New music
Peter Culshaw
The most extraordinary bunch of global musicians I met this year were the groups who were singing on the barricades during the Ukrainian Revolution on the Maidan Square, foremost among them the all-female Dakh Daughters, who describe themselves as "freak cabaret". The video below is well worth a look as they sing in front of massed ranks of police and army to an exhilarated crowd (the music comes in after five minutes): The band grab lyrics wherever they can – one of their hits “The Rose of Donbass” uses as a chorus a Shakespeare sonnet “Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud” and, Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Some say the albums that endure the longest are those that comfort us in our dark nights of the soul: LPs such as Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Joni Mitchell’s Blue. So what’s an artist to do when he’s outgrown the intensity of youth and the peaks and troughs have flattened out? Does life become less interesting? Or, necessarily, more predictable? Beck wrote Morning Phase while recovering from a back injury. More generally, though, it expresses a fine range of sentiments to meditate on as you grow older – melancholy, experience and cautious optimism.The “morning” referred to in the title is Read more ...
theartsdesk
From the clubs of Berlin to the pubs of Birmingham, via Somerset and New York, our new music writers select their most memorable gigs of 2014. Drenge, Hare & Hounds, Birmingham, FebruaryIn February, teenage drum and guitar two-piece Drenge were basking in the unexpected media glare caused by Tom Watson MP. They were also touring their self-titled debut album of high-octane rock ’n’ roll, and those curious enough to see them in a room above a pub in South Birmingham were treated to a spectacle of raw music and snotty attitude. Fiery tunes like “Gun Crazy”, “I Wanna Break You In Half” Read more ...
Tim Cumming
You’d have to go back almost 20 years, and to 1996's Spirit, to name a Willie Nelson album with more than one or two original new songs. The nine for Band of Brothers was a real cause for celebration. He may be 81, he may not fly over to perform in the UK again (I hope to be proved wrong) but he's not lost form.These new songs sound like they had to be written, and from the inside. They’re co-written with producer Buddy Cannon, and the working method was for Nelson to send Cannon demos of the songs, around which Cannon arranged a sympathetic acoustic band line–up of seasoned sessioneers – a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: I'm Just Like You – Sly's Stone Flower 1969–70Although a fixture on America’s mainstream charts since 1967’s “Dance to the Music”, Sly and the Family Stone’s August 1969 appearance at Woodstock changed things forever. After seizing the attention of a massive white audience at the festival, Sly Stone would move from the Bay Area to Los Angeles. The band then gradually fell apart. The greater success brought chaos yet also offered Stone the opportunity to stamp his personality on a new record label where he would be the house producer and writer. The appropriately named Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Finland’s album of the year, the number one, gold-selling and best-of-2014 poll-topper Pepe & Saimaa, has barely registered elsewhere. Probably not a crime but a damn shame nonetheless as the album, released in May, is undoubtedly an all-time great. Despite being entirely in Finnish, Pepe & Saimaa is crammed with beatific melodies carried by an emotive, warm voice evoking pre-falsetto Bee Gees, David Bowie, Scott Walker and Brian Wilson. The voice seamlessly meshes with music nodding to mid-Seventies Kraftwerk, similarly dated Isley Brothers and The Beach Boys. With full orchestration Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Far too many years ago, Roddy Frame – masquerading as Aztec Camera – took his first bow with an album of wonderfully vital pop songs. High Land, Hard Rain was jaunty with youth but somehow freighted with musical wisdom, the fruit of ingesting a smorgasbord of influences. More than three decades on, the face that stares out of the cover of his fourth solo album - his first since 2006 - wears the marks of middle age, but the thread connecting that first utterance with the voice on Seven Dials is remarkably strong.What's clear on Seven Dials, which was released in May, is that Frame has lost Read more ...
mark.kidel
Leonard Cohen, grand rabbi of poetry and the blues, turned 80 this year, and like a perfectly matured brandy, he only gets better and better. On his most recent European tour, he managed to combine an atmosphere of deep and communal spiritual devotion with consummate entertainment. Many artists cannot always make the leap between live magic and studio precision, but he has succeeded with a new album that shines in a way no other did for me in 2014.Following hot on the footsteps of the excellent Old Ideas (2012), in which the Canadian singer and songwriter trawled the abyss with a mixture of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There are, probably, two things standing in the way of Against Me! topping as many best-of lists as they deserve to this year: firstly, the January release date, which tends to lead to many fine records being abandoned for the newest and shiniest; and secondly, the tortuous route it found to release at all. Label issues, intra-band politics and the small matter of the additional attention paid to the band's songwriter and frontwoman Laura Jane Grace's first album since coming out as transgender in 2012. However, right from the thudding, drums-only beginnings of the album's opening salvo (" Read more ...
Matthew Wright
There were silly hats, and venerable, bouncy songs for all the family at the O2 last night. The traditional Madness December tour was Christmas come early for most of the audience, who sang about home, love, and the Middle East as they might do in church next week with rather less enthusiasm. The band’s original hits still hit the spot, though there was also a sense that, as with Christmas carols, the new ones mean well, but just aren’t as good.The best half-dozen of Madness’ pop-ska fusion songs are among the most distinctive pieces of pop music ever created. They’re even better live, Read more ...
peter.quinn
Pianist Jason Moran's Grammy-nominated tribute to the legendary pianist, singer and composer, Fats Waller, effortlessly captures the joyousness and melodic beauty of the Harlem stride master's music. Joining Moran is vocalist Meshell Ndegeocello, and from the über-slow jam of “Ain't Nobody's Business” to the utterly seductive grooves of “The Joint Is Jumpin” and “Honeysuckle Rose”, the kind of galvanic presence that she brings to the project takes the material to entirely new emotional places. There are coruscating instrumentals, too, including a barnstorming solo spot for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Millions Like Us - The Story of the Mod Revival 1977–1989A “testosterone-fuelled youth movement” is how the opening paragraph of the introductory essay of this box set tags the mod revival. Aficionados of the “clean-cut, neatly dressed younger sibling of punk” were members of “an often violently defined tribe”. Concerts are described as battlegrounds: “punches were thrown” at “live appearances by The Chords.” In the individual commentaries on the 100 tracks collected, there is talk of “boot boys in parkas” and, for the band Small Hours, “live appearances sometimes Read more ...