There’s way too much proficiency in music these days. There’s way too much interest in high production values. Also, half the people involved in popular music seem more interested in the business side, the branding and the online imprint. It is very, very boring. They are very, very boring. The Parrots will not change this, but I doubt they care and that’s a good thing. I’m not even sure they’d call this an album. Maybe they’d term it an EP. Who cares, it has six songs on it so we’ll say mini-album. Mika was supposed to be today's review but it never arrived. Probably for the best. That dude Read more ...

The LaFontaines are one of Scotland’s biggest new bands but have yet to make the same impact south of the border. There is, however, nothing about their debut album that’s parochial. To make a crude comparison, they sound, at first, like a grime-flavoured Biffy Clyro. What makes them stand out is the rapping of frontman Kerr Okan, whose lyrics occasionally land a punch. What’s less appealing is an over-reliance on predictable air-punching choruses, tiresomely tailored for giant venues. These make them sound ordinary.The five-piece from Motherwell have gone the traditional route of endless Read more ...

Every 75 years or so, Halley’s Comet comes round to say, "Hi". When it does, there’s genuine excitement, not because there’s any kind of stock trade in fond reminiscence when it comes to glowing lumps of rock, but because it’s a genuinely captivating event. The Orb’s latest offering is similarly hurtling through space once more, and reminding us of their conceptual debut that slapped us around our collective face back in 1991. It feels like a similar event.The first thing to say is that this is, without doubt, the most coherent offering from the Orb (currently comprised of Alex Paterson and Read more ...

The Supersonic Festival of the weird and the wonderful may now be in its 12th year but it is still more than living up to its long-running tag-line, “For curious audiences”. This year, an eager audience was treated to sets by both the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble and post-metalists Liturgy, as well as most points in between. In fact, for those who like their sounds drawn from beyond the mainstream, Supersonic was again a gold mine of tasty treats – and, as usual, there were also plenty of sights and delights that didn’t involve any music at all. Performance art, audience participation and Read more ...

The story of singer-songwriter-cellist-composer Arthur Russell is tragic and life-affirming in equal measure. A Zelig-like figure, from his corn-belt beginnings he glided through underground scenes in the 1970s and '80s, collaborating with everyone from Alan Ginsberg to Talking Heads to Philip Glass. Though he died aged just 40 in 1992, he directly inspired everyone from the early pioneers of house music to current luminaries like Sufjan Stevens and Hot Chip.When I interviewed his biographer Tim Lawrence for theartsdesk in 2009 it was clear that interest in Russell's work was continuing to Read more ...

 Lesley Gore: California NightsThe reissue of 1967’s California Nights is a timely tribute to both Lesley Gore, who died in February this year, and Bob Crewe, the producer of most of the album’s tracks, who died in September last year. Gore first charted in 1963 with “It’s my Party”, which was followed by a string of hits including the feminist-slanted “You Don’t Own me”. Crewe was prodigious: he was a songwriter, manager, producer and singer. With Bob Gaudio, he steered The Four Seasons to success and wrote or co-wrote classics like "Big Girls Don't Cry" and "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine ( Read more ...

Trying to pigeonhole Apocalypse, girl, Norwegian artist Jenny Hval’s third album under her own name, is like trying to grab onto a snake that is in the process of shedding its skin. It’s a simile that you can’t help thinking Hval would enjoy: “Kingsize”, the spoken word performance poem that opens the album, employs what might be an extended metaphor about bananas rotting in her lap – although it could just be about bananas.The word “album” itself barely seems to fit Hval’s work. It has nominal track divisions, but repeated themes and lyrical snippets cause the lines to blur. Sexual imagery, Read more ...

Like John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, who died this week, was both a defining and divisive figure in jazz history. His highly individual and virtuosic playing and his development of a non-harmonic style of improvisation and composition have remained milestones in the development of modern jazz. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, and developing as a musician in a series of R&B bands in Los Angeles, he studied musical theory privately, initially meeting widespread ridicule whenever he proposed his novel techniques. He cut a dedicated if idiosyncratic figure for most of the 1950s, operating a Read more ...

If the honours system is used to award deserving individuals, its other job is to provide an aspirational marker for the country as a whole. This, it tells us twice a year, is who we want to be: inclusive, non-sexist, colour-blind. From the look of the awards dished out in the arts for the Queen’s birthday honours list, in the summer of 2015 it looks very much as if we want to be a society which favours male privilege. Don’t hold the front page.So arise, then, Sir Van, Sir Lenny and, even if it’s only an honorary knighthood, Sir Kevin. There’s no arguing with any of these gongs. The great Read more ...

Hosted by self-confessed jazz nut John Thomson, a.k.a. The Fast Show's “Jazz Club” presenter Louis Balfour, the winners of this year's Jazz FM Awards were announced on Wednesday evening in the atmospheric setting of the Great Halls at Vinopolis.Produced by Serious, the evening kicked off with a thrilling call to attention by the House Gospel Choir, before musician, producer and comedian Ian Shaw presented the first of 11 awards for Vocalist of the Year to the great Zara McFarlane. Noting a positive change in the jazz vocalist genre over the past three or four years, Shaw said that, rather Read more ...

Giorgio Moroder has long been adopted by the cognoscenti. He’s the studio wizard who gave us key Seventies disco hits, iconic in the development of electronic music and club culture. The culmination of this archiving tendency was the tribute song on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, indeed, the whole album seemed sprinkled with shiny Moroder synth polish. It was undoubtedly this that resulted in Sony hauling him from retirement to work with a who’s who of contemporary chart-pop. The result is appalling, a catastrophic mire of Costa del Dumb Euro-cheese, pitched in some teeth-jarring Read more ...

Neither the name, the look, nor the recorded sound of Perfume Genius (*****) seems like the thing to set about a packed Royal Festival Hall with shock and awe, though there was plenty of both in last night’s show. The Seattle singer, known to his mum as Mike Hadreas, has developed a cult following for his ability to combine fragility and scorching power in lyrics of intelligence and versatility. Live, he displayed extraordinary vistas of emotional and techncial breadth.Last year’s third album, Too Bright, raised both eyebrows and expectations with a much broader range of sounds and techniques Read more ...