New music
Russ Coffey
Well, the vocals were certainly formidable...but what else would you expect? As a teenager George Ezra says he would listen for hours to his dad’s Leadbelly albums, whilst gazing at sleeve notes that read: “This voice is so big you may need to turn your record player down.” That was Ezra’s inspiration. Last night his own voice was sufficient to fill Brixton Academy.The 21-year-old arrived on stage in a blaze of spotlights looking tall and preppy. He walked to a spot just left of centre and launched into the jaunty “Cassy O’”. The young and thirsty crowd – the room had more than something of Read more ...
peter.quinn
Aged 91, and as frisky as a newborn puppy, the US singer, pianist and songwriter Bob Dorough is a sui generis stylist whose smart lyrics – delivered in an understated southern brogue – and nimble pianism which nods to both bebop and swing masters, combine to produce something quite unlike anything else in jazz. But what really lit up the Pizza Express Jazz Club was the joie de vivre of Dorough's performance, his humour and love of the ludic.The gig saw him reunited with the London-based musicians who facilitated and played on his terrific 2006 album for the Candid label, Small Day Tomorrow: Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The past few years have seen a glut of successful rock comebacks – in fact, acts like Judas Priest, Kiss and Saxon are rocking as hard now as they ever did. Unfortunately, for every group that has defied the years, there’s another who should have hung up the Spandex years ago. Scorpions, it would seem, are one such band. As a fan of euro-rock it gives me no pleasure to say it, but this return to the studio adds nothing to their back-catalogue.Ironically, the album came about while the band members were making plans for their retirement. As a final "thank-you" to their fans they'd been Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Billie Holiday’s anniversary this year deserves much celebration, and British soul singer and X-Factor alumna Rebecca Ferguson last night got the party swinging. Her new album, Lady Sings the Blues, which comes out next month, is a tribute to Holiday’s 1956 release of the same name, containing about half of the same songs, delivered with Ferguson’s powerful (and over-amplified) soul-ballad voice, with – in the live show – much humour and charm on the side. Without any formal training, and with enough real-life distractions to derail all but the most dedicated, Holiday developed a highly Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Those with long memories may remember Tad from the first wave of Seattle grunge. The band accompanied Nirvana on their first UK tour and released some lively metal-heavy records such as God’s Balls, Salt Lick and Eight-Way Santa, before disappearing in the late 90s. 15 or so years later, mainman Tad Doyle is back with a sludge rock, pagan rite of immense proportions.Clearly Tad’s new band, Brothers of the Sonic Cloth, don’t have a life full of sunshine and flowers, as their debut album is not exactly stuffed full of life affirming ditties. Brothers of the Sonic Cloth does, however, feel very Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The 1960s media's wild excitement about the space race is now almost forgotten. The era when every boy wanted to be an astronaut is ancient history. The period is, however, a goldmine for gloriously kitsch cosmic samples, a fact electronic groups such as The Orb have taken advantage of. Conversely, the new album from Public Service Broadcasting mines the area for neither irony nor comedy. The London duo’s second album is, instead, determined to celebrate humanity’s wide-eyed initial glee at blasting beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.Musically Public Service Broadcasting are somewhat Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Had it not been for the fact that Charli “XCX” Aitchison had struggled to find a hit of her own until last summer’s Fault in Our Stars-soundtracking “Boom Clap”, I’d be convinced that she had tapped into some secret formula for producing perfect pop hits. “I Love It”, the rabble-rousing breakup anthem she wrote for Swedish electropop duo Icona Pop and her attention-grabbing hook on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” share a distinguishable swagger, but had little impact on the negligible success of her 2013 major label debut True Romance. In the fickle world of pop music, that should have been enough to Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There’s a danger in an artist having their work reinterpreted that the end result will be little more than a rough outline of the original. Look at Metallica’s axe job on the Velvet Underground for instance. Still, on the bright side, at least they increased the band’s "reach" to include jocks and morons.Following a series of live shows over the last few years, Throbbing Gristle alumni and art-dance legends Chris & Cosey were inundated with requests for recordings of the live versions of old songs and ended up complying, dressing up their back catalogue for a night out on the tiles.So, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: Junk CultureOMD’s fifth album, Junk Culture, followed 1983’s Dazzle Ships into the shops. Where that was experimental, fragmented, wilful, used found sounds and, in places, eschewed melody and traditional song form, 1984’s glossy release was recorded at Montserrat’s swish Air Studios, the facility founded by George Martin which was favoured by Dire Straits, Elton John and Paul McCartney. Dazzle Ships was influenced by Stockhausen. Junk Culture featured the mambo-esque calypso “All Wrapped Up”, a weedy echo of early Eighties chart funsters Modern Romance.Of Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The death of Steve Strange, aged 55, was both a surprise and not a surprise to me. His adult life in and out of the spotlight had been something of an unpredictable rollercoaster ride where anything could happen.I had followed his career since the late 1970s and the early 1980s when he was at the forefront of the New Romantic movement, minding the door and acting as general tastemaker at the Blitz Club in Covent Garden. Then in 2001 I was approached by a publisher to ghostwrite his autobiograply, Blitzed!. His contemporary Martin Kemp had just had great success with his book, True, and there Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
While much of Hexadic is a blast, the first album from Six Organs of Admittance since 2012’s Ascent offers much that’s familiar: the snail’s pace heaviosity and shifts between bone-crushing density and desiccated sparseness of Dylan Carlson’s Earth, spaghetti-western guitar interludes (also favoured by Carlson), an approach to malformed riffing and guitar mangling blending Bad Moon Rising-era Sonic Youth, Harry Pussy and early Pussy Galore. Six Organs of Admittance’s prolific constant presence Ben Chasny used to be tarred as freak-folk, but nowadays his various musical guises hop with ease Read more ...
Jasper Rees
First there was the movie, the album, the book and the app. Now there is the tour. American Interior, Gruff Rhys’s postmodern narrative concept, has spread tentacles in any number of media. At the heart of it is the mythic story of John Evans, a young Welsh explorer who in the 1780s took himself off deep into the unvanquished heart of America in search of a myth, the lost Welsh-speaking tribe of Madog. A serpentine river odyssey that involved him in vast geopolitical forces, it has spawned a suite of songs about the solitude of adventure. Onstage, Rhys presents them in the form of a lecture Read more ...