly excited Norton is not at his most critical. There aren't any questions about Adele's ill-starred songwriting collaborations with Damon Albarn Read more ...
David Nice
Don’t blame the players: they did their considerable best. But what could they hope to achieve with a programme in which six of the seven pieces were on a hiding to nowhere, or too short to have much of an impact? A sequence, what's more, in which platform rearrangements took longer than two of the pieces in the first half?Worse, the end sank the whole. Milhaud’s La création du monde, the penultimate offering, might have sent us out smiling. Instead the world premiere of Simon Bainbridge’s Counterpoints, for the indisputable jazz king of the double bass Eddie Gomez, was a throwback to the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Eloquent, transfixing, profoundly moving. Last night, in the beautiful setting of the Cadogan Hall, the Maria Schneider Orchestra gave one of those landmark performances that people will remember for years to come. We heard seven of the eight tracks from the composer, arranger and bandleader's stunning latest release, The Thompson Fields, which celebrates its composer's love of her childhood home in Windom, southwest Minnesota.The scene-setting opener, "A Potter's Song", featured the free-flowing accordion playing of Ron Oswanski (also a fine pianist and Hammond B3 player), with just the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Suicide of Western Culture are an electronica-powered duo from the Barcelona region who revel in a low-tech approach that creates plenty of depth as well as some lively beats. Their third album, the magnificently titled Long Live Death! Down With Intelligence!, is a significant sonic step forward from their last offering, 2013's Hope Only Brings Pain, marrying a post-rock attitude that brings to mind the likes of Mogwai with the sonic palette of electro-drone merchants Fuckbuttons. It also takes a wry look at the world with all vocals provided by spoken word monologues, like Louise Sansom Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Exactly three years ago, Imagine Dragons played to 150 people in Glasgow. This time, there were 12,000 people in attendance. The ascent of the Las Vegas quartet (swelled to a five-piece for this tour) brings to mind Peter Cook’s withering assessment that David Frost “rose without trace”. Their 2012 debut Night Visions and this year’s Smoke + Mirrors have shifted in their millions in both the US and UK without the band making any discernible cultural impact.Imagine Dragons make brooding existentialist rock with a post-digital sheen. Self-billed as alternative, they are in reality custom-built Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Martin Fry is unsure whether Worthing is enjoying itself enough for his liking. Clad in a sharply tailored grey three-piece suit, ABC’s frontman keeps asking us if we’re having a good time. The shouts of approval that greet the question suggest we are. In any case, he certainly seems to be.Age suits him. He always aspired to a classic crooner look and at 57, he’s achieved it. Having established all is well, he plunges on into a greatest hits set, attacking the catchy, mid-paced “King Without a Crown” from 1987 (actually not a Top 40 hit, but sounds as if it should have been). The song allows Read more ...