New music
Kieron Tyler
Good Morning, Midnight is the 1939 Jean Rhys novel portraying an alienated woman moving through the present while being confronted with, but not necessarily recognising, her own past. In the book, Sasha Jensen wanted to be acknowledged but also unseen. Good Morning, Midnight the album is the first by Becky Becky, the new persona of Gemma L Williams, who previously recorded as Woodpecker Wooliams. She said goodbye to that guise at a show where she performed naked. The novel's alienation reverberates throughout the album.On Good Morning, Midnight, she is joined by Peter Mason, formerly of Fence Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Howling Bells have come a long way in the 10 years since they settled on a name and direction for their musical project, both physically - the four-piece uprooted themselves from Sydney, Australia to their adopted hometown of London to record and promote their self-titled debut album - and philosophically. In 2006, their combination of heavy, gloomy guitars and toe-tapping melodies topped with songwriter Juanita Stein’s effortlessly cool vocals deservedly attracted the frenzied attention of the music press and Bella Union boss Simon Raymonde, but that attention died down after a series of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The first thing you’ll notice about Sharon Van Etten’s Are We There is how crystal-clear and clean it sounds. “Afraid of Nothing”, the album’s opening track, fizzes with hope and expectation like the long tail of a firework from its giddy opening lines: “you told me the day that you showed me your face we’d be in trouble for a long time - I can’t wait”. Listen to it on headphones, though, and the component parts of that giddiness will stun you: the interplay between simple piano chords and guitar; the soaring strings that fill the chorus line with anticipation; the booming bass drum you can Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Oasis: Definitely Maybe“His onstage presence is supernatural, a good looking boy exuding primal sexual allure while standing stock still, hands behind his back, all effort going into his big chested, raw throated pure and essential singing.” The beyond-hyperbolic liner notes to Deluxe Box Set edition of the 20th-anniversy reissue of Definitely Maybe, the first Oasis album, read like a parody. Liam Gallagher may be many things. But supernatural?Elsewhere, they gush that “the holy grail of British pop music is surely a bunch of longhaired boys with guitars playing swaggering, melodic rock Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The veteran South African jazzers Adam Glasser and Pinise Saul transformed the gleamingly elegant Crazy Coqs cabaret den into a throbbing township jazz club last night, with an exhilarating programme of original South African jazz, seasoned with standards and township folk. Joining forces with the percussionist Marcina Arnold, a relative newcomer to their ensembles, they roughed up this venue’s urbanity with unfamiliar fires of passion and yearning.As well as playing piano with a gallery of South African jazz greats, Glasser is noted for his work on the chromatic harmonica, and last night’s Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes it feels as though modern music has lost its magic – that the more that's produced the more ordinary it seems. Last night, however, down the Bohemian end of one British seaside town, the crowd sat expecting something pretty special. They had good reason. These days 67-year-old Emmylou Harris, with her long silver hair not only looks Southern gothic but sounds it too.Harris is over to celebrate the reissue of 1995’s Wrecking Ball. The original was an alt-country landmark in which Emmylou swapped her trademark quavering harmonies for an ageless, spectral sound. U2/ Bob Dylan “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Somebody had to be Bikini Kill, otherwise we would have culturally starved to death.” The quote typifies the deferential The Punk Singer, a bio-doc on the driven Kathleen Hanna, the feminist front-person of the American bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and, most recently, The Julie Ruin.In contrast, Hanna herself was never and isn't deferential. Her vital importance to cultural and rock history is set in stone as, for the former, she initiated the Nineties feminist musical groundswell riot grrrl and, for the latter, she sprayed the words “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” (a deodorant brand) on Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Neil Young has been pretty much making albums of two types for most of his 45 year solo career. There have been the proto-grunge rockers like 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps and 1990’s Ragged Glory and the more subtle, acoustic folk-rockers like 1970’s After the Goldrush and 1972’s Harvest. All these four albums are titans of their genre but Young has never been the most consistent of artists and his career has not been without its misfires, like 1983’s Everybody’s Rockin’ and 1987’s Life.A Letter Home sits firmly in the folk-blues end of the Young spectrum and sees him accompany his own soft and Read more ...
caspar.gomez
It is only when Peaches turns into King Herod that she really becomes the Peaches the audience recognises. A cheer goes up as she jeers, “Prove to me that you’re no fool/Walk across my swimming pool.” She’s mocking, leering, puffed up in a gold coat, her hair shaved at the sides and swept into a giant bouffant on top. In fact she looks more like the Elvis-ish Pharoah from Rice & Lloyd-Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat than any character from the pair’s self-consciously hip interpretation of the Gospels. She tops it all off by ostentatiously doing the splits to whoops Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Declaring that your new album can help conquer insomnia seems, initially, self-defeating. If it induces such a calmness that potential listeners drift off to sleep, then there’s the potential it may never be heard in full. Yet this is what lies behind Matt Berry’s fifth album. It was written and recorded at his home studio in the small hours while he was suffering from insomnia. He wanted to create a music which would still his mind so set to devising his own therapeutic soundtrack. Music for Insomniacs is the result.Music for Insomniacs is neither the expected single drone or blandly Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Jazz pianist Chick Corea put a bomb under his reverential “rare solo concert” billing at the Barbican last night, with an outrageously showmanlike variety performance that seemed to take in everyone from Keith Jarrett to Gareth Malone. Corea’s two ECM albums, Piano Improvisations (1971 and 1972), blazed a trail for similar work, music that was cerebral, even austere, from Paul Bley and the arguably even more distinguished Jarrett. Anyone expecting a similar experience last night will have left reeling not just at moments of sublime musicianship, but also at Corea’s multifarious Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Nobody ever accused, say, Dylan of having a voice that didn't mature with his songwriting. It’s something that springs to mind every time I try to put my finger on exactly why I’ve never warmed to the country-folk sounds of Conor Oberst’s latter work. Stylistically, the music is beautiful and while the lyrics may not be steeped in the same visceral poetry of Oberst’s Bright Eyes days they’re still a cut above most contemporary songwriting. But the quivering timbre of the voice that gave that band its visceral, emotional core or that wrung itself raw fronting early 00s emo act Desaparecidos is Read more ...