New music
Peter Culshaw
Like a piece of conceptual art, it may be the idea rather than the actual music that is the most significant thing about the world premiere last night of Steve Reich’s Radio Rewrite. There will be a hundred times more people discussing the fact that Reich has taken on Radiohead than actually listening to it. Rather than variations, it's a 16-minute piece performed by the London Sinfonietta in which elements of a couple of Radiohead songs are referred to, often obliquely. Chords are shuffled around, but snatches of melody survive. It was a bit peek-a-boo and Spot That Tune.The first Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Straight out of Dumfries, Mull and Inverness, via Edinburgh, with a sound and songs that boast originality and imagination, Homework are small in profile but already nigh-on perfectly formed. Their name, judging from the album cover and sounds within, is a nod to Kraftwerk, but 13 Towers is no retro synth-fest.This four-piece combine electronic effects, pulses and tones with guitars and modern, driving, catchy songs. Not for them, either, the currently in-vogue Vampire Weekend-with-a-synth route. Theirs is not bland indie with slight electronic trimmings. Instead they draw on all sorts of Read more ...
Russ Coffey
When Justin Bieber finally arrived on stage last night the volume of the screams from the teen audience topped 100 decibels. I know because I measured it on my iPhone. That, however, wasn’t the first deafening noise from the capacity crowd of 20,000. The previous half-hour had been punctuated by a series of boos borne out of growing frustration. Bieber had been scheduled to arrive at 8.30. By 10.25, when the stage lights started to rise, he needed one hell of an entrance.Fortunately he had one. Dressed in a white suit and with a giant pair of wings Bieber descended from the domed roof on Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Definitely not the M that hit with “Pop Muzik” in 1979 and then swiftly vanished. This –M- is a bona fide, stadium-filling superstar. In France, that is. In Camden though, last night, Mathieu Chédid confounded any expectations of what stadium rock ought to be. The evening was rounded off by Chédid and his band dancing in a line to a playback of last year’s single “Mojo”, just as they’d done in the video. They make open and shut gestures with their hands, mimicking a mouth. The audience do the same. Pity that this often bewildering and sold-out show, the first of –M-’s two-night London run, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Stereophonics’ meat’n’potatoes Brit-rock is very easy to knock. So here goes. No, only kidding. Well, sort of kidding. The Welsh band were a fixture of the charts from the late Nineties until relatively recently. Initially punted hard as the first signing to Richard Branson’s V2 label, they rode out the arse end of Brit-pop and, in “Have a Nice Day”, made one of those songs that's irritatingly purpose built for ads and TV montages. Four years since parting ways with V2 after an underperforming album, they appear with the follow-up, their eighth, which occasionally spikes their usual lumpen Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Suede, led by the arrestingly beautiful Brett Anderson, was one of the finest bands to come out of the UK in the first half of the 1990s. Their eponymous debut album, released in 1992, won the Mercury Music Prize. During the recording of the 1994 sequel Dog Man Star guitarist Bernard Butler left and the remaining members – Anderson, Mat Osman (bass) and Simon Gilbert (drums) and new recruits Richard Oakes (guitar) and Neil Codling (keyboards) never quite received the same critical acclaim, although 1996's Coming Up was their biggest selling album worldwide.The group disbanded in 2003 but Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Blue Öyster Cult: The Columbia Albums CollectionBlue Öyster Cult were about more than the music. They seemingly arrived fully formed with a ready-made mythos and mystery. Their first two albums had no pictures of the band and weird, Escher-esque art. Their symbol, an inverted hybrid question mark and cross, suggested they were in thrall to a shadowy cult. Song titles like “Cities on Flame With Rock ‘n’ Roll”, “7 Screaming Diz-Busters” and “Career of Evil” fostered the impression they were zeal-filled revolutionaries. Their third album, issued in 1974, included a track called “ME 262” and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s enough to make any bedroom electronicist green with envy. A home experimenter releases their debut album to instant attention. Under normal circumstances, another Squarepusher wannabe would be hard pushed getting anyone to take much notice. These aren’t normal circumstances as Luftbobler is by one half of agitated art siblings Jake and Dinos Chapman.Despite being wholly in thrall to its influences, bits of Luftbobler are ok – it’s not entirely style over substance. As well as Squarepusher and the less-white noise end of early Aphex Twin, “Still Walking” and “Hot on the Heels of Love” Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Let us go now to a foreign country. To the foreboding concrete tunnels and rooms of an RAF early-warning facility under the Sussex Downs in the early summer of 1973.The Lower Sixth has somehow procured the space for an epic late-night party. Cheap beer and cheaper cider is drunk. Cigarettes are smoked, self-consciously. Flared jeans and cheesecloth shirts are worn under Afghan coats, not with panache.There’s no dancing because there’s no DJ and no one has thought to bring any pop singles. Instead, there’s a pile of gatefold-sleeved albums beside the record player, each of which gets played to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
She has yet to hit the second half of her twenties, but Caitlin Rose already has a voice to melt the heart of the most casual listener. While her pedigree - Nashville-born daughter of a Grammy-winning songwriter - screams country starlet, Rose’s vocal is instead the rich, melodic croon to match the torch singer coyness of the pose she pulls on the cover art to her second album.The songwriting may be simple and the vocals straight from a Patsy Cline record, but Rose’s work is about as old-fashioned as the whisky cocktail. Wurlitzer organ, pedal steel and a horn section get used strategically, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Walking into the auditorium of a packed Heaven last night, we were instantly treated to the sensation of having our bodies invaded by thousands of infinitely complex machine insects. It's rare that a band can have such an instant and disquieting effect, but Fiium Shaark's music, we discovered, is as unusual as their name in many ways. At first seemingly entirely improvising, Rudi Fischerlehner on drumkit and Maurizio Ravalico on assorted high-tech looking percussion set arrhythmic patterns scampering around one another while Isambard Khroustaliov filled the spaces with itchy fragments of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Yesterday Kenneth Branagh was thanking Manchester – saying that he felt he had “come of age” the previous time he had performed Shakespeare in the city 25 years ago, the audience being so “generous, quick-witted and lively". He also thanked the city for having the determination and audacity, in the face of gloom and cuts, at the launch of its adventurous festival, to back to the hilt a biennial world-class arts extravaganza, which, among many notable headline acts has Branagh as lead in Macbeth (directed by Branagh and Emmy and Tony award-winning Rob Ashcroft). Tickets will be gold dust, but Read more ...