New music
Tim Cumming
I write as a listener and concerned citizen. It's 2013, the legends of dad rock are facing the death squad: no liquids, no solids, no chance, baby. There's something dead in the water and a new breed is feeding on the remains. Welcome to Deathcore, Screamo, Metalcore, whatever.Asking Alexandria come from Yorkshire. They're on their third album, on the Sumerian label (got to love the name), and the lynchpins are guitarist Ben Bruce and singer Danny Worsnop. They rock like men on three legs – crunching, stop-start, arhythmic, stuttering guitar riffs that sound as if they sprouted out of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Eddie Noack: Psycho – The K-Ark and Allstar Recordings 1962–69Eddie Noack’s 1968 single “Psycho” was virtually unknown until Elvis Costello released his cover version in 1981. By that time, Noack had been dead for three years. After its resurrection “Psycho” was recognised as one of the strangest songs ever. Although musically it is straight, George Jones-styled country, in its lyrics an unrepentant killer describes his actions to his mother – whom he had just killed. There was no redemption, no punishment, no pay off. Just the cold refrain “You think I’m psycho, don’t you mama?”“Psycho”, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Rock ‘n’ roll was invented in Bodø about 1922,” declares Elvis Costello before kicking into “A Slow Drag With Josephine”. “Then it crept down to Trondheim,” he continues. “Then the squares in Oslo got it about 1952.” Up here, 25km inside the Arctic Circle, it actually seems possible that anything could have developed without the outside world noticing. On the tip of a finger of land between two mountain-fringed fjords, the city of Bodø doesn’t need to shout its identity. The setting is enough.Costello is here with the Imposters, playing Bodø Spektrum as the opening attraction of the 2013 Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s one thing to sound like an oldster recording back in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, it’s quite another to look the part. In the half-century rise of gym body hegemony and homogenous Barbie’n’Ken facial aspirations, normalcy of human appearance has slowly become regarded as offbeat. All those years ago, from Hollywood stars - Humphrey Bogart to Leslie Howard - and musicians - Hank Williams to Bing Crosby - they just looked like themselves, a certain gauntness, faces and bods that were characterful but far from sculpted. Pokey LaFarge could have sprung from the same era, hair slicked Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In a world of reality television show winners and interchangeable flash-in-the-pan singer-songwriter critical darlings, Frank Turner stands apart as the real deal. Over the past 18 months, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Turner had appeared as if from nowhere and his name was suddenly everywhere. But the groundwork for the songwriter’s considerable recent successes - a pre-show slot at the London Olympics Opening Ceremony (pictured below), a sell-out show at Wembley Arena, his latest album reaching the top of the iTunes Chart and number two on the Official UK Album Chart - has been Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Camp Bestival is overrun with children, even the night is alive with them. Where WOMAD is full of old hippies, Camp Bestival is full of raver-parents who refuse to stop shaking a party limb, even if they must haul little Finlay around on an exotic, duvet-filled gurney to do so. It creates a unique atmosphere, a bit bourgeois but just the right amount of wild, inner children meeting actual children to wobble about to Benga basslines.I attended all four days of it with my girlfriend and my two daughters, 10 and 15. The rain held off, the sun mostly shone and we set up a proper grown-up camp Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This is a buoyant, likeable album but – to be dismal and pessimistic – maybe the moment has passed for The Polyphonic Spree. This would be a shame as they’re more interesting than 90 per cent of the wannabe guitar pop stars out there. However, a dozen years and four albums (five, if you include the Christmas one) into their career they appear no closer to catching on. Yes, It’s True is not a great deal different in quality or style from any of their previous albums. The band are experts in light psych-pop that beams out a benign smile and melodic warmth. This is no slight on their music, just Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Since the announcement that he is suffering from Alzheimer’s, the music industry has splashily paid tribute to Glen Campbell: a big celebration at the Country Music Awards, a lifetime achievement Grammy. Campbell himself went out on the road to make a more personal farewell. This album is clearly his last word. The title – See You There – invokes the religious faith that has worked its way into Campbell’s songwriting since he turned away for the unholy country trinity of drink and drugs and divorce.When Campbell was recording Ghosts on the Canvas in 2011, he also re-recorded the vocals for Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the late Eighties one of the most sonically unhinged bands of all time came together in East London. Terminal Cheesecake caused few commercial waves but gathered a devoted coterie of fans for their unholy racket at pummelling concerts. Their sound was initially crunching riff-rock smeared with head-frying psychedelia and deranged electronic effects but throughout a career of five albums – Johnny Town-Mouse (1988), VCL (1989), Angels in Pigtails (1990), Pearlesque Kings of the Jewmost (1992) and King of All the Spaceheads (1994) – they gradually drifted into monstrous exercises in marijuana Read more ...
peter.quinn
Think of the ingredients you look for in a great jazz record – inspired, exploratory improv, the complete reinvention of standards, ear-catching arrangements, sonorities you've never heard before – and this new big band recording from Mike Gibbs delivers them all. By the bucketload.In a career that's spanned four decades, the 76-year-old composer, arranger and trombonist has worked and recorded with many of the music world's leading lights including Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, Joni Mitchell, Peter Gabriel, Kenny Wheeler and Django Bates. This latest addition to the Gibbs discography Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nilsson: The RCA Albums CollectionThe irony with Harry Nilsson is that despite being one of pop’s most distinctive and lauded songwriters, his two best-known singles were cover versions. In 1969 he hit the American and British charts with “Everybody’s Talkin’”, written by the ill-stared Fred Neil. Nilsson’s rendering was helped on its path by being featured in the film Midnight Cowboy. Then, in 1972, his interpretation of “Without You” topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. It was penned by Tom Evans and Pete Ham of the Beatles-propagated band Badfinger, both of whom would Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The prettiest-sounding album so far this year, the glistening Moon Tides evokes the ghostly atmosphere of The Cocteau Twins and the intimacy of Eighties melancholia fashioned by Liverpool’s Black. But it’s more than a revivalist album, since it’s firmly rooted on Earth and its melodies are fresh. Pure Bathing Culture are neither spaceheads nor nostalgists.Pure Bathing Culture are the Portland-based Daniel Hindman and Sarah Vesprille, a duo who have previously surfaced in Vetiver. The only sonic link between that incarnation and Moon Tides is the muzzy, Tango in the Night-era Fleetwood Mac Read more ...