New music
Guy Oddy
In his recent theartsdesk interview, Squarepusher (or Tom Jenkinson to his mum) stated: “A subtle wave of conservatism has washed gently across electronic music over the last five years. One of the things the new record smashes against is that.” On this he really isn’t kidding, and Damogen Furies is unlikely to be heard as mood music to your shopping experience in any high street stores in the foreseeable future. Hardcore rave sounds bump up against abrasive electro and abstract funk in a powerful tempest that is far from chilled out.Opening track “Stor Eiglass” suggests an imaginary remix of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No soul singer has been associated with one hit in quite the same way. Percy Sledge, who died last week at the age of 74, recorded “When a Man Loves a Woman” in 1966 and launched himself as a tearful balladeer. Its simple chord structure, featuring a descending bassline familiar from Pachelbel and Bach, was the bedrock over which Sledge howled plaintively of a lost love. There were other hits, until his producers retired in 1974 just as soul music was going priapic, but the first cut was always the deepest.When I met Sledge in 1994 he had his first new album out in 20 years. He was a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Jazz-funk organ trio Wild Card have been slowly building a reputation for smoking funk tunes and grooves you could lose a pantechnicon in for some years now. Led by French guitarist Clément Régert, with organist Andy Noble and drummer Sophie Alloway, they perform with quite a range of guests, both instrumentalists and singers, which keeps the atmosphere of their repertoire fresh and varied. Their rise to prominence has accelerated recently with the release of their third album, Organic Riot, which has been garnering rave reviews internationally. It was launched last night at Jazz Café POSK, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bert Jansch: Bert JanschNorth Villas is a short street parallel to Camden Road, the main artery linking Camden Town to Holloway in north London. It’s off Camden Square, where Amy Winehouse lived and died. In August 1964, Bill Leader began recording what would become Bert Jansch’s debut album in his home at 5 North Villas. The first-floor flat had two living rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. Leader would set up his tape recorder in the same room as who he was recording and monitor what was being caught on tape through headphones.At the same time as Leader was using his home as a recording Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
To let you understand the spontaneous grin that burst across my face when I first heard Foil Deer probably needs a little context: I studied, and now have a job involving, corporate law. Still, there’s no getting away from the fact that the powerful feminist themes and dirty, grungy guitar work form only part of the reason that Massachusetts indie rockers Speedy Ortiz’s third album is such a fantastic listen: frontwoman and songwriter Sadie Dupuis’ wordplay has never been stronger. The line that made my day, since you ask, was “we were the law school rejects so we quarrelled at the bar Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Mike Rosenberg kept the name "Passenger" for his solo folk-pop project even when the rest of the band left in 2009, even though, for a one-man outfit, the concept of being a passenger is a curious one. (Who’s driving then?) For the most part, this 16-song, two-CD release continues the gentle-sounding but hard-hitting storytelling of last year’s Whispers. That album didn’t make too many waves (the hit single “Let Her Go” made up for that) but confirmed Rosenberg’s reputation among folk-pop connoisseurs – happy for Ed Sheeran and James Blunt to be spoiled by raving attention – for grit and Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Novelty and rapture are rare commodities in Shoreditch these days, where everything has already been tried, and nothing surprises. But Australian post-jazz trio The Necks, ending their European tour at Village Underground last night, mesmerised the audience into dumbstruck awe with their slo-mo ambient improvisation. It’s an act they’ve been polishing since the late 1980s, and for a crowd that has the patience to allow the hypnotic weave of minutely manipulated cycles of minimalist phrasing, building to an organic dramatic shape, it’s utterly engrossing. The trio, of Chris Abrahams ( Read more ...
fisun.guner
Put your hand up if you were in the audience last night, or indeed on any of the nights of this ambitious On Stage Together tour, and came only to see one man, and that man was Paul Simon. I’m sure you won’t need much nudging. After all, after almost six decades in the business, Simon’s star may have dipped – and endured the political controversy of the Graceland years – but has never faded. Sting’s meanwhile, certainly has. It seems that breaking a UN cultural boycott is less of a crime than being the butt of tantric sex jokes.But Simon doesn’t need to be cool to be loved. He’s got the songs Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Alabama Shakes' 2012 debut album, Boys & Girls, was well-liked by both critics and music-lovers. It was appreciated for its tuneful, sassy reimagining of US southern rock, via the persona, songs and voice of front-woman Brittany Howard. The question for album two, then - as always for young bands wishing to blossom both creatively and commercially - is whether they can perfectly balance new ideas and inventiveness with whatever made them likeable in the first place. In short, they can and do.Where Boys & Girls unashamedly played with a retro template, staying within certain parameters Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Liverpool-based female trio Stealing Sheap’s second album Not Real frustrates. By turns immediate and deliberate, its Meccano-kit pop isn’t bolted together as a harmonious whole. Instead of meshing, electro beats and chanted vocals clash. It sounds as if an old-fashioned road-testing of the songs would have worked the bugs out, helped strip away extraneous textures, and injected some much-needed pep.It’s doubly frustrating as Not Real is not a bad album. It’s good. And often great. But the manifold buzz-friendly constituent parts often swamp what’s great about it. Head straight for track Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Most people like new music to sound as much as possible like music they’ve heard before. At the very least it should adhere to core genre tenets that don’t force listeners from their comfort zone. Music that’s regarded as brave by a conservative music media usually has the tiniest hint of something fresh, resulting in self-satisfied hurrahs for the excitements of Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire and the like. A label such as Belgium’s Crammed Discs, then, which consistently backs artists unbound by genre or even locality, never receives the mainstream attention it deserves as one of the world’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
David Kauffman and Eric Caboor: Songs From Suicide BridgeThe tale of David Kauffman and Eric Caboor is not unusual. Two singer-songwriters form a duo, play some live shows to zero interest, record an album which goes nowhere after it’s privately pressed and then – nothing. Kauffman and Caboor though recorded a gem which, in terms of its haunting mood and quality of songwriting, belies its obscurity. Songs From Suicide Bridge, which was barely released in 1984, is as good as James Taylor at his most naked, and as evocative as Elliott Smith. The album sounds as if it could have been Read more ...