New music
Peter Culshaw
As someone detached from pop music (more a world, classical, jazz kind of guy) I conducted an unscientific experiment during the past few months to try and discover what the really big tunes out there were. Travelling in Paris, Mumbai, Morocco and elsewhere, I found songs that have gone global in a massive way. I kept hearing them everywhere – in clubs, by the hotel pool, in bars and taxis, blaring out of shops. The process was made easier by Shazam, the app which allows you to identify a piece of music by pointing your phone at the source (better, admittedly, for Daft Punk than for Read more ...
peter.quinn
Squeaking toy pigs. Tea pots. Bicycle pumps. Yes, the dynamic Brazilian composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal was back in town, making a rare appearance at Ronnie Scott's. Described by Miles Davis as “the most impressive musician in the world” - he first gained international recognition by playing on Miles's 1971 album Live-Evil - Pascoal's riotous polystylism incorporates jazz, rock and Brazilian music (MPB, bossa nova, chorinho, forro) to create what he calls musica universal or 'universal music'. However you label it, it's one of the most joyous noises in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s bemusing that Gogol Bordello are not a mainstream success story. Shouldn’t they be a new Green Day or a 21st century Pogues? When Rick Rubin signed them to his American Recordings for their last album, 2010’s Trans-Continental Hustle, which he also produced, they were surely going to supernova? No such luck. Despite the album being a riotously accessible corker, the New York gypsy punks’ usual moniker in passing media mention is still “global festival favourites”.Their sixth album was recorded in El Paso, Texas, and, like their last one, continues to throw Hispanic flourishes into their Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Last night the “freaky” Devendra Banhart didn’t make an appearance. No songs were performed cross-legged, nor were there any wig-outs. For the majority of the evening the 32-year-old American-Venezuelan hippy was, by his standards, practically understated. In keeping with his new album, Mala, he chose to emphasise songwriting over personality. For those of us who were beginning to lose faith in him, it all came as something of a relief.At the beginning of Banhart’s psychedelic-folk career, the tall singer’s exotic approach led many to consider him a wunderkind. His imagination was wild and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The default word for these films, made by the band Saint Etienne with their collaborator and former guitarist Paul Kelly, is "poignant". As elegiac visual poems which capture the always-evolving environment of London, they certainly are expressive. They are also often described as nostalgic, as they cast a lens across businesses and buildings, proprietors and townscapes that are now gone. The mood they evoke is one of longueur: a figurative sigh. Fine as far as it goes, but that’s passive wallowing. What they generate from my viewpoint in north London is a tremendous anger, one born from a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
At the risk of coming over a bit Daily Mail, my, hasn’t she grown up? I refer not to the career management decisions that have seen the former Disney Channel star turned head Belieber handed dubious photoshoots and sexed-up roles in Harmony Korine films, but rather to the fact that on Stars Dance the just-shy-of-21-year-old sounds about 35.It’s a well-established pattern, so it’s hard not to be cynical: child star reborn with raunchy new image; a first video (featured below) replete with writhing, heavy breathing and lyrics with a suitably subjugated message despite the appearance of sexual Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Samantha Urbani is one of the sassiest frontwomen in all pop, a sexy, feline creature whose polyamorous lifestyle fuels her lyrics and adds to her projected sensuality. She sits outside Brighton seafront venue Coalition, watching water-skiers ride the mill pond sea in balmy summer heat, but one whisper from a bandmate in her ear and she's onstage within a minute, attacking opening song "Shattered". She wears a faded denim jacket with a yin-yang logo on the back, a white New York baseball cap, hot pant shorts with bulbous gold trim and a necklace of giant ersatz pearls. Behind her a large LED Read more ...
joe.muggs
Drawing connections between the far margins and the relative mainstream always leaves you in a difficult position, as it invites judgement from different groups with very different criteria. And the duo of Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power put themselves in that position more than most.For all the outré edginess of their name, their occult imagery, their presentation of their music as 10-minute noise-drone epics and their claims to be “aggressive, malevolent, apocalyptic,” it was not as great a surprise as it might seem that they were selected by Danny Boyle and Underworld to soundtrack Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Sunday evening was the last of a week of Kew the Music concerts – from Blondie to Paul Weller via Jools Holland and Leona Lewis – six nights, 8,000 people per night. The gate money is going towards the £400m facelift of the Temperate House, where the stage was set for the closing Sunday night of English and Scottish folk songs from Karine Polwart, Billy Bragg and Bellowhead.Polwart, with her brother Steven on guitar, and Fair Isle multi-instrumentalist Inge Thompson, delivered an early evening set of songs from her acclaimed recent album, Traces – "King of Birds", "Cover Your Eyes", "Tears Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The specially erected sign on the lamppost on the way in said "Sheffield". For one night only the People's Republic of South Yorkshire seemed to decamp to Somerset House in honour of one of its numerous musical sons. A trickle of chippy north-south divide ran through last night's gig, with quips about the la-di-da PM and the price of London drinks, but the music undoubtedly united everyone as Hawley warmed to his fans: "I might get you a beer later…I did say one between the lot of you."Hawley does not have a new album to plug, which meant – hooray – that he and his solid band played plenty of Read more ...
ellin.stein
Christened the Blues Brothers, Elwood and Jake’s first public appearance was as the warm-up act Lorne Michaels used to put the studio audience in a receptive mood before the show started. The audience became so warmed up that in April 1978, Michaels put the Blues Brothers on the actual broadcast, backed up by the SNL band. A contract with Atlantic Records, the label of several of the artists the Brothers emulated, materialised in short order. Belushi and Aykroyd found themselves in a dreamlike state where the slightest creative whim could be realised as a viable commercial product (indeed, it Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Roma have always existed on the margins: by choice, as they are nomads, but also through prejudice, as they and their outsider status evokes the threat of the unfamiliar. The brilliant gypsy clarinet players of Istanbul, cousins of the virtuosi of klezmer and Balkan wedding music, have entertained at parties for centuries. The best known, Selim Sesler, Barbaros Erköse and Mustafa Kandarili, may be admirable musicians, but, anxious to please the bourgeoisie, they have tailored their native fury to the needs of the Turkish nightclub.The Turkish clarinet player Cüneyt Sepetçi is something Read more ...