New music
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes, it doesn’t matter who you are. You might be a charismatic performer, or the most energetic band in the world. But some settings can’t be outperformed. Holding Berlin Festival at the city’s astonishing out-of-commission Tempelhof airport sets a challenge that’s almost impossible to rise to. Although it began working in the late 1920s, the surviving buildings were completed in 1941 and form a single block over a kilometre long, wrapped around an open quadrangle. The gleaming, pale buildings dwarf anything.The entrance hall is a cathedral to Albert Speer’s vision of a modern, world- Read more ...
peter.quinn
Django Bates has commented that he probably first heard the music of Charlie Parker while still in the womb. Parker's music has thus been part of his musical make up ab ovo, as it were. This brilliant follow-up to Bates' 2010 Parker tribute Belovèd Bird comprises three classics from the Parker canon – the title track, “Donna Lee” and “Now's the Time” – plus six compositions from Bates.The trio's amazing rhythm section, bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun, are both alumni of Copenhagen's Rhythmic Music Conservatory, the leader's erstwhile stamping ground. The sudden shifts of Read more ...
josh.spero
After Lady Gaga's concert at Twickenham last night, I asked some of the Little Monsters scurrying back to the station the name of the last song she had sung. The song she sang right after declaring that she had to bring the evening to an early end. The song she sang an hour after screaming that she would "sing her pussy off" and no one could stop her. Someone stopped her and no one could name it. (See Update in the penultimate paragraph.)If someone had stopped her approximately an hour earlier, you would have felt shortchanged from such a brief evening but at least left on a high, perhaps Read more ...
mark.kidel
Like Orpheus, Bob Dylan is familiar with the underworld. As he gets closer to meeting his maker, the tone of his work has become less baroque, increasingly stripped down and almost naïve in its simplicity. His latest album marks another episode, perhaps the darkest, in a series of sung chronicles, blues-soaked dirges and timeless ballads that draw from the poet’s seemingly unstoppable stream of memories, dreams and reflections. Even the more jaunty tunes – such as “Duquesne Whistle”, one of several songs on the album to evoke the emotions associated with the arrival and departure of trains – Read more ...
theartsdesk
Lee “Scratch” Perry and Friends: Disco Devil - The Jamaican DiscomixesThomas H GreenAs bass culture conquers the musical universe, with even Justin Bieber diving into dubstep waters and gnarly electro-goth Skrillex one of the biggest earning new artists of the year, the double CD Disco Devil is a timely release. It represents the roots of bass culture. Not the prehistory of Lee “Scratch” Perry’s early Seventies experiments, but a slightly later turning point that led us directly to where we are today. One of the notions that Jamaica’s sound system culture was built around was an emphasis of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Astonishment is the emotion that creeps up most often when watching 36-year-old New York singer-songwriter Jeffrey Lewis. The term singer-songwriter does him an injustice, in fact, for these days it summons notions of strummed predictability, opaquely emotive lyrics and vulnerable falsetto-flecked whining, whereas he’s a whole different ball game. Take his history of the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance. Behind him and his band, The Junkyard - featuring his brother Jack on bass – there’s a screen upon which Lewis’s comic illustrations are projected, Robert Crumb-esque cartoons of Kennedy Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Lady Gaga arrives in the UK this weekend to play two huge shows at Twickenham Stadium, before moving on to Manchester. Today, she is the biggest pop star in the world. Three years ago she was in the final stages of a highly orchestrated campaign intended to claim that position. What follows is an interview with her in Israel in the autumn of 2009, right around the time the world went Gaga gaga. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Pet Shop Boys eleventh album leaps sideways into smooth, opulent US FM radio production in a way that will initially give long term fans palpitations. The duo sound… different. They recorded Elysium in Los Angeles with Grammy-winning Kanye West producer Andrew Dawson and it sounds that way too.Here’s the thing, though, whether you like the results or not, Dawson pushes them somewhere new, albeit sometimes in directions that jar. A case in point would be the way the snappy “Ego Music”, which ruthlessly satirizes the portentous self-importance of certain rock stars, is wilfully followed by “ Read more ...
bruce.dessau
One of the current tropes in stand-up comedy is the way that television appropriates music to manipulate emotions. Sean Hughes employs a flurry of Snow Patrol when he acts out buying some bread, while newcomer David Trent has Sigur Rós on his soundtrack as he celebrates winning a piffling £10 on the Lottery. Which brings us to The xx. The young band's Mercury Prize-winning 2009 debut album became a dinner party staple and a default promo choice, plugging everything from the BBC's Election coverage to teen tosh 90210. Their sequel must be as eagerly anticipated by creatively moribund marketing Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a lot that's right with this album. Love This Giant sounds like Talking Heads for one, suggesting that David Byrne has made his peace with what made him great in the first place, and has seemingly stopped his slide into becoming a fascinating conceptualist and writer but slightly boring performer. It also, in several places, sounds strikingly like Róisín Murphy's Ruby Blue album made with Matthew Herbert, which given this is one of the most criminally underappreciated records of the 21st century is no bad thing at all. Yet despite that, it also sounds extraordinarily coherent and Read more ...
bella.todd
“There’re a lot of turds out there, ladies and gentlemen. But they’re not one of them.” It’s Friday afternoon in Larmer Tree Gardens, a wood-rimmed, laurel-trimmed, urn-decorated corner of Dorset, and thank yous are coming thick and fast for Bella Union, the indie label Simon Raymonde founded in 1997 with fellow Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie. To celebrate their 15th birthday, the defenders of much that is beautiful, offbeat, meditative and plain meaningful in the world of music are curating the first day of the seventh End of the Road, the boutique festival dedicated to all that is beautiful, Read more ...
theartsdesk
The seventh radio show from theartsdesk features a wealth of eclectic music, from grime to Bach, while Joe Muggs and Peter Culshaw discuss everything from French café culture of the Fifties to sub-Saharan politics in the Sudan and northern Mali.Questions that arise include: Is the Bohemian outsider philosophy dead? Have the Olympics helped kill off the old artistic ideal of seeking “derangement of the senses” in favour of clean living? How much hipper is Bradley Wiggins than Paul Weller?A track from jazzer Brad Mehldau’s new record is played alongside one from the solo piano album by Chilli Read more ...