New music
bruce.dessau
If there was ever an album that could be reviewed on the basis of its track titles it is this one. "Helping the Retarded to Know God", "I'm Working at NASA on Acid" and "That Ain't My Trip" sound like they have been automatically generated via some Flaming Lips Title-Generating Machine. Luckily the music, recorded with chums including Nick Cave, Yoko Ono, Ke$ha, Bon Iver and Erykah Badu and first released in limited edition outside the UK on this April's Record Store Day, does not feel quite so formulaic.It is definitely thrilling to hear Nick Cave in playful comedy sex god mode barking out Read more ...
peter.quinn
The UK premiere of Wynton Marsalis's Swing Symphony (Symphony No 3) last night was extraordinary on several counts. We heard, first and foremost, a real dialogue between jazz band and orchestra. Not one of those fist-bitingly cornball jazz arrangements where the jazz players get to stretch out and the orchestral players sit back and contribute the sustained, saccharine harmonies. This was a genuine coming together where all hands contributed equally to the rhythmic, harmonic and melodic detail of the work. And talking of melody, the one that Marsalis penned for the orchestral bass section – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Idjut Boys are a London DJ/production duo who, like peers such as Optimo, Ashley Beedle, Tom Middleton or DJ Harvey, are not corralled by the electronic pulse that rules dance music. Like many good DJs of their generation, they veer towards the spirit of acid house, but they plug a wide range of other, often older, music into that feeling without drifting off course. The pair of them – Daniel Tyler and Conrad McConnell - have been around for 20 years, running labels and parties, cutting tunes, DJing the global circuit, but are claiming this is their first artist album, despite long- Read more ...
joe.muggs
Sometimes a record tells you whether you're going to like it before you've even hit play. With electronica this goes double: track titles like "Scanlon's Leaping Gore Pull", "Pneuquonsis on Return" and "Fewton Tension Chords" are either going to intrigue a potential listener, or make you think "stop playing silly buggers". If the former, then this collection is for you; if the latter, then there's not one nanosecond in the collection of grinding, bending, warping electronic sounds that is going to make you think otherwise.Though there is some repetition to these grooves, there is nothing that Read more ...
joe.muggs
The 21st-century British summer would be a very different thing were it not for Rob Da Bank. With the Bestival brand, Rob – originally Robert Gorham – and his wife Josie have, over the past decade, redefined the weekend music festival, setting the stage for the current massive proliferation of boutique events. The Bestival itself, still on the Isle of Wight site where it began in 2004, has grown to 10 times its original size, remained strong through the recession, and birthed the family-friendly Camp Bestival spin-off which takes place this coming weekend.Bestival's party ethos has its roots Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“It’s the oldest building in England,” Ana Matronic said breathlessly. “We’re probably going to behead someone.” The Tower of London is an unlikely venue for the fizzy pop monster that is Scissor Sisters, who dedicated one song to Anne Boleyn. In the end, no executions, or drawing or quartering, but they did have a couple of oversized beefeaters (pictured below) flanking the stage and dancing. Seeing them top the bill at the BT River of Music at the Americas Stage, you realise just how many pop classics they now have at their disposal from their four albums.It was a case of wishing you could Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
On her sixth album Joss Stone does what she does very well so the only question is whether it’s worth doing. When she first appeared with volume one of The Soul Sessions, tackling songs such as Aretha Franklin’s “All the King’s Horses” and Carla Thomas’s “I’ve Fallen in Love with You”, it was generally acknowledged that, while she was vocally proficient, she was only 15 and hadn’t really lived enough to inhabit raw soul scorchers.A decade later few would argue she’s not been through the mill - battling EMI and narrowly avoiding a kidnapping, amongst much else – and her voice is, indeed, a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jimmy Cliff (b 1948) is one of Jamaican music’s biggest names. Raised in the countryside, he went to Kingston in his teens and persuaded record shop owner Leslie Kong to record him. The resulting song, “Hurricane Hattie”, was the first of a string of local hits but in the late Sixties he moved to London and, working with Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, his songs such as “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” and “Vietnam”, the latter a favourite of Bob Dylan, reached a far wider audience, becoming hits in Europe.In 1972 Cliff played the lead role in the film The Harder They Come, about a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Coming off the back of million-selling soul concept album The Defamation of Strickland Banks, the third album of Plan B - who is soon to be seen as George Carter (the Dennis Waterman role) in the remake of The Sweeney - is a belated soundtrack to his feature film ill Manors.Ben Drew’s 2006 debut was the sweary, snarling urban youth apocalypse and Daily Mail nightmare, Who Needs Actions When You Got Words? His latest returns to the same gritty British hip-hop territory, but with harsher criminality and disgusted social commentary. It is of a piece with the film, dropping in snippets Read more ...
howard.male
What function does a critic even serve at an event like this? Some of the best Colombian musicians across several generations are playing some of the best music Colombia has ever produced to an audience that largely consists of blissfully happy Colombians on Colombian Independence Day. But before the party got into its stride there’s a non-Colombian support band to consider. And consider them we must, because Ghanaian Afro-funk band Konkoma were as coolly polished and insidiously funky as the headline act.Like Ondatrópica they take much of their inspiration from the dance music of Read more ...
theartsdesk
Blur: 21Bruce DessauThe recent closure of Word magazine has been seen by some as linked to the demise of "Fifty Quid Man". Who can afford such a wallet-frightening splurge these days on the kind of music the monthly's writers wrote so eloquently about? Well, have a chat with your friendly bank manager because this lavish tribute to the winners of the Britpop long game retails at £134.99 and is just about worth it. Every stage of Blur’s career is here – apart from, annoyingly, one their recent new tracks, "The Puritan" – charting the band's evolution from pre-Madchester incarnation Seymour to Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Peter Sellars has a talent for controversy, from his early days when he was the director who brought you Così fan tutte set in a diner on Cape Cod, Don Giovanni as a cocaine-snorting, Big Mac-eating slum thug, and Figaro getting married in Trump Tower. At his best, in John Adams's Nixon in China, Saariaho’s L’amour du loin, or his Teodora at Glyndebourne, the results have been some of the freshest and most inspiring stagings of new music seen in recent times. Anyone who has met him knows he is a brilliant polymath, extremely charming and charismatic, even if many hate his haircut (see Read more ...