New music
Tim Cumming
They've performed together on stage and in the studio since the first Waterson:Carthy albums of the early 1990s, but this is the first time Martin and Eliza Carthy have recorded as a duo, and they've kept it lean and clear with just their voices, Eliza's fiddle and Martin's guitar – each element distinct enough by itself, but together creating a very pure, personal kind of austere beauty. There's no excess baggage, and the tunes are handled with the kind of expertise, love and assured interpretation that comes with a lifetime's immersion.The opening “Her Servant Man” is a succinct Read more ...
Guy Oddy
For those not in the know, the Supersonic Festival is Birmingham’s annual knees-up of noisy avant garde music drawn from a broad range of genres that is curated by local promoters and heroes, Capsule. This year, despite the event being reduced to two days from the usual three, there was doomy, sludge rock; electronic weirdery; pseudo film soundtrack music; screaming guitars; the legendary Bill Drummond and the mighty Swans. To some extent, the line proved to be gold to the hipster community of the West Midlands (and further afield) with a shocking amount of blokes sporting beards and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Any fears that Howling Bells’ short hiatus, or the new motherhood of frontwoman and lead songwriter Juanita Stein, had softened the band’s deliciously dark yet melodic songwriting must surely be assuaged by the huge, squalling riff that opens new album Heartstrings - and its lead track, “Paris”. While the song itself is a gorgeous, languid meditation on Europe’s romantic capital (“oh Paris, every song’s about you, every romance calls you”) it’s the sonic power of the four-piece’s simple guitar-drums-bass approach that makes its mission statement clear.Loud but never knowingly jarring is as Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Once upon a time, Matthew “Matisyahu” Miller was the Hasidic reggae singer. There was only one, and the beard he sported for the first three albums made him pretty easy to spot. He still calls himself the “Hasidic reggae superstar” (on “Watch the Walls Melt Down”), but now, for this fifth studio album, he’s sleek, smooth and groomed, like any successful performer from LA, with a cosmopolitan stylistic palette to match. The generic diversification is, it seems, deliberate. While reggae, rap and hip hop have been converging for some time, and the Jewish sounds have always been there, he Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Holland-Dozier-Holland - The Complete 45s Collection, Invictus, Hot Wax, Music MerchantAs Holland-Dozier-Holland, Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland wrote and produced for The Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes and every other top-flight Motown act between 1962 and 1968. Their credit was behind “Baby Love”, “Nowhere to Run”, “Reach Out I’ll Be There”, “Where Did Our Love Go” and many other classics. But that wasn’t enough for the trio. At Motown, they increasingly felt, as the book with this package puts it, “overworked and under-appreciated”. Splitting from Read more ...
joe.muggs
Electronic music, it seems, is finally being seen broadly as something with heritage. Perhaps it's the alienating qualities of sounds that don't emanate from any easily graspable human action, perhaps it's the association with either academia or the subcultures of psychedelia, industrial culture and rave, perhaps it's just that people are naturally conservative, but there has long been a sense in the mainstream that electronic sound-making had to do just with novelty and modernity rather than being part of any deeper cultural flow.If any label can prove otherwise, it's Mute, the label that Read more ...
joe.muggs
Joe and Peter are back with another show of the exotic and out-there, with a heavy leaning towards the Lusophone this time.Music from Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde and Portugal itself features, including some very serious Brazilian disco and a taste of Kuduro. But there's also modern Swedish psyche rock guitar virtuosity, Californian ambience, Congolese ritual, Catalonian post-dubstep, and heartbreaking country & Western balladry with just a hint of West Africa to it, among much, much more. Dive in, we dare you. Tracklist below. The Arts Desk 01/05/14 by Meattransmission on Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The third Emulsion Festival, curated jointly this year by Trish Clowes and Luke Styles, turned out to be more of a collage of original colours, when the second day of programming concluded at Village Underground last night. Yet the varieties of performance all shared a commitment to novel combinations of sound, technique and feeling, and drew collectively on inspiration from Rihanna’s “Only Girl in the World” to the classical chamber ensemble to create an absorbing spectacle of multi-genre music that was both emotionally and technically compelling. The Village Underground itself was the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Denmark’s Broken Twin take the lead in the latest of theartsdesk’s regular round-ups of the new music coming in from Scandinavia. Debut album May is melancholy. Minimally arranged, with lyrics addressing the pain brought by the passing of time, bleakness in the form of metaphorical references to weather and what happens after death, this is an affecting album. The sense of a lonely despair is reinforced by the defeated, distant voice of Majke Voss Romme – who is Broken Twin. May might fit clichés about Nordic chill, but the album draws from and sits proudly alongside landmark works of the Read more ...
james.woodall
Caetano Veloso gets more extraordinary. After his 2010 show in London, one critic (me) said that at 67 his “wings seemed a little clipped”. Maybe that show, which was quite short, wasn’t the best he’d ever given. But maybe I was wrong. At 71, this slight man has not a clipped or cramped or confined thing about him. He seems to have got younger. He sounds exactly like he did over four and a half decades ago, when he exploded with Gilberto Gil into Brazilian music with, for the time, a shocking thing called Tropicalismo.Tropicalismo went right across the arts. Its musical bent shocked because a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone with more than a passing interest in the Radio One playlist will have been aware that 2013 was, without doubt, the year of Rudimental on Planet Pop. Hit singles, a massive album in Home and plenty of well-received festival and live performances followed and the accolades rolled in. In 2014, it looks like it is going to be Clean Bandit’s turn. January’s monster hit single, “Rather Be”, topped the UK charts for four weeks, they have just finished a hugely successful UK tour and it’s not even festival season yet, with its wall-to-wall TV coverage.Clean Bandit have already made significant Read more ...
Aimee Cliff
Whatever “it” is, Alex Turner has it in his bones. From those first excitable live performances passed around online in the early 2000s, before Sheffield’s Arctic Monkeys rocketed to No. 1 success apparently overnight, to 2014’s triumphant Finsbury Park headlining residency, the frontman exudes charisma live. Where that once came from his disarming lyrical dexterity and comparable physical awkwardness, though, he’s now a different character entirely: one with smooth hair and smoother hips, who floats through an hour and a half set in front of a crowd of around 40,000 like a living, breathing Read more ...