New music
Kieron Tyler
Without intending to, Fleet Foxes set a benchmark with their debut album in 2008. One that resonated. So much so that the release of their second album, Helplessness Blues, is accompanied by sell-out shows at top-drawer venues. The love of their sensitively delivered, beautifully crafted and emotive folk rock is clear. But anyone expecting a rerun of the debut on Helplessness Blues is in for a surprise. What’s known and loved is here. There’re also more than a few left turns.Fleet Foxes will keep the fans they have, but the broadened musical palette and new idiosyncrasies exhibited on Read more ...
peter.quinn
For the sheer multiplicity of event, the resplendently rich palette of sound and the incendiary aural thrill it detonates, Marius Neset's Golden Xplosion is aptly named. This second solo album from the 25-year-old Norwegian sax player and composer careens between the hyperventilated counterpoint of “City on Fire” and the glacial, slightly ECM-ish soundscape of “Epilogue”.Neset clearly has omniverous tastes and has listened widely. The ballad playing of Wayne Shorter; the Stravinskian, block-like intercutting of material; the combination of endlessly sustained melodic lines over big, wide open Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I thought I was creating metaphysical history by running Creation” says the label’s Alan McGee in Upside Down. Seconds later the meat-and-potatoes rock of Oasis blasts from the soundtrack. The drug-assisted disconnect between such lofty aspiration and the grounded music of Oasis was never going to be bridged. Even by the man billed as “the president of pop”.Creation Records was destined to go down the tubes at some point, and the success of Oasis hastened that fate (Noel Gallagher of Oasis, pictured above). Luckily, unlike great British failures like Eddie “The Eagle“ Edwards, Creation Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes it seems as though every bit of music from the past has been disinterred, no matter how obscure or outré it is. But, of course, surprises keep on coming and the Psychedelic Pernambuco compilation is a reminder that great stuff still lurks out there. Collecting material recorded for the Brazilian independent Rozeblit label, Psychedelic Pernambuco roams through weird folk, post-Tropicália strangeness, fractured instrumentals and more.Brighton’s Mr Bongo label issues Psychedelic Pernambuco next month. The specialist Latin imprint seems to be on a roll right now as last month they Read more ...
howard.male
The downside of this job is that because new CDs are dropping through the letterbox every day, a lot of stuff inevitably gets consigned to the archives and forgotten about, when it really shouldn’t be. So when I heard that The Mexican Institute of Sound (aka Mexico City’s Camilo Lara) was rather belatedly playing live in London for the first time (his last album was released two years ago), it was an excuse to reacquaint myself with his recorded works to see if they were as good as they seemed at the time. The good news is that they are, but the less good news is that this concert didn’t Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Always renowned as an interpreter of other artists' material, Emmylou Harris has been a late developer as a songwriter. On 2008's All I Intended to Be, she successfully balanced cover versions with her own songs, but this time she has written eight songs single-handed, and three more in collaboration with Will Jennings. It's a sign of her writerly progress that her own work comfortably holds its own against the non-originals "Cross Yourself", composed by producer and multi-instrumentalist Jay Joyce, and Ron Sexsmith's slightly turgid title track.Hard Bargain was cut in a brisk four Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's something about this album that feels as if it's already existed for a long time. Full of post-apocalyptic images of smoke, dust, decay and weakness, and themes of struggling individuals and implacable political forces, it thematically fits with the works of a long line of acts who positioned themselves against the fear of nuclear armageddon and the seemingly immovable Conservative government in the 1980s. Its mix of Caribbean-influenced soundsystem culture and dub poetry with an edgy alternative experimentalism, too, harks back to the post-punk genre collision of Dennis Bovell, On-U Read more ...
david.cheal
These days it’s all meant to be about tracks, not albums; modern music listeners, it’s said, have pitifully short attention spans and skip flightily from one song to the next, like bees with ADHD in a blossoming orchard, without pausing to put each song in its proper context. But the third collection from Guillemots, the four-piece band who originated in Birmingham, is a proper, old-fashioned album: Walk the River has shape, structure, almost a narrative arc, taking the listener on an emotional journey that goes from despair to hope to joy to resolution.At times, it’s almost bipolar in Read more ...
joe.muggs
The music of Hype Williams is the definition of an acquired taste. It sounds ramshackle, thrown together, deliberately awkward – either deeply contrarian or the work of very, very messed-up people just playing around with archaic home recording equipment. But immersion in it reveals all kinds of layers of strangeness, and particularly a rich and emotionally resonant sense of melody that weaves through all the clashing rhythms and crackly recordings. Even the arrangements, it becomes apparent, are not random, but show real complexity – although what is deliberate and what not is hard to pick Read more ...
david.cheal
This was one of the funkiest shows I’ve seen for a long while; perhaps even since Prince’s peerlessly funky residence at the same venue in 2007 (though nowhere near as brilliant). There came a moment, on "Deeper Underground", when everything just clicked – the bassist and the drummer were locked in a deep groove, the guitarist was doing his precisely controlled chopping thing, the percussionist was rattling his timbales, the brass section popped and squirted, the backing singers shimmied, and singer Jay Kay himself did that weird dance, almost nerdy: glide-jerk, glide-jerk. Looking Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As her black robe swirled around a black leotard, Lykke Li became the anti-Stevie Nicks. Instead of conjuring the mellow California feeling, she sang “sadness is a blessing”. Yet this Swede’s pop is as uplifting, as transporting as any good vibe merchant. More so. Last night’s show transfixed with its Bo Diddley beats, gospel choruses and wheezy garage rock organ. Rather than being a retro futurist, Lykke Li takes from the past and recasts it to fit her vision of what affecting pop ought to be.Recent album Wounded Rhymes was a magnificent drama, the post-nuclear-age Shangri-Las slugging it Read more ...
David Nice
Bear with me while, like supergroomed rising star Miloš Karadaglić retuning his guitar to a mellower vein, I adjust my concert-hall vocab and describe this as a no-gimmicks sell-out gig underground with young musicians from the London Philharmonic’s Foyle Future Firsts scheme presenting two varied sets and Karadaglić headlining. And now I’ll just revert to old habits and declare the meat to be a slice of Classicism chromatically spiced (Mozart) and a 20th-century maverick pushing Neo-Baroque into near-atonality (Stravinsky), our top guitarist serenading by way of late-night coda. All this to Read more ...