New music
Natalie Shaw
Drake’s routine is divisive; he’s attracted hip-hop’s most loyal following in a somewhat unconventional way. By using self-doubt as his signature complex, he’s taken something traditionally uninteresting and made it his calling card. The cringe factor in his lyrics seem, from the outside, best suited to an album at the tail-end of a career, but that’s without considering his charm, his astute ear for a chorus, and how unashamedly, loveably contrived and cheesy his whole shtick is. At his second sold-out night at the O2, 25-year-old Canadian Aubrey Drake Graham proved to be a master of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The 1972 Jethro Tull opus Thick as a Brick was offered by Ian Anderson as a parody of progressive rock concept albums. Its sub-Pythonesque packaging proclaimed the record’s lyrics to be an epic poem composed by an eight-year-old swot, Gerald Bostock, who was disqualified from winning a literary prize after swearing during a BBC interview. Anderson talks up the jape to this day, neglecting the Oedipal struggle central to the album’s opaque narrative, its layered, intricate musical motifs, and its cinematic sweep. Never given its critical due, Thick ranks beside its predecessor, Aqualung, as a Read more ...
mark.kidel
Ambrose Akinmusire is the new jazz sensation, the messiah of the post-bop trumpet. With his hyper-talented and youthful quintet, the 29-year-old Californian delivered a set in Bristol that rang all the changes from the soft and lyrical to high-energy heat.Akinmusire took the stage following an at times dazzling opening performance from the equally young, gifted and black British pianist Robert Mitchell. The American trumpeter started with a kind of alaap, a jazz equivalent of the prelude to a raga when the lead instrumentalist explores the tonalities of his chosen mode. It was as if Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The Moscow girl punk band Pussy Riot say their impromptu performance inside Russia’s major cathedral of their song “Holy Shit” was a prayer. They were replying to the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill who called it “blasphemy”.Speaking at a liturgy in Moscow’s Deposition of the Robe Cathedral, the Patriarch condemned Pussy Riot’s actions at Christ the Saviour Cathedral as “blasphemous” saying that “the Devil has laughed at all of us.”“We have no future if we allow mocking in front of great shrines, and if some see such mocking as some sort of valour, as an expression of political Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Norway’s bouncy electropoppers Casiokids release their new single “Kaskaden” next week. They’ve chosen to premier the video on theartsdesk. Directed by their long-term collaborator Blank Blank, the fantasia takes in Kung Fu films and the Hollywood of the Eighties, mixing them with a Norwegian flavour.The video for “Kaskaden”, a track from their recent Aabenbaringen over aaskammen album, is produced and directed for Casiokids by the Finnish/Colombian/Norwegian collective Blank Blank and choreographed by the Dutch contemporary dancer Marjolein Vogels. The band describe the video as a “ a film- Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The dazzling Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca delighted a packed Barbican last night – but part of the fun was seeing him negotiate the balance between more soulful, minimal playing and sheer technically brilliant extravagance. Is he more an heir to Chucho Valdez, the consummate sophisticated Havana Jazzer, or to Ruben Gonzalez, the more lyrical pianist of the Buena Vista Social Club, into whose shoes he had the tricky task of stepping for their live tours? The set lifted off with the driving beat of the self-penned “80s”, also the opening track of his new album Yo. It enabled the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
To dubstep or not to dubstep, that was the question perplexing the nearly 5000 metalheads jammed into the Brixton Academy to see Korn.The California four-piece made their name as purveyors of "nu metal" in the mid-Nineties (like old metal - but with funkier rhythms), and they’ve done extremely well, topping the album charts in the States and around the world. They have always reinforced their sound with funk and hip-hop stylings, but their latest album, The Path of Totality, their 10th, pushed unexpectedly far into the snarling world of dubstep (of the post-Skrillex variety).Throughout the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In their native Australia Sarah Blasko, Sally Seltmann and Holly Thorsby are award-winning solo artists in their own right, even if their reputations have for the most part not yet preceded them internationally. Seeker Lover Keeper is both the name of their collaborative recording project and its first release, the name easily calling to mind a tripartite structure in which the identity of each major player shifts with each track - writer, frontwoman, harmony.With three formidable talents on board the project could never be anything less than a true meeting of minds, with each artist writing Read more ...