New music
Russ Coffey
Maybe they really just don’t make ‘em like they used to. The latest in 2014’s prestigious roll-call of bus-pass rockers is Judas Priest - back minus one original guitarist (relative youngster Richie Faulkner replaces K.K. Dowling). Redeemer of Souls may have been recorded by a bunch of guys mainly in their sixties but the LP feels almost as preposterous, exhilarating and entertaining as anything they’ve ever done. It’s also a real contender for metal album of the year.Comparisons will inevitably be made with Sabbath’s recent 13. Both are comebacks of sorts and both bands are synonymous with Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Minstrel of Misery or the Poet Laureate of Bedsitland: Morrissey has been musical marmite since he first entered the public consciousness with The Smiths’ debut single, “Hand in Glove”, over thirty years ago. World Peace Is None Of Your Business may be a return to form, but it is unlikely to change his public image. No doubt he will be fine with that.The lyrics, predictably enough, are from the Morrissey that we have all come to recognise and the music is still mostly dominated by the white boy, indie sound that he has long made his own – albeit with occasional trumpet and acoustic guitar Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Right from their lo-fi beginnings, Glasgow’s Honeyblood have always been able to deliver the perfect kiss-off. It’s why it’s a relief to see that the duo’s self-titled debut album retains a fair slice of that crackle and hiss, Stina Tweeddale’s candy-coated vocals still providing a deceptive delivery method for her often venomous lyrics.It’s not always big and it’s certainly not always clever - new single “Super Rat”, for example, combines three minutes of likening a cheating ex-boyfriend to the titular rodent with a playground chant of “scumbag, sleaze, slimeball, grease” - but Honeyblood Read more ...
joe.muggs
As dance music once more sweeps the mainstream, we're returned to the situation of the 1990s where singer and song can seem to become a little detached. Parades of “featured vocalists” deliver refrains for the producer teams who are queueing up to repeat the success of Route 94, Clean Bandit, Duke Dumont and above all Disclosure. And as the field gets more crowded, so the requirements for the singers to sit back, know their place and deliver the simplest hooks become more pressing.Some new generation singers do manage to step into the spotlight of course. Rita Ora parlayed her big hit with DJ Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This year’s edition of the Gnawa Festival in the medina of the beautiful coastal town of Essaouira featured two spectacular fusions – between Bessekou Kouyate with Hamid El Kasri on the closing Sunday night, and on Saturday night – in the early hours of Sunday morning, in fact, on the main stage at Moulay Hassan – bassist, band leader and Miles Davis alumni Marcus Miller with Mustapha Bakbou, forging a dense, deeply rhythmic fusion to match the pounding Atlantic ocean on one side, and the long, curving bay on the other (with its own late-night beach stage in the distance).Earlier in the day, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Sia Tolno was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, had a violent father, was forced to leave the country due to the civil war and ended up in the harsh world of Conakry nightclubs. Life was no bed of roses, in other words. The inspiring thing about this album is how she now stands loud and proud in the tradition of powerful African women like Angelique Kidjo and Miriam Makeba. This, her fourth and most ambitious album is her take on Afro-beat. Her collaborator is Tony Allen, Fela Kuti’s legendary drummer and co-architect of Afro-beat 40-plus years on from the original sound when Allen was the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: CSNY 1974Considering that their 1974 tour was the world’s first series of dates limited to outdoor stadia since the Beatles in 1966, it’s appropriate the long-gestating collection chronicling Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s mammoth jaunt is an all-encompassing three-CD box set which also includes a DVD and a hefty, copiously illustrated booklet with a definitive in-depth essay on the tour.Although previously bootlegged and not hard to find, the dates did not – curiously, since it was a landmark tour designed to rake in cash – spawn a live album Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If you're not familiar with Jon Allen, here's a few facts: he possesses a fine gravelly voice, and nimble fingers. More than anything, though, Allen has an uncanny knack for penning a good tune. He learnt his craft while sequestered up in a woodland shack. Actually no, that’s Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. The truth is Allen’s back-story is a little prosaic by today’s standards – he studied song-writing at a performing arts college in Liverpool. Still, what he lacks in romance he makes up for with sweat and perseverance. In keeping with its cover, Deep River, Allen's third LP, mainly flows at Read more ...
Matthew Wright
If, like Wynton Marsalis, you’re a gatekeeper of the jazz tradition, there’s little you’ll defend more staunchly than the Blue Note back catalogue. With the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, in London on a short tour, he presented a glossy and intriguing selection of Blue Note repertoire before an ecstatic audience in last night’s Barbican concert. Technically, this was a tour de force. Where the components of some big bands lose definition and melt into a raucous fudge, JALC boasted talon-sharp brass bite, regal articulation, and a deeply golden lustre. Marsalis’ traditionalism is well Read more ...
caspar.gomez
PrologueOn Thursday 26 June I arrive at a cloudy but warm Glastonbury Festival, set up camp, eat sausages, chase after DJ Richie Hawtin for an interview that never happens, then acclimatise, settle, let this hedonist Mecca do its work on me…Friday 27 JuneIt starts as spotting. Then it lets go. The sound of droplets pattering against the outer skin of the brown four-person tent becomes a regular tattoo. I lie within, waiting out the mind-fuzz of yesterday’s cider, whisky and chemicals, munching on a breakfast of Morrisons Cheese Savouries (which are, incidentally, addictive). I wonder if 2014 Read more ...
Matthew Wright
French band Pulcinella is little known over here, but the release of their third album Bestiole (meaning nothing more ribald than “tiny creatures”, apparently), coincides with a brief UK tour, and is looking like the beginnings of a breakthrough. A quartet of sax, accordion, percussion and bass, with an exotic array of guest instruments, they’re self-consciously experimental, but melodic and humorous with it. Their swirling sound-world of whimsical, gothic circus noir draws on jazz, tango and alt rock, but balances the mixture with feisty originality in independent territory in between.The Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Admired by Brazilian musical royalty like Milton Nascimento and Caetano Veloso, Maria Gadú, at the age of 27, already has four platinum albums to her credit, not to mention a couple of Latin Grammys. Her music blends the urban chaotic modernity of her hometown São Paulo with the grassroots sounds of the North East and Rio. Born Mayra Correa Aygadoux in 1986 Gadú was something of a child prodigy, and began writing songs and recording them onto cassette at the age of 10. Remarkably enough one of them, "Shimbalaie", would eventually make it onto her debut album and become her first hit Read more ...