New music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In a week packed with releases from music industry veterans including Neil Diamond, Chris De Burgh and Status Quo, it’s actually the new one from Slipknot that’s the most interesting. .5: The Gray Chapter is the mask-wearing Iowan metallers’ first album in six years, and their first since the 2010 death of founding member and bassist Paul Gray from an accidental overdose. As its title suggests, much of this album is a tribute to friend and colleague – and, as the genre suggests, it’s one that is brutal, honest and raw.Musical tributes to absent friends are not rare – “Silver Bridge”, from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Madness: One Step Beyond - 35th Anniversary EditionLast time One Step Beyond was reissued on CD, for its 30th Anniversary, the album was expanded to cover two discs with added B-sides, tracks from EPs and a flexi-disc, a John Peel session as well some live cuts. The package was rounded out with five promo videos and liner notes by author Irvine Welsh.Now, five years on and 35 from its original October 1979 release, Madness’s debut long player resurfaces again in a multi-foldout digi-pack as a double-disc set. Disc Two is a DVD with four of the videos from last time (“The Prince” is Read more ...
Matthew Wright
A first live experience of the French-Cameroonian singer Sandra Nkaké leaves many questions unanswered. Once the immediate bewilderment has passed, the most pressing question for a British audience should be: why is this extraordinary performer not block-booking the festival circuit? In a single set, accompanied by flautist and controller of the electronics, Jî Drû, Nkaké gave a stunningly complete display, as voice, accompaniment, movement and stage presence combined to project her mesmerising, leonine charisma. For Georgia Mancio’s ReVoice Festival, it was an inspired booking.There’s a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Online comments for the preview stream of Kings and Queens of the Underground have been disappointing. So poor, in fact, they could have you checking Mr Idol’s new autobiography, Dancing With Myself, to see if Billy had insulted the authors personally. But, c'mon guys, the album really isn’t that bad! Ok, it’s overproduced and patchy, but once you ignore the worst three or four tracks, surely there's something rather loveable about this 58-year-old from Bromley still hung up on being a 20-year-old American punk.Inspired by writing his life story, this new album looks back on William Broad’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Apologies, I missed nearly half the concert. I turned up at 9.00 when I’d been told the gig began but they started half an hour early. Apparently it was a last minute decision. There we go. When I crushed into the back of the Concorde 2, a space jammed mostly with men between 35 and 55, Buzzcocks guitarist Steve Diggle, clad in a polka dot shirt, was singing “Sick City Sometimes” from their eponymous 2003 album. It’s no classic but Diggle was throwing his every ounce of zest at it.The band has always been based around the dynamic of Diggle and the other Buzzcocks lifer, Pete Shelley. The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
John Foxx was one of electro-pop’s original instigators. His alienated synth sound and Ballardian sci-fi vision defined the genre in its early days. He was, for instance, an acknowledged influence on Gary Numan who became a global star in 1980 as a result. Foxx did not, but his Metamatic album is still regarded as an important stepping stone in electronic music’s development. With a sideline in academia and graphic conceptual art, Foxx retains a rabid fan-base who follow his every move. He’s also extraordinarily prolific, recording at least twenty albums since the millennium, including Read more ...
Russ Coffey
From David Attenborough’s spoken introduction to the blonde, robed backing singers, Biophilia Live sees Björk in full experimental flow. Sometimes the film seems almost as if documenting the ceremonial workings of a science-based cult rather than covering an avant-garde pop show. Musically it is reverent, the atmosphere is cerebral, and, above all, Björk’s persona is shamanistic.Biophilia (literally love of nature) was released in 2011 as a conceptual, multiplatform project. In addition to the CD the diminutive singer oversaw a series of interactive educational IPad apps. In Iceland the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As vaporous as the haze on its cover, the sound of Kiasmos resonates like clouds sweeping across low mountain peaks, intermittently breaking into a storm or opening to reveal wan sunlight. Although firmly within the boundaries of electronica, the self-titled debut instrumental album by Kiasmos still beats with an organic heart.There are touches of a Balearic pulse on “Looped”, a pattering glitchiness on “Lit” and even a hard house beat opening and punctuating the acid-esque “Swayed”. But live drums, grand piano, viola, violin and cello temper the wash of electronics and softly throbbing Read more ...
Guy Oddy
From the sonic vantage point of the Ting Tings’ new album, Katie White and Jules De Martino’s explosive appearance in 2008 with hit single “That’s Not My Name”, with its lively mix of indie guitars, electronics and bolshy vocals, seems a long time ago. The dominant sound of Super Critical is emphatically funk, disco and chart pop.The title track is a lively, Prince-like groove with brass embellishments, a funky bass and even the Purple One’s trademarked high-pitched backing vocals. “Green Poison” is a mash-up of Prince-like funk pop and the riff from Stevie Wonder’s “Superstitous”. “Daughter Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Since part of every star’s make-up and appeal is their backstory, can we ignore how unremittingly dull Jessie J’s has been? She cut her teen teeth on a TV talent show, left the Brit School (pop star university) the same year as yawn-inducing Leona Lewis, apprenticed as a Sony songwriter, creating ditties for the odious Chris Brown, then “graduated” to official pop stardom. What a yawn! Sounds like a CV, like a proper job, all good, honest hard work and very boring for it. And that first album, with the perennially irritating “Price Tag”. God alive, that was annoying. So listening to her third Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If you’ve ever found the idea of “cock rock” to be unnecessarily gendered, then the debut album from Ex Hex – an all-female trio who, between them, have created the best 35 minutes of ballsy rock 'n' roll I’ve heard since Sleater-Kinney’s “The Fox” – is for you. If you haven’t, and you’re just looking for something new to listen to that’s uncomplicated and up-front that will blow the cobwebs out from between your ears, then Ex Hex is also for you. And if you’ve been struggling to find a record that would match the giddy girl-rock high you got the first time you listened to Wild Flag’s first Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Bevis Frond: MiasmaMiasma wasn’t meant to have an afterlife. The Bevis Frond’s debut album wasn’t even by a band. Its creator, Nick Saloman, wrote all the songs, played every instrument and recorded it in a Walthamstow bedroom on a 4-track system which used cassette tapes. Saloman pressed the album in 1987 and had few expectations beyond, as he says in the liner notes included with this reissue, “giving it to friends and family and sticking the rest [of the copies] up in the attic forever.”Today, The Bevis Frond are still a going concern and a Saloman-fronted band as such. Their Read more ...