New music
Thomas H. Green
Tina Turner has recorded an album of American blues and folk classics, as well as one original song, with the remaining members of Led Zeppelin. theartsdesk can exclusively reveal that the 74-year-old pop star and soul-funk legend met Led Zep guitarist Jimmy Page through her husband, the German music executive Erwin Bach, and that recording took place last November near her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland.The new album, as yet untitled, was recorded over a fortnight with Page, and included sessions involving Zep singer Robert Plant, bassist John Paul Jones and drummer Jason Bonham, son of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s strange to think that music recorded 45 years ago in what was once an old Yiddish theatre turned rock 'n' roll palace on the Lower East Side in the summer of 1970 – a few months before Jimi Hendrix’s death, as war raged in Vietnam and riots in the US – still sounds way ahead of our time, let alone the time in which it was made.Robert Glasper recently complained that jazz was stuck in the past, with Miles Davis, 22 years dead, still able to knock him off the number one spot. Fair enough, but Davis was playing the future, not the past, and on the strength of a remarkable third volume in Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
By the time I reached “Coming Home” - the second track on Kaiser Chiefs’ fifth album, and the band’s "comeback" single - I was predicting not a riot exactly, but certainly a few snide comments below re: my knowledge of the Leeds lads’ back catalogue. While not wholly unpleasant, its drivetime radio-friendly smoothness seemed an odd choice for a band best known for anthemic, stadium-filling indie swagger - particularly as it was always going to be seen as something of a mission statement for their first album without chief songwriter and drummer Nick Hodgson.But then Education, Education, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Elton John: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road box set“Elton John plays cricket as he plays piano; dressed to kill and as if his life depends on it.” The commentary on the film included in the box-set version of this reissue of 1973’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is hugely over the top and rococo, and treats its subject as a form of showbiz Moses. Brian Forbes’s 45-minute Elton John and Bernie Taupin say Goodbye to Norma Jean is crammed with eyebrow-raising moments, but none more so than when John declares he writes songs in just 30 minutes. “It takes me on average about half-an-hour per song,” he Read more ...
Guy Oddy
As anyone who has a television will know, Rebecca Ferguson is a graduate of The X Factor – having come runner-up in the 2010 competition. In fact, with her heavily-promoted back story of overcoming heart-ache and disappointment, it looks as if she is presently being set up as the successor to Simon Cowell’s previous Queen Bee, Leona Lewis, whose career seems to have hit the buffers of late. So, armed with songs of survival and redemption that she has largely co-written for her two albums, 2011’s Heaven and last year’s Freedom, she took to the stage in Birmingham to the sound of Billie Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone who came across Band of Skulls' sophomore album, Sweet Sour, in 2012 would have heard the sound of a band that was more than conversant with the Led Zeppelin songbook but who had no intention of staying put in the early Seventies. The chugging guitar was there alright, but there was plenty more than that going on in the likes of “Bruises” and “You’re Not Pretty but You’ve Got It Going On”. Follow-up, Himalayan, breaks still further from the strict blues-rock template with the introduction of a bucketful of other textures. That said, the echo of Jimmy Page’s crunching riffs and Robert Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The other day I woke up with Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” fracking my mind. Round and round it juddered, wouldn’t leave me alone - horrid production, killer chorus - and much too much of that bloke whose career used to be endlessly repeating, “One time, one time” on Fugees tunes. Turns out it’s not just me. “Hips Don’t Lie” is globally the best-selling song of this century. When I discovered that fact, it fried my head.Then again, it’s possible for Europeans to forget what a massive deal Shakira is, one of the top-earning female entertainers of all time. The petite Colombian burst out of the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Goldfrapp have already toured new album, Tales of Us, having hit the road in the UK and Europe last autumn. However, they are back for some more and on the first date of the spring leg of their live shows, Alison Goldfrapp and her five-strong backing band take to the stage at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall as the spoken introduction to Peter and the Wolf fades out with “Are you comfortable? Then let us begin.” Gone, it seems, are the clown, Marlene Dietrich and military kitsch of previous tours, as the tastefully black-clad group opened with “Jo” and slipped straight into the magic realism- Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
It’s strange that probably most of the best-known Brazilian artists here are over 60 and from one state, Bahia - those being Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Maria Bethania and Tom Zé. Brazil is the size of Europe, though, and of course there are younger generations from other states. One of the leading new voices is Karol Conka, whose Brazilian electronica is as fresh as anything you are likely to hear this year. Her breakthrough hit “Boa Noite” kicks off and ends the album (see video, overleaf) in which she raps that she is “totalmente livre e leve ao mesmo tempo que ferve” (“totally free and Read more ...
James Williams
There was something of a Canadian invasion at the O2 last night, but this is about as far from lumberjacks and mounties as it comes. Abel Tesfaye, better known as the Weeknd, is getting straight to the point. “I want to get on top, London!” This may of course simply be a metaphor for his and mentor Drake’s meteoric rise to fame, but Tesfaye does seem to like saying naughty things.All sleaze aside, though, his sleek, futuristic brand of R&B tonight is bolstered by a backing band of considerable talent, making songs from his recent Kiss Land project sizzle and pop in the cavernous O2 arena Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Zara McFarlane’s rise to jazz eminence has taken the scenic route, especially in these days of the super-educated jazz prodigy. From a Jamaican home where reggae was always in the air, via a love of musical theatre, and a degree in pop performance, McFarlane studied jazz and improvisation at the Guildhall. With the support of Gilles Peterson, who signed her to his Brownswood label, she released a debut album, Until Tomorrow, in 2011. This was warmly reviewed, and received a MOBO nomination, but her second album, If You Knew Her, which came out earlier this year, is a further breakthrough. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Thinking back, it was with 2010’s Heaven is Whenever that I stopped recommending my favourite band to the people who didn’t already get it. It wasn’t that it was a bad album – in capturing the world-weariness of the party band once the world moves on it was almost exactly the one that they needed to make – but by that stage you probably knew yourself whether you were the type of hopeless barroom romantic likely to learn lessons from the one who’d seen it all in the corner. On first listen Teeth Dreams comes across as more of the same, but there are so many moments of magic here I’m half Read more ...