New music
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes appearances can be deceptive. The frontman on stage looks as generic it gets. His scruffy beard, retro specs, baseball hat, shapeless jeans and the bulging outline of a mobile phone stuffed in his trouser pocket don’t add up to suggest that his band Tahiti Boy & the Palmtree Family are going to be anything distinctive. But the studied casualness belies what actually takes place musically. This is exceptional.The all-purpose hipster is multi-instrumentalist/singer David Sztanke (pictured below, photo © Johanna Cafaro), who has also played as a sideman with Lenny Kravitz, Iggy Pop Read more ...
Katie Colombus
A pop album drawn from a musical could be off-putting to some. Images of Glee spring to mind or a tweenypop version of Idina Menzel – both of which seem quite a departure from Sara Bareilles’ hugely popular hits "Love Song", "Gravity" or most recently, "Brave".But for her fourth studio album – a follow up to 2013’s The Blessed Unrest – Bareilles has taken tracks from the upcoming musical, Waitress, set to hit Broadway in April 2016, for which she wrote both the music and lyrics. The result is a bit of a pick ‘n’ mix: I know I will play my favourite couple of songs on repeat until I know all Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Until last night, critics had a clear view of Esperanza Spalding as the virtuosic jazz bassist and singer, whose prodigious composing, performing and bandleading made her one of a small and precious group capable of re-making serious and popular jazz. In a rare moment of triumphalism, jazz critics love nothing more than recalling the fury of Justin Bieber fans, whom Spalding beat to the Best New Artist Grammy in 2011. Best get that story out the way before we go any further.Last night, however, she redefined her career with Emily’s D+Evolution, an extraordinary, zany multi-form experimental Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Can you have too much of a good thing? I ponder this as I scroll through the 109 watermarked MP3s of Bob Dylan’s recording sessions spanning 13 January 1965 to 16 February 1966, for Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. This is the six-disc Deluxe edition I’m talking about; a collectors’ set three times the size is available for a small mortgage, in a limited edition of 5,000 copies, or you can choose the 2CD best-of set of 36 tracks, all alternate, unreleased takes (“I’ll Keep It With Mine” and “Farewell Angelina” excepted) of what many say is his greatest Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a current running through the underground club / electronic music of the 2010s that cares not a jot for progress – but neither is it retro as such. It's been called “outsider house”, which is a pretty lame name for stuff that is often extremely accessible and welcoming, and is certainly not just house music. Rather it's a kind of neo-psychedelia, a sound that plays tricks with memory and expectation, collapsing oppositions between sophistication and naiveté, between kitsch and sincerity, and between low and high fidelity in the pursuit of beautiful discombobulation. And as the none- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Levitation: Meanwhile GardensIf Meanwhile Gardens had been issued as it was meant to be in 1993, it would not have had an easy ride. The band itself was falling apart. Founder member and former House of Love guitarist Terry Bickers had said on stage that May that the band was “a lost cause” and “we've completely lost it”. He left, the album was not released and, with a reconfigured line-up, Levitation limped on before splitting in autumn 1994.That wasn’t their only problem. The contemporary context in which they operated was changing and also unforgiving. The weekly music press were Read more ...
mark.kidel
While many of his contemporaries make the most of their grizzled old men’s voices, Georgie Fame sounds as young and fresh as he did when he first burst on the London scene in the 1960s. This is supposedly his last album, and it sounds, in many ways, as if it had been made 50 years ago.Accompanied by a group of top-drawer British jazzmen, including Guy Barker (trumpet), Alan Skidmore (tenor sax), Alec Dankworth (bass) and Anthony Kerr (vibes) – along with his sons Tristan on guitar and James on drums – the veteran delivers a very tasteful range of characteristically bluesy hard bop, blue beat- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s Patti Smith week. Her second memoir M Train is out. To mark its publication she spoke on Wednesday night at a Guardian event of her love of Morse, Lewis and George Gently. On Thursday she had an appointment with U2 at the O2. Last night (and again tonight) Smith was back at the Roundhouse, where she first performed in the UK in 1976. The question on nobody’s lips was whether, at 68, senior citizenship has remotely withered the savagery of her voice. “We Smiths age well,” she said before she sang a note.On the setlist was a complete performance of Horses, which turns 40 on 10 November, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
For women making music, it’s probably a tough call to decide on what is more tedious: being asked what it’s like being a girl in a band, or being grouped with other female musicians, regardless of genre, for magazine features and documentaries on Women in Rock. Girl in a Band – which, like Kim Gordon’s recent memoir, wears its title as a wink to the first – is a little too much of the second, although still has plenty of interesting things to say.Kate Mossman, the New Statesman’s arts editor, put together an impressive selection of interview subjects from Carol Kaye, a former jazz Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s been a while since we heard from Jamie Woon. 2011 to be precise. Back then his debut album Mirrorwriting was a critics’ favourite, a ghostly post-dubstep soul affair that had “music journo-friendly” written all over it. He remains an elusive figure, easy on the eye yet reticent of playing the game and propelling himself into the public realm. His second album is, by his own somewhat abstract standards, a poppier affair, created in collusion with Lexxx, AKA rising producer Alex Dromgoole who’s previously worked with Bjork, Wild Beasts, Crystal Castles and multiple others. It is a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some artists you'd only ever want to see in a club or a theatre, but if ever there was a group who belonged naturally in stadiums and arenas, it's U2. They have a history of elaborate stage productions, and for this tour, focusing on last year's album Songs of Innocence, they've shown the opposition a clean pair of heels with a remarkable show based around a wall of screens that stretches out towards the back of the auditorium.It's a kind of rock'n'roll IMAX, projecting giant blow-ups of the band in action or dazzling panoramas of imagery to illustrate the songs. Particular attention has been Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On record, Cat aka Chan Marshall is the quintessence of hip. From art-rock to blues, her vocals are cool and effortless. Live, however, things have been notoriously inconsistent. Google “Cat Power live”, and you will find a catalogue of stage meltdowns. Even her Wikipedia entry tells tales of drunken rants and abuse of fans. And yet for every gig disaster, there’s another rave review. When it comes to a Chan Marshall gig, it seems you pays your money and you takes your chances. As I queue up outside the huge Victorian St John-at-Hackney Church the moon is shining and fans are chatting in Read more ...