New music
Kieron Tyler
The use of Sigur Rós’s aural drama for the soundtracks of Life on Earth, Vanilla Sky and its subsequent sound bed ubiquity has meant their music has become divorced from who they are. The enthralling Valtari emphasises that these four Icelanders are a band rather than a machine supplying lazy directors with ready made atmospherics. Even so, Valtari’s “Ekki múkk” and “Varúð” are so spectacular they’ll no doubt warm the hearts of filmmakers world wide.Thankfully, Sigur Rós have ditched the outside elements that made their last album, 2008’s Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, a compromised Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
One image remains stuck from Watch the Throne's second of five sold-out nights in London; it’s a song-long vision of Kanye West and Jay-Z – aka J Hova or just Hov – sat side by side for Hov’s “Hard Knock Life”. Hov’s words fell out of his mouth seemingly effortlessly as the track's structure emerged while ‘Ye sat in a silent, contemplative stoop - his dripping sweat and jewellery making him look post-marathon mid-set.They’re hip hop’s biggest stars, sure, but here we have two very different entities. For their numerous collaborations – aside from the Watch the Throne album, some of Jay-Z's Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The end had long been nigh for The Cult, when it first came in 1995. It wasn’t just the booze and the arrival of grunge. It was as much that smart-arse Brit Pop was never going to have much truck with a man who called himself Wolf Child and wrote lyrics like, “Cool operator with a rattlesnake kiss”. More fool them. But yet, for all the brilliance of Love, Electric and Sonic Temple there was no denying things went seriously downhill after the fourth album. Still, fans have long believed in one last Memphis hip shake from the old peace dogs. And finally, on their second comeback, we now have Read more ...
theartsdesk
Paul and Linda McCartney: Ram (Deluxe Edition)Jasper ReesThe project to reissue the big moments in Paul McCartney’s solo career continues. McCartney and Band on the Run have already had the deluxe treatment. Now it’s the turn of 1971's Ram, the one and only time the uxorious former Beatle gave the lovely Linda equal billing. She takes a co-writing credit on half a dozen songs, supplies backing vocals and, most of all, sleeve shots of her hubby wrangling livestock and jamming. Ram is more notable for other things. Having played all the instruments on his first solo effort, it found McCartney Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gary Numan (born Gary Webb, 1958) was born in Hammersmith and raised in the western outskirts of London, the son of a bus driver. By the latter half of the Seventies he was fronting punk band Tubeway Army but his fortunes changed dramatically when he added synthesizers to the formula and became, with the album Replicas and songs such as “Down in the Park” and “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, one of electro-pop’s great innovators. His coldly catchy music, sci-fi imagery, adenoidal voice and air of robotic isolation was hugely influential. He sealed his repute with the globally successful single “ Read more ...
joe.muggs
“Post-classical” the FatCat label call it, and well they might. All three of the acts who played at the Barbican last night in one way or another used the instrumentation of the classical concert hall but in a way that was completely dislodged from tradition – not raging against it, nor fighting to escape it in the sense of high modernism, nor reviving it, but rather looking back on it as something other, something of a different era.Dustin O'Halloran's music is lyrical, strange and very pretty. It has something of the TV soundtrack about it, but as Noël Coward so rightly put it, it's Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Often it can seem the sheer struggle of early reggae gets lost in all that happy, spliff-smoking Rastafarianism of Bob Marley's Legend. For one-time label-mate Jimmy Cliff, however, there was never any sense of “every little thing's going to be alright”. In the 1972 film The Harder They Come, he played a musician forced into crime and eventually shot by the police. And as a singer-songwriter, over a 50-year career, he has sung of injustice and hope. Last night, in front of a rambunctious indigO2, a 64-year-old Cliff showed he has absolutely no intention of mellowing.This concert was Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It's hard to remember sometimes, as you hum along to the singalong refrains and soaring choruses of their relative hits such as "Trains to Brazil" or "Get Over It", that Guillemots have never been a pop band. Rather, the four-piece have always provided the musical manifestations of some of the more deranged ideas flitting through fabulously named frontman Fyfe Dangerfield's head at any given time. Songs that seem charming enough on the surface reveal more with every listen, whether it's the clever instrumentation or the lyrical flights of fancy or - as early as the band's debut - the 11- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Being pigeonholed as "disco" became the kiss of death for many of the genre's lesser lights, but a select handful were able to transcend its limitations. Chic and the Bee Gees managed it, and so did Donna Summer, disco's so-called "First Lady of Love" whose career stretched over four decades. Having hooked up with Giorgio Moroder to help define the hypnotic, hedonistic message of disco, Summer was subsequently able to embrace pop, rock and gospel music. Her powerful, soulful voice lent conviction wherever her musical explorations led her.Her background and upbringing had left her equipped to Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
Scissor Sisters’ breakout cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” was so downright preposterous it looked likely to doom the New Yorkers to one-hit wonder status; it’s the kind of balls-out release that comes along only very infrequently. Thankfully for everyone, however, they’ve gone on to become one of our most treasured pop acts - headlining arena tours in the UK, enjoying life at the top of the charts and attracting fans from across the board.That gaiety, slink and uncompromised cultural slant have remained consistent throughout their nine-year reign in the mainstream. On the verge of Read more ...
graeme.thomson
In the eight years since the fourth – and very possibly last - Blue Nile album, High, Paul Buchanan has seen his band disintegrate and a close friend die. Little wonder, then, that his solo debut is a reflective record. The most cinematic of bands, the Blue Nile's ravishing sound-pictures generally came in widescreen; Mid Air may be a more intimate, art house affair, but it is no less affecting.Mostly recorded in Buchanan’s Glasgow flat over the course of a couple of years, there's not much to it: 14 songs, as beautiful as they are brief, consisting of soft piano, the occasional daub of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Spoek Mathambo is one the year's brightest new hopes. From Johannesburg but based in Sweden, Spoek (real name Nthato Mokgata) plays with genres like few others. He makes radical, sometimes disjointed music, some of which - like his new single “Let Them Talk” from his recently released album Father Creeper - you can actually dance to.Spoek got a lot of attention last year with his cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control", but I began by asking him about Die Antwoord, the hilarious and brilliant white rap group who created a lot of waves in 2010. He and his band are currently on tour in the Read more ...