New music
theartsdesk
One of the great British singer-songwriters of the past half-century, Nick Drake is the subject of a new tribute album, Way to Blue, released next Monday on Navigator Records. A companion piece to the concerts staged worldwide over the last four years, the artists involved include Teddy Thompson, Vashti Bunyan, Robyn Hitchcock, Lisa Hannigan, Scott Matthews and Danny Thompson. We are a delighted to have an exclusive preview from the album, of Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside performing “Fruit Tree”.According to Joe Boyd, Drake’s producer and the man who coordinated the album and the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Paramore’s fourth album picks and chooses from so many genres that, first time around, I thought that I had accidentally begun to play it on shuffle. Its opening two tracks make an incongruous pairing: the seemingly light-hearted “Fast in My Car”, with its “we just want to have fun” refrain, and the gothy first single “Now”, which piles on the war metaphors.It’s on the second listen that I figure it out, which seems fitting because this self-titled release marks the full-length debut of Paramore the trio, following the departure of Josh and Zac Farro at the end of 2010. The album’s opening Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Shuggie Otis: Inspiration Information/Wings of LoveShuggie Otis's vanishing act after the release of his 1974 album Inspiration Information belatedly created one of pop’s great what-ifs. However, it only became so in the Nineties after the album was recognised as a soul treasure. David Byrne reissuing the album on his Luaka Bop label in 2001 didn’t plug the information gap, and Otis remained in the shadows. Now though, with this new reissue, the enigmatic soul auteur has resurfaced to supplement the album with a series of unreleased tracks dating from 1971 to 2000. Whatever else he was doing Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark are too often remembered for their musical sins. Their long career has taken multiple twists and turns including way too much watery tweeness in the mid-Eighties, then, later on, soppy, occasionally successful attempts to crack American FM radio. Many forget that initially they were one of the first electro-pop bands, Liverpudlian Kraftwerk devotees whose early work stands up beside any equivalent act of the era.The classic quartet line-up, featuring Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphries, the creative core from 1978 until the end of the Eighties, reformed in 2005 Read more ...
Sam Mills
On Wednesday I will strap on a guitar and take the stage at the Royal Festival Hall for the opening night of this year's Alchemy Festival. I am the musical director and happy accompanist to a line-up of spectacularly talented musicians, all with roots in different parts of the Indian subcontinent. As I write, visas are being stamped and air tickets finalised for 11 musicians flying in from India and Pakistan. I am part of the London contingent: Susheela Raman (pictured below right), whose concert this is, is a Tamil Londoner. Aref Durvesh, a longstanding colleague and the UK’s funkiest tabla Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Shaking The Habitual’s centrepiece – the seventh of its 14 tracks – is the 19-minute “Old Dreams Waiting to be Realized”. A tone which ebbs in and out, it’s occasionally underpinned by distant rhythmic colour. Although thoughts inevitably turn to the similarly lengthy “SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)", the 22-minute amelodic experience exemplifying Scott Walker’s recent Bish Bosch, the astonishing Shaking the Habitual is, over its 97 minutes, an album retaining connections with what is recognisably music. Even so, it’s still pretty far out.Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer – Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Over here, They Might Be Giants are mainly known for the insanely catchy “Birdhouse in My Soul”. There's also a general assumption that it's their only hit, and a suspicion that they're, probably, Canadian. In fact, TMBG are a Brooklyn-based band centred around founders John Flansburgh and John Linnell. A long and often successful career in the States has included several children's albums and even the theme for the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle. The latter won them a Grammy. Nanobots is their 16th album and, quite consciously, looks back over their 21 years in pop.Impressively, it does so – Read more ...
simon.broughton
"Multi-instrumentalist" is a catch-all phrase that usually means somebody who plays flute, clarinet, sax and perhaps a bit of guitar. When it comes to Stephan Micus, he’s a multi-instrumentalist of an altogether different calibre. He plays hundreds of instruments – he doesn’t know how many – which he’s collected and commissioned from all over the world.Micus, who has a rare London concert this month, has just released his 20th album on ECM, which puts him up there with Keith Jarrett as one of the label’s most prolific artists. But Micus’s art is of a totally different nature. While Jarrett Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's an easy answer to James Blake's naysayers (and there are a lot of them): you're not listening loud enough. I made the mistake myself. Even knowing his early, brilliant electronic works, I was quite unimpressed by the breakthrough cover of Feist's “Limit to Your Love”, idly listened to on laptop or radio, until I heard it delivered over a club soundsystem and realised just how perfectly the song structure was built around the annihilating bass.What Blake does, and is doing better than ever on his second album, is, roughly speaking, what Radiohead have been fumbling for since Kid A. Read more ...
Michael Stephen Clark
Only an April fool would deny Emeli Sandé her right to rule as the home-grown pocket diva for the Smartphone generation. The current elfin queen of the UK pop charts took the stage in Edinburgh last night having already won over her capacity crowd on Amazon, i-Tunes and in miles of supermarket aisles.Her proclaimed heroines are Nina Simone and Alicia Keys, and both are audible in her output. Sandé can certainly sing to stir the senses, but can she move the soul? My suspicion is that beneath the polish of her long fingernails is a more engrained layer of spirituality. Songs like “Next to Me” Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s clear that Sarah Blasko is in a defiant mood right from the timpani roll that opens her fourth solo album. A lush, gorgeous work, in which the frantic strings of the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra offset the Australian singer’s husky, intimate vocals, I Awake is an enthralling and unsettling listen.Blasko is the first of the three singers behind Seeker Lover Keeper, her project with countrywomen Sally Seltmann and Holly Throsby, to release her own material since their collaborative album was released last year. Although her contributions to the project tempered its more sugary-sweet Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Simple Minds: Celebrate – The Greatest Hits +Of all the bands which surfaced in 1977 in response to punk, Simple Minds occupy a singular status. Despite line-up changes, they have never split up. After their 1982 success with “Promised You a Miracle”, they have never surrendered the glittering prize. Their enviable career is defined by a tenacity which can go hand-in-hand with a music that runs on rails. Although they can’t be faulted for sometimes putting their musical development on hold to embrace causes and the needs of the stadium, this chronologically sequenced triple CD suggests their Read more ...