mon 09/06/2025

New music

Reissue CDs Weekly: The Beach Boys

 The Beach Boys: Made in CaliforniaMade in California is a fantastic thing. Six CDs slot into the inside of the back cover of an LP-sized, full colour hardback book with a padded cover. As an artefact, it’s a triumph. As a career-spanning...

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Youssou N'Dour: Voice of Africa, BBC Four

You either get Youssou N’Dour, or you don’t. For millions on his home turf, the Senegalese singer is a major cultural figure: the street urchin-turned-superstar who almost became president. For large numbers of Western fellow travellers he’s the...

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CD: Goodie Mob - Age Against the Machine

A casual observer might know Atlanta-born CeeLo Green as the rotund soul man who struck commercial gold twice in the last decade, as half of Gnarls Barkley, and then with his own “Fuck You!” in 2010. But the 39-year-old has a long and rich musical...

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Prom 62: A Celebration of Charlie Parker

Pianist, composer, and band leader Django Bates was so inspired by Charlie Parker as a teenager that he used to whistle his tunes on the train. This led not to abuse, but the acquaintance (at Brixton station) of saxophonist Steve Buckley. Returning...

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CD: Rizzle Kicks - Roaring 20s

When Brighton hip-hop boys Jordan Stephens and Harley Alexander-Sule first came on-radar in 2011 with the summer smash “Down With the Trumpets” they appeared to be a good-time flash-in-the-pan, possibly even a nascent boy band. When Fatboy Slim got...

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CD: múm – Smilewound

The last album released by Iceland’s múm was Early Birds, an archive trawl from 2012 which unearthed previously unheard material recorded between 1998 and 2000. Before that was 2009’s Sing Along to Songs You Don't Know. Smilewound is a comeback, and...

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Another Self Portrait: Bob's buffed up for Bootleg Series Volume 10

No songwriter casts a deeper shadow than Bob Dylan does, and since the first three volumes of the Bootleg Series came in 1991, his shadow career – now reaching Volume Ten with Another Self Portrait – continues to prove as compelling as the official...

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CD: Neko Case - The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You

I have little patience with those that link mental anguish with creativity, glamorising the former as if the latter were any consolation. That said, there is comfort to be drawn from songs that spin the blankness of depression into something...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Sly Stone

 Sly & the Family Stone: Higher!Sly & the Family Stone’s hits “Dance to the Music”, “I Want to Take You Higher” and “Stand!” delivered a sharp wake-up call to the American charts in a period when psychedelia meant new styles of pop were...

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Sun Ra Arkestra, Café Oto

Dalston was the place on Friday night, as the Sun Ra Arkestra put on a trademark display of Afro-jazz excellence in the intimate surrounds of Café Oto. Jazz pioneer Sun Ra might have been dead since 1993, but his influential big band is very much...

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CD: Julia Holter - Loud City Song

This is an incredibly hard album to work out. One major clue comes, though, with its second track, “Maxim's 1”, the backing for which is a dead ringer for a lost track from Cocteau Twins's 1990 Heaven or Las Vegas album. Not that any of the rest of...

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How To Be A World Music Star, BBC Four

This was a somewhat nostalgic look at the rise of “World Music” as a genre, starting in the Eighties when the term was first used, essentially as a marketing tool. As the ever ebullient Andy Kershaw put it, the problem was where in record stores “...

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