New music
Matthew Wright
Gilles Peterson has been a fan of Brazilian music since a furtive teenage liaison with pirate radio. Now, very much at the other end of the radio wave, and after many decades’ advocacy of Brazilian music, he’s created Sonzeira, a collaborative band featuring his pick of the contemporary scene. This is no bossa nostalgia: the concept’s serious and football-free; the artists are little known outside Brazil; and the recording is cleanly, neutrally rendered. Even the traditional repertoire sounds new. Vasconcelos’ opening, a solo drum track, celebrates the centrality of rhythm to the Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Decidedly diverse in its musical offerings as ever, this year’s Field Day, which for the first time was spread over two days with the Pixies as a fitting finale, was gifted with glorious sunshine and a chipper ambience. Fresh ferocious voices breaking out and established names reaching back to their roots made for a harmonious mix of boldness and greatness.Thurston Moore’s exceptionally tight guitar skills and sparse melancholy lyrics gently weaved across the sunny afternoon breeze with the sublime sound similar to that of early Sonic Youth delivering a delightful wave of nostalgia. Meanwhile Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Hank Marvin (b 1941) was born Brian Rankin in Newcastle. At 16 he and his school friend, fellow guitarist Bruce Welch, headed for London to seek their fortune as musicians. They quickly found work at the 2i’s Coffee Bar in Soho, a seminal British rock’n’roll haunt. The pair were soon hired as Cliff Richard’s backing group, initially known as The Drifters and, eventually, as The Shadows. As well as accompanying Cliff Richard on early hits, the Shadows fired out a series of era-defining instrumentals such as “Apache”, “FBI” and "Kon-Tiki”. Together these releases came to sum up Britain’s take Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Bob Mould is one of the patron saints of that uplifting punk-pop sound married to angsty lyrics which has gone down so well with the alt-rock crowd since the first wave of hardcore punk ran out of steam in the mid-Eighties. First with the mighty Hüsker Dü and then the more straight ahead Sugar, his fuzzy guitar sound was instantly recognisable and clearly made some impression on the likes of Pixies and Nirvana.It is a sound that he has kept at arm's length for much of his solo career though, opting instead for stabs at reflective, acoustic maturity and even electronica. 2012’s Silver Age, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Something about First Aid Kit has always seemed a little too polished, too perfect. While there can be no denying that their 2012 breakthrough record The Lion’s Roar is a rich, lovely listen – in no small part thanks to the charm of Klara and Johanna Söderberg’s effortless harmonies – its strict adherence to the trail blazed by its transatlantic influences kept me from finding it as magical as the rest of the world seemed to. If the question is how do two sisters from Stockholm follow something as technically perfect as that album on their major label debut, its first single “My Silver Lining Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Too Slow to DiscoToo Slow to Disco is about the five years from 1975 onwards when men and woman alike sported billowing white shirts, had wind-swept, pouffed-up hair and sang frozen-nosed, freeze-dried songs in sensitive voices about love, love and more love. Fleetwood Mac defined the mellow, cotton-wool-shrouded sound of a California-dominated wave of singers and songwriters who weren’t going to break a sweat about anything despite being strung out on coke. The by-word was mellow.This fascinating compilation makes the case that the cocaine cowboys and lush ladies Read more ...
Aimee Cliff
When you have quite as much going on as 10-piece (in their current form) experimentalist Canadian indie band Arcade Fire do, it’s hard to know where to look. It’s a fact they’re aware of, and it seems like they even riff on it quite heavily with the overwhelming presence of the fragmented, fractured aesthetic of their latest album Reflektor at Earls Court, on the first of their two-night run. A lesser band might struggle to hold attention given the amount they’re asking their audience to engage with - and the sheer size of Earls Court, which felt like it could almost be large enough for their Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If they ever wanted somebody to make a sequel to Marty Robbins's Gunfighter Ballads and usher in a rockabilly revival for good measure, Jack White is the man. The 11 tracks on this new album - the follow-up to 2012's Blunderbuss - reek of rage, lust, drink and gunpowder (among other things), and most of them crash along like a herd of stampeding buffalo.Identifying every ingredient White has smuggled in could take years, but he squeezes bags of mileage out of crashing piano chords, guitars that sound like steel girders being hammered out of shape and country fiddles that yowl like mating cats Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
What sometimes gets lost in the great blur of testosterone and hype surrounding Kasabian’s public image is that a decade ago they released a self-titled debut that’s one of the most exciting albums of the 21st century. A bunch of hairies from a commune in Leicester with a sexy guitarist and a good line in drug-endorsing, anarchistic, Sixties-style patter, they turned out to be one of those bands who decide, week-by-week, which of their heroes they fancy emulating. Like Primal Scream before them, sometimes the results spectacularly surpass mere imitation.If their last album, 2011’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any band’s reunion is bittersweet. They can never be what they were at their peak and know it, and yet fans hope. Recapturing past magic is tough. Hair is lost, weight is gained and aging depletes energy. With Pulp, the band never assumed formula rock personae and their reunion was always going to be more seamless with their own past than most. There was less chance that memories would be sullied. Their reformation was one of the most convincing in recent years, in part also due to quickly bowing out after returning and the favour they brought to the listening public by not writing any new, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The sheer scale of One Direction’s global victory march is something to behold. Last night’s stopover on their Where We Are tour was the biggest concert ever staged by one band on Scottish soil, with 64,000 fans pouring into the national rugby stadium (I didn’t conduct a scientific poll of the gender split, but it had certainly never been easier to use the Gents at Murrayfield.)Everything was bright and brilliant and giddily over-sized, from the piercing screams that greeted every banal utterance (“We love you, Scotland!”), to the price of the merch: £10 for a flimsy plastic lanyard is pretty Read more ...
Russ Coffey
According to Chrissie Hynde's press release, Stockholm has a kind of Abba-meets-John Lennon vibe. That may seem like the kind of gobbledegook statement you'd expect from an artist going solo but at least it kind of hints at the influence of producer Bjorn Yttling and guest presence of, uh, Neil Young. More than anything, though, Stockholm just sounds like a tenth Pretenders album, and there’s little wrong with that.Hynde was once described as having a voice half-way between Elvis and Dusty Springfield. Remarkably, at 62 she still does. Fans are already claiming that the power-pop of Read more ...