New music
Thomas H. Green
Even before Kate Tempest appears, it’s clear this isn’t going to be an evening of slam poetry jamming. Her band walk on, three guys who attack a line-up of electronic kit with vigour, one wielding drumsticks, alongside Anth Clarke, a striking black female MC, who looks like a 2007 nu-raver in baseball cap, white sunglasses and a crop top. They whip up a hammering electro racket before cutting out abruptly when Tempest walks on, all smiles, flowing blonde locks and a low-key black T-shirt. She breaks into “Marshall Law” from her Mercury Music Prize-nominated album Everybody Down. “Everywhere Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This October lo-fi, fuzzy VHS-style footage of Kylie Minogue in a ripped tee-shirt swaying on a mattress in a messy loft apartment singing Flight Facilities’ breakthrough song, “Crave You”, popped up in internet-land. It was an unexpected move that successfully amped up expectations for the Australian duo’s debut album. Kylie’s acapella appears on the album, uncredited, as well as the original, a smooth, sleepy, longing, slothful love song and lazy dance throb which first appeared in 2010. It made clubland sit up and pay attention. If this album had swiftly followed, ahead of the deep house Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
If a band gets up and says “We are only going to be playing songs from our new album, not actually released here yet” normally most audiences would groan mightily. But somehow Susheela Raman has educated her audience to expect the unexpected. Her somewhat wayward musical path has included Indo-jazz, rock covers, Tamil voodoo music and introspective songs. It has not been one that a manager or record company would have recommended. They tend to like more of the same.Susheela and her band did all the songs from the new album The Queen Between, only officially released in France I believe so far Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In the end, I had to disable every auto-correction feature in my word processing package to complete the sentence. Wiggly red lines and pop-up boxes were swarming all over the words “philosophy” and “Cheryl”. But eventually the machine understood: Cheryl’s fourth album has a philosophy. Not only that, but it also has a philosopher (Alan Watts) intoning worthily on the opening track about the meaning of life, with Cheryl first speaking, then (on subsequent tracks) singing her response.What she says is perfectly sensible at the level, perhaps, of a lifestyle column in a glossy magazine, though Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Jazz. Is there any other term in contemporary culture so widely recognised, yet so difficult to define? Now in its 22nd year, the London Jazz Festival offers an annual global snapshot of the condition of this most disputed of music form, with the usual big names, but more excitingly, many new, young ones, which is what I have focused on here: acts indicative of the scene today.Wherever you have a tradition, there’s always a temptation to turn it into a dogma, but one of the delights of jazz is the speed of its evolution, morphing before your eyes and ears into a new shape and sound. Surely Read more ...
Guy Oddy
When TV On The Radio released their breakthrough album, Dear Science in 2008, they were hailed in some quarters as saviours of indie music through a modest injection of intellectualism and an eye for throwing the unexpected into the mix. Six years on and three years since Nine Types Of Light, it all feels like we’ve been here before.Recent single, “Happy Idiot” is pure homage to New Order and is catchy and danceable without slipping into daft clichés. Elsewhere Tunde Adebimpe, David Sitek and their merry men show off their 80s fetish with hints of Echo and the Bunnymen on “Could You” and Read more ...
peter.quinn
Michael League is the Grammy Award-winning bassist, composer, producer and bandleader with NYC-based jazz-funk-fusion band Snarky Puppy. Formed in Denton, Texas, in 2004, Snarky Puppy is comprised of a collective of over 30 musicians. In addition to touring and recording, the band is committed to music education, holding over 100 clinics, workshops, and masterclasses in the US, Canada, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.Snarky Puppy released their debut album, The Only Constant, in 2006. Following the band's fifth album, Tell Your Friends (2010), League launched his own Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Eight musical cities, eight films, eight sounds, eight songs: grasping the scope of Dave Grohl’s ambition with the Sonic Highways project is a strenuous business. The album cover, all distorted visual references packed together, looks more like a dystopian computer game than music from the honest-to-goodness Dave Grohl. It doesn’t sit well with the Foo Fighters’ core strengths: their frank, immersive, overwhelming energy and emotional honesty. And the connection between TV series and album is strained.The HBO docs, currently showing on BBC Four, in which Dave Grohl talks to musicians from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Cyril Davies' All-Stars: Radio Sounds of Cyril Davies Various Artists: Girls With GuitarsAn escalating side effect of the current vogue for vinyl is that some reissues are being released only in that format – and some are so interesting they merit covering. theartsdesk saw this a while ago with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Jimmy Page’s Lucifer Rising soundtrack and John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil. So, once again, this week’s reissues aren’t available on CD.The compilation Girls With Guitars does though draw from a series of CDs – three so far – issued under that title, each of which Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Endless River, a contemplatively ambient opus comprising four pieces made up of 17 instrumental sections and a concluding song, is Pink Floyd’s second “last” album. Their first sign-off was 1982’s dreary The Final Cut, virtually a Roger Waters solo excursion that demonstrated, as did much of The Wall, how crucial to Floyd’s characteristic sound were Richard Wright’s lambent keyboards-playing and his gently yearning vocals, not least on the Meddle masterpiece “Echoes”.Ousted during The Wall sessions, Wright rejoined guitarist-lead vocalist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason for the post- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The voice is unmistakably Icelandic. Fluting and dancing around the notes, the words it carries are broken into segments which don’t respect syllables. Although singing in English, Hildur Kristín Stefánsdóttir hasn’t sacrificed her Icelandic intonation.The music itself is also unmistakably Icelandic. As with fellow Icelanders múm, electronica has been assimilated bringing a glitchiness which knocks the lush, ebbing and flowing arrangements off balance. Yet the totality is folky and warmly intimate.Innra, the third album from Rökkurró, is a lovely thing – a musical postcard from a world where Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Röyksopp have mustered fantastic moments during their career, notably the awesome floor-filler "Eple", one of pop’s most joyous, bouncy instrumentals. Since appearing at the turn of the century from the creative excitement of Norway’s second city, Bergen, which was bubbling over with electronic mavericks at the time, they have released four albums, each riding enthusiastically, accessibly and imaginatively across the landscape of electronic pop, usually with a strong house flavour. Now, however, alongside the claim their fifth will be their final album, they give us a melancholic synth-pop Read more ...