New music
Barney Harsent
There are certain things that you approach a Brian Wilson album expecting. Melody and harmony of course, but also a certain kind of approach: a fearlessness to experiment. When he finally completed the famously unfinished Smile in 2004, it was a landmark moment (though not, if we’re honest, as satisfying as the old demo versions). Then, while 2008’s That Lucky Old Sun was never going to be Pet Sounds, there was, at least, enough that was engaging about a man revisiting the sounds of his youth to be glad that he’d made it.Sadly, the same can’t be said of No Pier Pressure, a largely Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Very often, the greatest impact comes without shouting. Subtlety can have a power lingering longer than the two-minute thrill of a yell. So it is with Bridges, the eighth album by Eivør. In the past, the Faroese singer-songwriter has collaborated with Canada’s Bill Bourne, the Danish Radio Big Band and Ireland’s Donal Lunny, and taken turns into country and jazz. Bridges builds on her last album though, 2012’s Room, as further evidence that she is now more focused than ever.Bridges is an all English-language album. It opens with the elegiac “Remember Me”: the song asks “Will I leave a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Morton Valence popped up six years ago and have released nothing but beautifully realised, lyrical, melancholic indie-Americana ever since. That's four albums of it, including this one. Strictly speaking, much of their oeuvre isn’t “indie-Americana” either, as it takes in everything from synth-pop to this album’s whispered disco-funk episode, “The Hawkline Discotheque” – yet there’s always a kernel of country & western desolation at the heart of it. Marinated in perfectly pitched 3.00 am bar-stool pathos, the band is built around the London partnership of songwriter-vocalist Robert Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It’s been just over a year since Future Islands’ Samuel T Herring famously gyrated, and chest-thumped his way through the band's latest single on American TV. The show was Letterman and the singer looked like a stevedore undergoing primal scream therapy. Within days the footage had gone viral. People have been talking about it ever since. Not least in the bar before last night’s show – how could he, they asked, possibly keep that up for an hour and a half?Heaven knows where he gets his energy from but Herring never missed a beat. This was his show. Dressed all in black, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Rude Boy is a rotten film. Nonetheless it exerts an inexorable draw as it includes live footage of The Clash which is amongst the best of any rock group on stage. The performance of “Safe European Home”, caught on camera in July 1978, is white hot. That is, the performance as seen. The audio track was subsequently modified in a recording studio.Rude Boy is not a documentary. It is a confabulation which didn’t represent The Clash as they saw themselves – which was a crafted persona anyway. The band did not want it released, and even had badges emblazoned "I don’t want Rude Boy Clash film" made Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Flesh Throne Press is the sixth album from heavy doom-rock duo Pombagira. Guitarist and singer Pete and drummer Carolyn Hamilton-Giles’s massive sound is characterised by portentous riffing soaked in reverb, vocals that could easily be mistaken for prime time Ozzy Osbourne, and sluggish but powerful drumming, all basted in early '70s production values. While Flesh Throne Press could, at a stretch, be described as meditative, it’s certainly not unobtrusive background music and needs to be played very loudly indeed.The obvious touchstones for Flesh Throne Press are the sound of classic Black Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Let’s get one thing straight: Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell is not a folk album. Folk, in this case, is a word used as a comfort blanket in an attempt to summarise the Michigan songwriter’s return to simple, acoustic music after the apocalyptic electronica of 2010’s The Age of Adz or the epic, high-concept Illinois. But folk music is a communal thing, predicated on culture and oral tradition. Carrie & Lowell – a sparse, beautiful and gut-wrenching album inspired by the writer’s difficult childhood and coming to terms with the death of his mother – is none of these things.For an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Specials: Specials, More Specials; The Special AKA: In the StudioAfter hearing the three albums credited to The Specials during their formative period with 2 Tone Records it becomes hard to think of them as a single band. Their clanky sounding, Elvis Costello-produced eponymous debut album, issued in October 1979, just about holds together overall, but its successors now sound as though nothing united the different directions they were firing off in. More Specials (October 1980) sits up-tempo cheerlessness alongside a warping of easy listening. In The Studio (June 1984) comes across Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
How many UK Number One albums have there been since the millennium that emanate truly vicious, caustic energy? How many have a furiousness which sets them completely apart? Royal Blood gave it a good whirl last year and Plan B’s Ill Manors in 2012 had dark, abject drive, but nothing has gone anywhere this monstrous assault of an album. Let’s go further. While Metallica are due kudos, and ignoring The Prodigy’s own output, you’d have to go back to Nirvana’s In Utero in 1993 before you hit a Number One album that’s a sonic match for the raw punk relentlessness of The Day Is My Enemy.Of course, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Polar Bear have been re-shaping the musical landscape (the experimental jazz end of it, at least), since 2004, and after a few years’ hibernation after 2010, the creature is back in rude health, this year’s album hot on the heels of last year’s Mercury-nominated In Each And Every One. Identifying the group’s generic mix feels increasingly daunting, as new elements are constantly layered onto the existing work. Leafcutter John’s electronica have always been an important part of the mix; here, their role is a more subdued, but crucial ambient underpinning, as rattly dub beats do more of the Read more ...
mark.kidel
The music of melancholia takes on varied forms on different continents: the religious spirit and anger of the blues contrasts with the edgy rebelliousness of Greek rembetika, and the spiritual longing and melismatic vocal whirling of the Turkish aman with the sweet sadness of Portuguese fado. In Vietnam, the black dog barks softly and blue moods are tinged with resignation and regret, an acceptance of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that owes a great deal to Confucian teachings on surrendering to one’s fate.In this collection of recent field recordings, we hear from a variety of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Not unreasonably, anyone might imagine that a band might lose a bit of their usual vigour if they found themselves four albums into their career playing in a room not much bigger than a church hall, miles from home on a cold Monday evening. Not so the Subways. The Hertfordshire three-piece bounced onto the stage in the Temple room in Birmingham’s Institute and tore straight into the anthemic “We Don’t Need Money to Have a Good Time” and didn’t let up until they finally left the stage more than an hour later with sweat dripping down the walls in torrents.More impressively, they also had the Read more ...