New music
Aimee Cliff
Angel Haze learnt the art of crafting an identity from gigantic pop icons. Raised in what she describes as a cult, she was unable to hear pop music until the age of 14, when she discovered - and devoured - everything at once. Her backstory, involving repeated abuse, sheds light on the rapper and singer’s major label debut Dirty Gold, an album that weaves together the scathing confessionalism of Eminem, the bombastic fire of the EDM boom, syrupy R&B choruses and a series of self-mythologising field recordings that mirror those all over Beyoncé’s recent opus.Everything comes to a head in Read more ...
David Nice
May this be a New Year sign and a symbol of a revitalized concert scene to come: an eclectic programme of dazzling range to draw in the new pick-and-mix generation, full of segues that worked and executed with the right balance of poetry and in-your-face exuberance by a crack team of young players. The Aurora Orchestra’s American “Road Trip” nearly drove into a ditch with Kentucky singer-songwriter Dawn Landes on board, but even one or two of her numbers were fascinating and in any case the purely instrumental sequences were rich enough to make up a concert in themselves.So let’s get the dips Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Chisholm was born and raised in Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, and was tutored by great fiddler player, composer and instrument maker Donald Riddell. He's a regular player with Julie Fowlis and with his own band Wolfstone, and this is a live recording of his epic Strathglass Trilogy. Originally released on the Copperfish label, the trilogy was six years in the making, and features the award-winning Farrar (2008), Canaich (2010) and Affric (2012). The trilogy - and this live set - is a musical representation of the ancient Chisholm Clan lands north-west of Loch Ness. It’s one of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Love, Poetry and RevolutionThe subtitle “A Journey Through the British Psychedelic and Underground Scenes” – with “A” as the operative word – suggests this box set isn’t going to tell a familiar story. Most of the bands were and still are barely heard of. Twenty-four of the 65 tracks compiled were not originally issued.The opening shot is “Pretty Colours”, by obscure West Midlands band Deep Feeling which included future Traffic member Jim Capaldi. Although unreleased at the time of its October 1966 recording, The Animals’ Eric Burdon cocked an ear and declared it “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
With the passing of Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers yesterday, aged 74, rock’n’roll loses half of one of its greatest original pairings. With his brother Don he meshed the close harmonies of country acts such as the Louvin Brothers with the poppy rock’n’roll of fellow southern boy Buddy Holly, a close friend with whom they toured regularly.The Everlys had a spectacular run of hits between 1957 and 1962, songs such as “Bye Bye Love”, “Wake Up Little Susie” and “All I Have To Do Is Dream”. Among much else, their 1960 song “Cathy’s Clown” was the first single to simultaneously top the charts Read more ...
peter.quinn
In jazz, 2013 belonged to Wayne Shorter. In recognition of a remarkable six-decade career as a saxophonist, educator and composer, Shorter, who turned 80 in August last year, received a lifetime achievement award from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz – only the second time in the Institute’s history that it has bestowed such an honour (Quincy Jones being the first recipient in 1996). There were yet more awards from the Jazz Journalists Association: Lifetime Achievement in Jazz, Soprano Saxophonist of the Year, and Small Ensemble of the Year. Then there were the numerous headline Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It was almost exactly a year ago (January 8, 2013, to be precise) that we awoke to the news that David Bowie, far from dying, retiring, or living the half-life of a rock and roll renunciant in his Riverside apartment, had blindsided us all by sneak-releasing his first new work in a decade on the morning of his 66th birthday.The weary reflection of "Where Are We Now?” was so perfectly measured, and its nil-by-mouth marketing strategem – in which absence, to paraphrase James Joyce, became the most potent form of presence – so perfect that one wondered whether Bowie shouldn’t just quit while he Read more ...
James Williams
It's been an exceptional year for electronic music worldwide, and while the UK has mostly always afforded it the respect and admiration it deserves, it is more surprising to find that the United States has finally allowed dance music a pass into the mainstream. One outcome of this is that the disparate sub-genres that have quietly been thriving in its inner cities for the last few decades are now receiving global recognition, and one such movement is footwork.Originally created to accompany the frenetic breakdance-esque dancers of south and west-side Chicago in the late Nineties, the focus in Read more ...
theartsdesk
2013 was the year that Thom Yorke, somewhat tautologically, referred to the music business as “a dying corpse”, and Justin Bieber's manager Scooter Braun claimed that same business “doesn't exist any more.” This was slightly odd, given that it was one of the liveliest years in recent memory, with mainstream and underground pulsating with debate over big issues and big releases, and – for all the technological and multimedia proliferation which prompted Yorke and Braun's hyperbole – the actual music itself being higher on the cultural agenda than for a long time.The most visible example of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Not a year in which big names came through, and many on the list below are actually quite introverted and low-key, but none the worse for that. Among numerous global musical gems this year were the following:The Fes Festival of World Sacred Music retained its high quality with scores of top notch acts, notably the wonderful Lebanese singer Abeer Nehme singing Aramaic music with incredible sweetness and purity. The video below gives some idea:The most extraordinary act of this year’s WOMAD was a modern folk group from Italy with the unwieldy name of Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, whose rootsy Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There aren't a lot of harpists in pop. Transatlantic migrations took all sorts of instruments away from their European place of origin to become the building blocks of American music. But there was no sizeable Welsh diaspora so the harp stayed at home with its most diligent exponents. That places singer-songwriter-harpist Georgia Ruth in a musical tradition with deep roots but a less than broad reach.One of the many pleasures of her enchanting debut album Week of Pines is the way she ushers an old instrument into lush new pastures. In "In Luna" the harp has a lovely eager lilt as a kind of Read more ...
Russ Coffey
“Maybe I needed to grow up a little first/ Well it looks like I hit a growth spurt”. So goes MMLP2’s opening track and over the course of the next hour it becomes apparent this is no idle brag. The album’s dizzying mix of melody, syllables-per-minute, heart and hurt means, despite the endless plaudits being given to rival "deadly fucking serious” Kanye West, it was really the nutcase from Detroit who demonstrated the greater artistic maturity in 2013.Some may consider the term “mature” ironic given Marshall Mathers' love of adolescent word play. But that would be to misunderstand how Em’s Read more ...