New music
mark.kidel
Folk music is about roots and place and while rootedness can provide a welcome balance to the vagaries of a virtual and globalised world, it can also raise some less salubrious spirits: the British folk movement expresses at times a folksy form of insularity, in which place or nation are made just a little too sacred and exclusive. The Cecil Sharp Project, which emerged out of a week of workshopping sponsored last year by the Shrewsbury Folk Festival, avoided these pitfalls with a great deal of deftness, a sense of irony as well as a dose of humour.The assembled musicians drew from the Read more ...
joe.muggs
I've seen some genre intersections in my time, but gangsta ambient takes the biscuit. Baghdad born South Londoner VersA Beatz began as a grime producer, but like many has moved from that genre's hyped-up energy into the slower, more menacing electronic “trap beats” of hip hop. This in turn has overlapped with a current American style of melancholic leftfield hip hop sounds pioneered by Clams Casino (best known as producer to Lil B and current sensation A$AP Rocky) to produce, in this free album of instrumentals, a narcotic sound that feels as if gravity has been loosened and the imagination Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The term "folktronica" always makes me think of that horror-porn abomination The Human Centipede. Two entities being joined together in a way that they should never be joined together. Finger-in-your-ear choral harmonies and groovy basslines? It should not work but it often does. Audacious outfit Tunng regularly cocked a snook at received boundaries and pulled off this unholy alliance with flying colours, so perhaps it is no surprise that frontman/founder Sam Genders repeats the trick with the debut release of his latest outfit, Diagrams. And then some.Black Light is the kind of album that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Whether it’s the British troupes which inspired It Ain’t Half Hot Mum or Bob Hope’s visits to Vietnam, the armed forces have long recognised that entertaining the troops is central to keeping on-going campaigns on an even keel. In 1971, the US army went a step further, using bands of serving soldiers both to entertain and as a recruitment tool. For the bands, it was also a way of avoiding being sent to Vietnam. The East Of Underground Hell Below box set, which collects the albums the army released, is more than a musical artefact. It offers a window on an until-now barely known aspect of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It must have been difficult for Mexican acoustic instrumental guitar duo Rodrigo Sánchez and Gabriela Quintero to know where to go next. Initially discovered in Dublin as high-end buskers, they’ve built a career on energised acoustic pyrotechnics, combining complex Hispanic flourishes with heavy metal tics. It’s an invigorating concoction, especially live, and eventually they were courted by Hollywood, writing pieces for Puss in Boots and the last Pirates of the Caribbean film.The bigger picture, however, is that they’re seen by some as a one-trick pony. There’s a touch of the Gotan Project Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Canadian singer-songwriter Lindi Ortega took to the stage last night in a rococo Edinburgh broom cupboard looking like a country-fried Amy Winehouse in widow’s robes. As with most first impressions, it proved misleading. The visuals might have screamed Camden boho chic by way of New Nashville, but the voice was pure Dolly.Ortega has been making fine music for over a decade. Between spells providing vocal back-up for the likes of Brandon Flowers, she has carved her own niche. In the time between her first album, The Taste of Forbidden Fruit (2001) and her third, Little Red Boots (2011), she Read more ...
peter.quinn
Recorded live at New York's Blue Note during a two-week residency, this double CD celebrating the music and legacy of the jazz pianist and composer, Bill Evans (1929-80), stirs the soul even as it breaks your heart a little. Drummer Paul Motian, a member of the first Bill Evans Trio with Scott LaFaro on bass - widely recognised as one of the most influential piano trios in jazz - passed away in November last year.
Disc one sees piano maestro Chick Corea, together with Motian and another Evans alumnus, bassist Eddie Gomez, dusting down two Evans originals, “Peri’s Scope” from Portrait in Jazz Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Debut albums often set the bar high. How are you going to top a Psychocandy or a Piper At The Gates of Dawn? The answer is, not easily and, with rare exceptions, not at once. All those ideas that had been growing forever splurge out in those first excited studio sessions, years of passion and imagination explode into the open and the thrill carries to the listener.This especially applies when a debut album rewrites the book. It’s almost impossible to completely shift the musical landscape with the same finality twice, especially just a year or two later. Beardy Californian yoga mystic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Last night was about how few notes can be played, and how texture can offer them maximum effect. Five musicians strove to play the minimum with the greatest impact. Of course, that’s what Black Sabbath did at the very beginning, but A Winged Victory for the Sullen’s instrumentals are built from piano, treated guitar and strings. Yet, at times, they had the power of rock.But this is classically slanted minimalism. A Winged Victory for the Sullen are composer Dustin O’Halloran and Adam Wiltzie, mainstay of Texan drone experimentalists Stars of the Lid and former associate of Sparklehorse. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Their name is Portuguese for miracles. Aiming high with their handle hasn’t prevented the Brooklyn-based Milagres from being criticised for their supposed Coldplay leanings. Sure, singer and main man Kyle Wilson has a tendency to stretch the middle of words out and there is a yearning, windswept feel to much of their debut album. Elbow and Grizzly Bear can be chucked into the pot too, but what they most sound like is a Mercury Rev/Talk Talk smoothie.The production of Glowing Mouth is crisp. Precise. Milagres’s lyrics are less specific. “Lost in the dark” sings Wilson on song of the same name Read more ...
bruce.dessau
I was pretty sure I could hear the sound of a kitchen sink being chucked into the mix on "Feel To Follow", the third track on The Maccabees' third album. The London-based quintet has certainly lobbed everything else into the mix to deliver a long player (an old-school term for an old-school album) that looks set to be a fixture in both student union bars and end-of-year charts. Given to the Wild is easily the band's most mature album yet, even if it does wear its influences a little too noisily. Still, as I write it is currently outselling Adele's 21 and that's got to be a good thing.It is Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“He’s a praying mantis,” said the girl next to me, “but sexy.” True enough, even if Mr Bruce is a gangly long-limbed performer rather than an actual insect. I’ve seen him twice this year already, and he’s completely compelling on stage and as a dancer who moves like no one else out there.The first time was last week at a party or wake to mark the sad selling-off of Rosemary Works, a hive of studios in Islington where the entertainment included punk power-pop band Sabre Tooth Tiger and a girl who did a burlesque show dressed as Queen Elizabeth. Gloriana disrobed and shook her stuff, then Mr Read more ...