New music
Thomas H. Green
The big vinyl storm in the US media over the last month has been a kerfuffle about VNYL, the service that hoped to do for vinyl what Lovefilm used to do for DVDs. The idea, backed by a hefty and successful Kickstarter campaign, was VNYL would send members three records, based on their stated tastes and chosen by connoisseurs. These could be listened to and returned, to be replaced with others. Sounds like a dreadful idea. Vinyl is delicate and surely one of its pleasures is ownership? If there are scratches, they've been earned at your own parties and late nights. Unlike MP3s and CDs, vinyl Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell first put out a joint album only a couple of years ago but their association goes way back, before either’s mainstream US fame. Crowell was working closely with Harris as long ago as the mid-Seventies, still within immediate memory of the latter’s folk origins and groundbreaking partnership with Gram Parsons. He later found major success Stateside but has never been renowned in Europe like Harris. Perhaps it’s their steadfast friendship that makes The Traveling Kind such easy-going and pleasing listening.Harris can always write and deliver a decent song but Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I fell in love with both of them immediately,” says Pete Townshend of Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, the managers who took his band The Who to world-wide success. An hour into Lambert & Stamp, a documentary on the duo, the depth of that bond is belatedly seen in a touching clip of Townshend demonstrating one of his new songs. Singing with acoustic guitar, Townshend tries a tentative run-through of “Glittering Girl”. Stamp’s face lights up as he hears the melody line take shape, Lambert is attentive. The relationship is not quite that of son to father, but it is familial.Lambert & Stamp Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Almost two decades into a distinguished career, nobody would have judged Thea Gilmore for indulging herself with a greatest hits collection – indeed, it’s something that record labels have been bugging her about for years. Album number 15 Ghosts and Graffiti is perhaps intended as a compromise – part new songs and part old favourites, featuring an all-star cast of collaborators and reinterpreted with the same affection and irreverence the singer-songwriter recently brought to Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and the lost lyrics of Sandy Denny.Two of the songs from Don’t Stop Singing Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It’s a shock to see the Corn Exchange’s hundreds of seats sold out for a jazz piano trio. When I first heard GoGo Penguin two winters ago, it was in an East London basement, where new recruit Nick Blacka’s thunderous double-bass was inspiring a few intrepid dancers to their skittering beats, among a crowd of dozens. Since then, there’s been a Mercury nomination, and a recent three-album deal with America’s gold-standard jazz label, Blue Note, a remarkable achievement for a British band.It’s when they break from their own successful formula that GoGo Penguin are most interestingListening to Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Todd Rundgren is not known for sitting on his laurels and churning out the same old stuff year after year. Since Runt, his debut solo album from 1970, he has tried out a vast array of genres from heavy metal to prog rock, EDM and power pop, as well as having a prominent role in Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell. Runddans, his second album of 2015, sees him venture further into pastures new by teaming up with Scandinavian electronica boffins Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Emil Nikolaisen for a one-track ambient beast – albeit one with a hefty injection of prog sounds.Runddans came about after Rundgren Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The timing of this tour, to celebrate the 15th anniversary of their self-released, lo-fi masterpiece Mwng, could not be more fitting. The album was inspired, in part, by Welsh language punk band Datblygu, and the left-wing political feelings that ran through that band’s work. Fast forward to now and London looks like an island of red surrounded by a sea of blue following the recent election – and there are a lot of people here aching for escape after Thursday's events.The tour has the air of a retrospective. The songs from Mwng, including the sea-shanty sway of “Ymaelodi A’r Ymylon” and the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s no doubt SPOT is Europe’s tidiest music festival. In hosting SPOT, Denmark’s second-city Aarhus turns the expectation of what a festival can be around. There’s no mud, no one takes a stage late and the sound is always immaculate. Underworked stewards collect what little debris there is. The two main venues are so spotlessly non-rock they force the focus towards the music.The Aarhus Musikhuset is an airy, early-Eighties complex with a glass-walled façade reminiscent of London’s Royal Festival Hall. Inside, cool wood panelling and designer light fittings set the tone. SPOT has seven Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Fall has always delivered great album titles, and Sub-Lingual Tablet is right up there with the best – Witch Trials, Hex, Caustic, Are You Are Missing Winner… The song titles, too, have a medicated, sub-lingual ring that no other artist could pull off – “Junger Cloth”, anyone? – guaranteed to wipe away all psychiatric waste...Several songs take on the soft-focus Stasi surveillance of mobile social media – the rage and fury of “Facebook Troll” – Smith’s multi-layered vocal stylings, whiplash shrieks and raw blizzard of gleeful hatred are breathtakingly purgative, the song's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Spooky Tooth: The Island Years (An Anthology) 1967–1974After Spooky Tooth called it a day in 1974, various long-time members struck out in directions as unpredictable as their former band’s identity was hard to get a handle on. Drummer Mike Kellie joined the Lou Reed-influenced, punk-era band The Only Ones. Their main songwriter, co-vocalist and keyboard player Gary Wright scored a massive US hit in early 1976 with the fantastically atmospheric proto-yacht rock single “Dream Weaver”. Guitarist Mick Jones formed the immediately successful (in America) formulaic rock band Foreigner. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s an odd duality about Brighton tonight. Post-election, it’s a righteous oasis, a green and red bubble amid a sea of blue. Most of Britain may have chosen to systematically destroy the NHS and the education system but Brighton stands fast. The mood, then, is one of victory – a brass band plays jauntily in the street outside the Dome and the streets gabble giddily of Caroline Lucas, the Green MP who held the city’s centre - but the celebrations are tempered by hurt and a sense of epic defeat. Squarepusher’s Brighton Festival gig encapsulates the dichotomy.Tom Jenkinson – Squarepusher – Read more ...
Lydia Perrysmith
It was a strange atmosphere inside Camden’s KOKO last night, like a very particular nu metal subgroup of 2003 having a reunion. There was no one under the age of 20 but there were still dreadlocks and beards aplenty. First up on this nostalgia-fest were Alien Ant Farm, the American rock band who formed in 1995 in Riverside, California. By the time the band come out on stage, the crowd has had time to buy a few warm, over-priced beers and are ready to let loose.As they launch into “Wish” there’s a surge of excitement, with grown men and women suddenly reverting to awkward angst-ridden Read more ...