New music
Matthew Wright
Aaron Copland was an unlikely musical portraitist of the American plains and prairies. Son of Jewish immigrants from Brooklyn and student of modernism with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, he nonetheless created the quintessential American orchestral sound with a series of popular (“vernacular” was his phrase) works in 1930s and 1940s. Last night three of his most popular pieces were paired with two new pieces inspired by jazz, that other great American twentieth-century music. While the first half of last night’s concert, three Copland pieces, was charismatic if a little scrappy, the second, the UK Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The story is a familiar one: four lads rattling through three-minute garage rock songs full of sweary, lovelorn couplets. With the exception of the name (a tribute, apparently, to a busker that frontman Van McCann met as a child) there’s little to set Llandudno four-piece Catfish and the Bottlemen apart on paper - but there’s something about their debut album that makes me smile. Clocking in at just under 40 minutes, making it the perfect length for my walk home from work, The Balcony is the aural equivalent of orange squash: drunk too often it tastes cheap and a little bit sickly, but Read more ...
mark.kidel
Tricky has consistently displayed the genius of the self-taught DIY music magician and his latest album, a varied collection of sounds sombre, mysterious, melancholy and ceaselessly surprising, proves his continued worth as one of the most creative of the ground-breaking musicians who emerged from Bristol in the 1990s.In giving the album his real name, “Adrian Thaws”, he once again proclaims his mixed-raced roots, the Knowle West boy who turned his wounds – the loss of his poet mother when he was a young child, asthma and eczema so serious he was often kept away from school – into a source of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Dream Your Life Away is the debut album from Vance Joy, a pop-folkie whose style suggests Ed Sheeran without the cloying niceness. These songs of young love and of a young man spreading his wings are pretty much created out of little more than vocals and an acoustic guitar. There is occasional support from other musicians, but this is understated and the rolling groove that characterises much of Dream Your Life Away is pretty much just Joy singing and strumming along.Most of the first half of the album is mellow and laid-back but still manages to swing from time to time. The previously Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I suspect that, a good few years after a dodgy couple of albums, Ryan Adams has reached a stage in his career where they’re all going to be dubbed a return to form. I seem to remember writing something similar about 2011’s Ashes and Fire – but here we are, three years on, and I couldn’t tell you the last time I listened to it (I should probably mention that I’m writing this not just as a critic, but as somebody with his artwork tattooed on my arm).There are a few things about Ryan Adams – the album, not the man – that make the story. Firstly there’s that self-titled thing, which will always Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Calypso CrazeIn 1956, calypso battled it out with rock ’n’ roll to become America’s hottest musical craze. As the year ended, newspaper reports quoted pundits predicting it would wipe Elvis and his like out. One such was Reverend Norman O’Connor, a “Catholic chaplain at Boston University and a jazz authority”, who said “rock ’n’ roll is on the way out.” Showbiz trade mag Variety concurred in December, proclaiming calypso “the exterminator of rock ’n’ roll” and “the hot trend.” They seemed to have a point. Pop’s first million selling album became Harry Belafonte’s Calypso, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The genteel north London of the Roundhouse isn’t the obvious venue for a ladtronica and bloke rock band. Especially one that’s recently come from headlining Glastonbury and is used to open horizons, and sound systems more dangerously ramped-up than Primrose Hill house prices. By giving a performance that wowed an audience of mainly young couples, Kasabian showed a character and identity that’s more nuanced than the standard hairy bloke depiction allows.They played two sets, with a first set that seemed deliberately lower-key and less spectacular than the second, as if they were supporting Read more ...
joe.muggs
A fleetingly interesting exercise with this album is to try and imagine it as an instrumental record. Would it pass muster for its high production values and neat fusions of Celtic folk, bluegrass, West African sounds, blues, prog, some U2 widescreen action and a little bit of Nineties mainstream electronica? Or would it just seem like glib, WOMAD-tastic fusion, or perhaps the sort of thing that successful session musicians might fling together to soundtrack a high-class travel documentary?There's no question it's exquisitely mixed and structured, and there are certain instrumental breaks, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There’ll be no Lady Gaga tonight. Tony Bennett’s most public performances over the last 20 years have been in duets with such lesser talents, or in Glastonbury’s borderline ironic old-timers’ slot. The crackly recording of Sinatra calling him “the greatest singer in the world” which precedes him has introduced the 88-year-old for decades now, as if he still needed the recommendation of the long-gone Chairman of the Board. But these days, Tony Bennett stands alone. The “saloon singer” Sinatra called him is a vanishing art he embodies. His two nights at the Royal Festival Hall, instead of one Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Karen O’s first solo outing is an intimate confessional full of short, lo-fi, angst filled songs which mark a period in her life when she “wasn’t sure I’d ever fall in love again.” Recorded in private over 2006-2007 after a break-up with Spike Jonze the year previously, the album leaves the listener to ponder not only her mind-set at that time but the reasoning for making this heartfelt debut available now. Released under Julian Casablanca’s label Cult, and accompanied by a tour of small gigs, the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs' extraordinary front woman is currently showing no signs of despair. Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The swamp, all grime and alligators, is not somewhere most jazz or rock fans will expect to spend much time, a soggy Glastonbury aside, and it’s a puzzling title for a work of reflective delicacy and sympathetic instrumental colouring. Partisans have now been playing together for 18 years, and this album, their fifth (a leisurely work-rate indicative mainly of how busy the players are elsewhere) is a sensitive tonal portrait and quiet trove of electronic loveliness. The sweetness of Robson’s guitar and Thad Kelly’s bass, singing and growly, is layered with Siegel’s reeds, from piping soprano Read more ...
Tim Cumming
In Budapest, when your building turns a century old, you’re invited to be part of Budapest 100, a city-wide birthday celebration-cum-open-house invitation. It’s a direct way of experiencing the applied, lived-in artistry of the city, past and present. The absent friend’s apartment I’m writing this from was built in 1913, in Ferencváros, the city’s 9th District, in what was then a working-class area, home to the city’s biggest football team, and one of the flashpoints of the 1956 uprising against the Soviets. I’m a few blocks down Mester Utca on the south side of Pest, a half-hour walk Read more ...