New music
Katherine McLaughlin
Kicking off with an epic eight-and-a-half-minute-long tribute to New Jersey’s Palisades amusement Park and a lament to forgotten friendships, the Counting Crows seventh studio album intentionally invokes the spirit and sound of Seventies rock. The opening track has high aspirations with its triumphant horns, confident piano chords, shore setting and coming of age theme clearly paying homage to Bruce Springsteen’s early work, most obviously the Born to Run album.Tearing away across time, states and continents, and evoking the bands of a highly romanticised era, Counting Crows map the geography Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Game Theory: Blaze of GloryThe news of the death on 15 April last year of Scott Miller was a shock. Although hardly a household name, he was one of pop’s great auteurs. The California-born songwriter may no longer be with us, but the music he made with his bands Alternate Learning, Game Theory and The Loud Family will forever testify to his originality, single-mindedness and, above all, way with a tune and a meaning-filled snarky lyric. The structure of his songs twisted and turned, but they were always melodic. He was clever, eloquent, sarcastic and, in person, always charming. All of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Blondie may have been around the block a few times since they got together in New York in 1974, but they seemingly have no intention of settling into a comfortable existence of just playing the hits to ever-diminishing artistic returns. Their present set-list features large swathes of recent album Ghosts of Download, as well a fair amount of other unlikely surprises in between the tunes that provided a soundtrack to the teenage years of many of their now-greying audience. That said, those who came along to hear the highlights of classic albums, like 1978’s Parallel Lines, or unforgettable Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tulegur Gangzi describes his music as “Mongolian grunge” and “nomad rock.” Thrashing at an acoustic guitar, the Inner-Mongolian troubadour is singing in the khomei style, the throat-singing which sounds part-gargle, drone and chant – or all three at once. His approach to the guitar is just as remarkable. With his left hand sliding up and down the neck, the open tunings he employs set up a sibilant plangence nodding to the trancey folk-rock of Stormcock Roy Harper. The slashing, descending guitar which kicks in near the close of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” appears to also be in Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Sarah-Jane Morris is in every sense an original voice. One of Britain’s most distinctive and versatile singers, she has enjoyed commercial success, spending five weeks at number 1 with the Communards’ version of "Don’t Leave Me This Way" in 1986, and selling 100,000 of her self-titled solo album in 1989. She has the distinction of having “Me and Mrs Jones”, which featured on the album, banned by the BBC for suspected lesbianism.She decided, however, that the baubles of a mainstream pop career did not suit her commitment to music that mattered, that had principles, that told important stories Read more ...
Heidi Goldsmith
Punctually, following a tension-building countdown, Elbow entered the blue-lit stage at London’s legendary Roundhouse, beers in hand, and gestured the 1500-strong audience into a mass toast. With his slight stoop, soft Manchester accent and wayward estate-agent appearance Guy Garvey’s frontman persona takes more from familiar folk Daddies like Loudon Wainwright III than from the styled superstars also headlining at the iTunes Festival.And yet, opening with "Charge" from the new album The Take Off and Landing of Everything, their sound was a mighty urban wash of deep, bassy organ and slick Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Sam Sweeney’s Fiddle: Made In The Great War is the first solo project from one of the vibrant British folk scene’s most exciting players. Sam Sweeney made his name in Bellowhead, as a duo with Hannah James, in The Full English, in Jon Boden’s Remnant Kings, and Fay Hield’s band, and in Kerfuffle, alongside other regular and irregular groupings.It’s his fiddle that’s the real star of a thoughtful, moving and intimate account of its maker, its making, and its afterlife. Made but not assembled by one Richard Howard in 1915, a young working-class man from Leeds who made his own instruments and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When a person approaches a Barbra Streisand album, they would be a fool to go in carrying the same expectations as with, say, the forthcoming collaboration between experimental frontiersmen Scott Walker & Sunn O))). Or even, in all honesty, the new Jesse Ware album, the new Marooon 5 album, or some such. This applies most especially to music journalists, so often obsessed with the vanguard, with what’s coming next, and dismissive of mainstream, comfortable or rehashed sounds. So let’s approach the 72 year old actress-diva-legend’s latest in the knowledge that her debut album appeared 51 Read more ...
David Nice
Swathes of this year’s final Late Night Prom were so invertebrate, amateurish even, that I was tempted to go home and throw out my Want One and Want Two CDs. I won’t, of course: Canadian American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has written some fabulous songs, and developed a unique vocal style to deliver them. But if the act of “hammering out a tune” is, as he puts it, "cosmic", as, very often, are the results, last night’s performance was aquatic, and not in a good way. Swimming around in front of an over-amplified orchestra – a much-expanded Britten Sinfonia conducted by Canadian Opera Read more ...
fisun.guner
The voice no longer soars with easeful power, nor does it possess that tingling, honey-coated purity that gave hits such as “Bridge Over Troubled Water” such emotional force. This should hardly come as a surprise, since Art Garfunkel is now 72. Away from Paul Simon, from whom he split in 1970, Garfunkel has had a long, stop-and-start solo career, occasionally writing and recording his own songs but mainly singing other people’s, including those unforgettable Simon hits.But it’s not just age that has affected his vocal cords. The last three and a half years saw Garfunkel suffering vocal cord Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Sometimes you don’t escape. Even for those of us with a sturdy frame and a good track record, every now and then, enjoying the ride means taking the pummelling. Thus, 36 hours after Bestival I sweat saline syrup over the keys, my back muscles spasm, poisoned, the inside of my head has been scoured as if by wire wool, my throat’s caustic, wrecked, my nose drooling putrefied gunk, my lungs hacking dustbowl bellows, my hands clawed into arthritic knots, my stomach bilious, my mind overcome with an aching desire for sleep, as well as the certain knowledge that all my dreams and ambitions are but Read more ...
joe.muggs
Aside from the title track, there are pieces here called “Febrile,” “Red Sex,” “Drowned in Water and Light,” “Kin to Coal.” You might not be surprised to learn, then, that this is not a set of jaunty singalongs. But neither is it the techno the young Bristol producer has become known for, either. If you wanted the point hammered home that this isn't an easily accessible record, the sub-two-minute opener “Febrile” appears to be an improvised jam between death metal drummer, road drill and police siren, punctuated with long silences, while the following instrumental “Red Sex” is a seasick Read more ...