New music
Thomas H. Green
Styles and innovations in music, as in all the arts, change incrementally over time. Suddenly we can find ourselves in an unrecognisable landscape. Things moved on when we weren’t paying proper attention. Sometimes this is due to a wave of game-changing talent – exciting and all to the good. On other occasions we’re startled to awake in a mire. What’s worse, as in a nightmare, everyone around is carrying on regardless. Are their souls asleep? Listening to Ellie Goulding’s new album is such a moment.Goulding’s debut, Lights, was a big seller. It opened doors and she even played Elton John’s “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Being told that Magical Mystery Tour was a home movie is bit tiring. Self-evidently, The Beatles’ filmic response to the psychedelic experience was not that. They tried, and failed, to hire Shepperton Studios. Known artists like Ivor Cutler and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band were brought on board. Gavrik Losey, then hot from being an assistant director on Modesty Blaise, worked on it. Masses of extras were employed. Although a self-originated vanity project, none of this points to it being a home movie. The negative reception received at the time seems to have skewed the collective consensus. Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Motherhood doesn’t always bring out the best in singer-songwriters. On the album Aerial Kate Bush, for instance, sings “luverly luverly luverly Bertie…you give me so much joy/ and then you give me more joy”. Yeuch. So when I heard that recent mum Martha Wainwright’s new album was to be called Come Home to Mama my heart sank. It needn’t have. If there’s one thing this album isn’t, it’s sickly.The title actually comes from “Proserpina", the album's only cover and the last song her mother, Kate McGarrigle, wrote before her death in 2010. In Roman mythology Proserpina was condemned to live the Read more ...
theartsdesk
B B King: Ladies & Gentlemen…Mr B.B. KingKieron TylerOne of the stranger manifestations of U2’s Eighties fascination with the iconography of American music was “When Love Comes to Town", their collaboration with B B King. As a single, it was a hit, something King has never chased. This smart, career-spanning box set is probably not going to have the same effect as U2’s patronage, but the still-constantly touring 87-year-old blues legend is unlikely to be fussed about that.Ladies & Gentlemen…, confusingly, comes in two configurations: a 4-CD, 77-track set and a 10-CD, 194-track Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Matthew Herbert (b 1972) is a leading experimental musician. His work is sometimes as much sonic exploration as music and mostly inhabits territory where the two realms meet. Recently made Creative Director of the newly resuscitated BBC Radiophonic Workshop (who have an open day at the South Bank’s Ether Festival on 7th October), he first came to public attention through Nineties electronic dance releases as Radio Boy, Wishmountain and Doctor Rockit, melding club beats to his own “found sound” field recordings. By the turn of the century he was a successful DJ/producer, remixing the likes of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Despite the fact that this month marks the 50th anniversary of the release of The Beatles’ first single, the focus on the Fabs right now is as much on their 1967 psychedelic folly Magical Mystery Tour. The arrival of Tame Impala’s second album seems appropriate as it’s a modern psychedelia which knows all about the detachment brought by mind expansion – the distant vocals on opening cut “Be Above it” echo John Lennon’s on “Strawberry Fields Forever”.Not that Tame Impala are specifically Beatles-influenced. For their first album, 2010’s fabulous Innerspeaker, they were pretty much a one-man Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Midway through their set Gallows are expending a mass of energy, attacking their instruments and jerking about like possessed men in a jam-packed venue yet, unless you are one of their devotees, moshing like Bedlam or hanging from the rafters gesticulating, it’s not especially engaging. It should be, with such energy and dynamism on show but their music attempts nothing so much as to fulfill the expectations of those who already like them, possibly in an ever-diminishing manner.Gallows are a punk band from Watford and when they first made it big in 2007, they were a breath of fresh air, angry Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Killer Queen” by Queen, “Rocket Man” by Elton John and “Laura” by the Scissor Sisters are all songs that reek of design. Their finest details have been engineered to their smallest component parts, yet the tone is light, almost throwaway. They’re crafted, calculated classics, but they revel raw in pop glee. This is the feeling Mika constantly strives for and which, despite his brilliance at constructing songs, continues to evade him. Not that the world minds too much: his records are globally successful on a huge scale, especially his first album, Life in Cartoon Motion. He has sold multi- Read more ...
peter.quinn
Christine Tobin’s latest CD Sailing to Byzantium brings to life the lyrical magic of W B Yeats’ poems and has been widely acclaimed. Reviewing the album earlier this year, I wrote that "Tobin has created an unqualified masterpiece. Setting poems from across the entire spectrum of Yeats's oeuvre, Tobin perfectly gauges the emotional and spiritual resonances of the texts, aided by performances of incredible subtlety and understatement."In October and November, the BBC award winning jazz vocalist and her group - Phil Robson (guitar), Kate Shortt (cello), Liam Noble (piano) and Dave Whitford ( Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There are, roughly speaking, two types of record. There are the ones that it is hard to consider as anything other than a complete unit - gimmicky concept records or complex themes, tracks that ebb and flow and blend together as if making a mockery of the single-track-friendly digital future. And then there are records like Deer Creek Canyon, from which any song could be plucked to form the centrepiece of a homely, autumnal mixtape.And “homely” is the operative word this time around for Colorado-born Sera Cahoone, who on this third album shines her songwriting lantern on the foothills of home Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Manu Chao is “backstage” in a little makeshift tent on the green outside Brixton’s St Matthews Church (that’s the one opposite the Ritzy Cinema) and he’s certainly more at home than in some of the more conventional rock star places I’ve seen him in. Like Glastonbury, where he hated being in the VVIP area of the main stage with Amy Winehouse and Jay Z – all the fences and passes made him think of Palestine and he looked bored and dejected.This event is more Manu’s speed – befitting its name, the inaugural Brixton Come Together Festival was a small, friendly, positive community event that is Read more ...
joe.muggs
A confession: though very fond of the Beatles, I'd never seen their self-directed Magical Mystery Tour before this DVD release. Not that I have anything against psychedelic follies, but I felt like I'd had my fill of this sort of thing a long time ago and had never bothered seeking it out. Consider me chastened; it's a joyous film – yes, it's the result of a bunch of rich young men fooling about with drugs and looks like it, but there's so much warmth, so much colour, so much affection for the textures and quirks of a lost Britain shot through it that it's hard not to love.Two things make it Read more ...