New music
joe.muggs
Let's get the obvious out of the way: yes, this is incredible. Not just the sounds, nor the ambitious staging of Hans Christian Andersen's last story as a ballet, but the fact that, 30 years since they met, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are still making music that's both relevant and gloriously excessive to a frankly crackerdog mental degree. They've tinkered with classical themes before, of course, from setting “Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat” in 1988's “Left to My Own Devices” to their 2004 live soundtrack to Battleship Potemkin, but this is something else. Piling on romantic themes Read more ...
david.cheal
Beards, beards, beards: at the Roundhouse, they seemed to be everywhere, sprouting from the chins of hundreds of chaps in the audience. Perhaps, though, I was just looking out for them, what with the luxuriant growth on the face of the man they had all come to see: Iron & Wine, the artist otherwise known as Sam Beam, singer, songwriter and former film studies professor from the American south-east.Indeed, I think I had beards on the brain; skimming through his Wikipedia biography before the show, I thought I’d read that he “sometimes tours with a full beard”, when of course it says “ Read more ...
howard.male
Sometimes it’s worth remembering that what is world music to one music lover is pop music to another. Portuguese four-piece Deolinda’s first album, Canção ao lado, spent nearly two years at the top of the charts at home, so there are an awful lot of people who see this band as pop music. This must also make it strange for the band themselves who, presumably, play sizeable venues in Portugal, only to find themselves in front of a London crowd of less than 300 at the Jazz Café last night. And to add one final twist, this London crowd seemed to be largely made up of Portuguese fans.But Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Cologne label Kompakt has been home to a plethora of very fine electronic dance music over the last decade. They also occasionally develop acts, as in proper bands rather than professorial Teutonic sorts standing behind laptops with intense, funereal expressions, pale-lit by console glow. Los Angeles couple Danny and Tiffany Preston don't look professorial. In the only publicity shots I've seen they traipse through the desert dressed in Arab garb, carrying synthesisers and machine guns. It's a good look and bodes well.Apparently the duo's first bit of kit was a Lebanese Casio with Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Poor Charlie Fink. First losing Laura Marling to Marcus Mumford, and then, last month, suffering the indignity of having to watch Mumford & Sons win Album of the Year at the Brits. Still, on recent evidence he’s the one with the real talent, and the confidence with which he changes style implies he knows it too. On 2009’s The First Days of Spring Fink had morphed from naive nu-folk into sophisticated Bill Callahan-style acoustica, and now he’s gone all Eighties pop-rock. Unsurprisingly for such a radical change of sound, Last Night on Earth has divided opinion, with the way people feel Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Kurt Elling’s new one has the potential to push him out of the hermetic world of jazz insiderdom where he has been a big figure now for over a decade. It's produced with the right mixture of restraint and pizzazz by Don Was. Elling has sometimes been seen as the nearest thing to a successor to Frank Sinatra. His inventive ease dancing vocally over the strict metres, his charismatic ability to front a band, not to mention his sharp suits and his love of a killer melody are Sinatraesque.But like his fellow top American jazzers such as Brad Mehldau and Cassandra Wilson – both also in their Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Last month I thought I'd gone deaf. After decades of standing too close to the loudspeakers I'd finally got my comeuppance and my ears had given up the ghost. I was at Joan As Police Woman's gig at the Barbican and the music sounded like a muffled whisper, as if someone was talking to me from the other side of the room through a ball of cotton wool.Luckily it turned out that it wasn't me, it was them. Joan apologised for the sludgy mix and explained that it had been perfectly fine during the soundcheck but some gremlins had decided to rain on her sonic parade. The sound improved a little Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some say that R.E.M. haven't made a great album since original drummer Bill Berry left in 1997. Others don't care whether they have or not. But regardless of whether Collapse Into Now is "great", it's an excellent R.E.M. disc which erases the memory of equivocal efforts like Reveal or Around the Sun. It does so by successfully re-establishing contact with the band's original strengths (guitars, harmonies and a whiff of folk-rock mysticism) and doing it with a barrelling rush of energy which verges on the phenomenal for a band now past its 30th birthday. Maybe it's taken this long for the Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Grown men with bulging muscles and tattoos were crying in Brixton last night. And not just the man at the front who got unexpectedly kicked when Mike Skinner decided to go crowd-surfing. It was Skinner's very last gig before he pursues film-making, novels or roadsweeping, depending which interview you believe, so could he finish with a bang?Well, he certainly started with a bang. The gig hit the ground running, quite literally in the case of dreadlocked co-vocalist Kevin Mark Trail, who spent almost the entire 90 minutes on stage hurtling around, while the star of the night preferred to Read more ...
peter.quinn
A jazz concept album exploring the historical origins of Europe. No, not the synopsis of a new Christopher Guest film – although how I'd love to see Fred Willard in that - but an ambitious, far-reaching new recording from sax maestro Courtney Pine. Except, Courtney doesn't play any sax at all. In one of several firsts, Europa hears him blowing up a storm through the delightfully rich, woody timbres of the bass clarinet, an instrument he fell in love with when he heard Eric Dolphy play on John Coltrane's seminal 1961 recording, Live at the Village Vanguard.Pine is a musician who is constantly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Halfway through last night’s show, as songs segued and smooshed into each other, it became clear that Robyn has perfected a high-concept pop that’s impossible to place geographically. She might be Swedish, but bloopy Chicago house, Euro electro and synthetic Japanese new wave are in the mix. A human blender, she’s at a peak – visibly fizzing.Although she says she has a throat infection – probably the reason for the single-song encore (“With Every Heartbeat”) – she's constantly throwing martial arts shapes and flinging herself side to side as though she’s experiencing an alien attack on the Read more ...
joe.muggs
On paper Jessie J is an amazing pop star. Great looking but not willing to play the eager-to-please dollybird, full of cheeky Essex girl vim and verve, clearly musically multitalented, thoroughly immersed in soul and funk, and with a healthy pair of lungs to boot – as her early solo YouTube appearances (see below) amply demonstrated.And there are bits of this album where she shows what she's capable of, in particular the high-kicking cabaret blues with dubstep bass of “Mamma Knows Best” in which she hollers her heart out like Christina Aguilera at her belting best. “Casualty of Love” is Read more ...