New music
graeme.thomson
The French have got serious form when it comes to twisting the determinedly uncool into something hip, a fact Phoenix illustrated so winningly last year with Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, a beautifully crafted album of mid-tempo soft rock which lounged dreamily in some critic-proof holding area between the mid-Seventies and early Eighties.The Versailles four-piece have been kicking around for the best part of 15 years, but they only really hit their stride with their fourth studio album, a veritable party bag of lush, dreamy, fluid, euphoric pop. It won them a Grammy for Best Alternative Album ( Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month's top releases are headed up by a brilliant covers album by Brazilian singer Seu Jorge, and the Manic Street Preachers and Richard Thompson on peak form. Elsewhere there is South African pianist Kyle Shepherd, Argentinian "eccentric mystic" Axel Krygier and dance music from Underworld and Superpitcher and "like a Humberside Randy Newman" Paul Heaton. Reviewers are Sue Steward, Joe Muggs, Russ Coffey, Peter Culshaw, Kieron Tyler, Marcus O'Dair, Bruce Dessau and Howard Male.CD of the MonthSeu Jorge and Almaz Seu Jorge and Almaz (Now Again Records)by Sue Steward"Errare humanum est” is Read more ...
howard.male
“One afternoon back in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, I met four scientists in a bar, they were on their way to West Africa to study a parasitic worm that attacks the eyeballs of human beings and turns them into blind men.” And so begin the sleeve notes of C W Stoneking’s second album, Jungle Blues. Last night this teller of tall and fevered tales washed up in deepest Brixton, to perform to a motley crowd in the gloomy but brightly painted Windmill pub. It was an unlikely juxtaposition which nevertheless worked rather well.Because the truth of the matter is that wherever Mr Stoneking landed, he and Read more ...
mark.kidel
The world music scene is hungry for new sensations - and Omar Souleyman, about to hit London and the Shambhala Festival, well deserves to be one of them. In the early 1980s the hunger for the exotic focused on anything that came from the parallel universes untouched by the pressures of commercialisation: polyphonic pygmy singing from Central Africa, ecstatic Sufi soul doctors from Pakistan, drone-drenched bagpipe players from Bulgaria or heart-invading praise singers from Mali. Souleyman is the singer in a small band that plays dabke music at weddings in Syria.As the global village has shrunk Read more ...
joe.muggs
If there's one festival in Britain where people are ready for the rain, it's the Green Man. After all, nobody goes to the Brecon Beacons to sunbathe, right? The weekend, which began the spate of boutique and specialist festivals that dominate the summer season now, remains one of the most spirited in the UK, and its crowd seems to be one of the hardiest even when, as this year, the deluge is near-continuous. It helps that the site is both beautiful and sloping, so it wasn't able to turn into a grim waist-deep mudbath; the real saviour of the festival, though, is that attention to detail in Read more ...
theartsdesk
When Sarah Millican won the If.comedy newcomer award two years ago, it was with one of the most accomplished shows I had ever seen at the Fringe - by newbie or veteran - and now the South Shields stand-up has made critics reach for the superlatives again with another hour of superbly crafted comedy.Sarah Millican, The Stand ***** Entitled Chatterbox (a name she was given at school but a quality that, she slyly tells, she is now making a living from), is on the face of it Millican talking away to the audience about the everyday concerns of her life. But it’s much more than that as makes Read more ...
theartsdesk
Second up in theartsdesk's short series of recommended reads is Tom Russell, the Texan musician who has a reputation as the last great American songwriter. His 25 albums stray from cowboy music to "folk opera" - which makes his reading selections surprising.
Mentor by Tom Grimes which details his years at the Iowa writers workshop and his relationship with writer Frank Conroy (Stop-Time author). A decent book on the ups and extreme downs of prose writing. To me it details, without meaning to, how writing can only be lived and learned and not taught. We are at a low point in the writing Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Royal Opera House is appealing to the public to record sounds to contribute to their three-day If-A-Tree festival in early September, curated by Joanna McGregor. Sound artist Scanner is transforming the former Floral Hall into an aural forest with a soundscape to which he wants Joe Bloggs or John Doe or indeed (thanks to technology) anyone in the entire world to contribute.
People are being asked to use their phones or tape recorders to capture sounds conceptually related to forests - it’s suggested whimsically that these can include “forests of children” at a playground, or “forests of Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Kerry Ellis amassed a legion of adoring fans when she went "green" playing Elphaba in Stephen Schwartz's smash-hit musical both in London and on Broadway. But her pre-eminence as a musical-theatre-diva-cum-rock-chick was secured earlier still when Brian May, the celebrated lead guitarist of Queen, asked her to play Meat in the Queen/ Ben Elton show We Will Rock You. May quickly recognised a symbiosis between them and their CD single Wicked in Rock sprung a rip-roaring reimagining of "Defying Gravity" with Brian May's amazing guitar riffs a key feature.
Now her debut album Anthems from Decca Read more ...
david.cheal
It’s been a while since I’ve seen an audience go quite as bonkers as this one. Kasabian were performing a London show as a warm-up for their appearances at this weekend’s V Festival, and singer Tom Meighan was working the crowd into a lather of excitement: standing with his legs apart, staring into the middle distance and flicking his outstretched palms in a “Come on!” gesture; leading the community singing of big boisterous tunes such as "Club Foot", "Fire" and "Where Did All the Love Go?" (the last two from 2009’s West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum album); imploring the fans to wave their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although The Arcade Fire are currently occupying column inches on the back of their new album The Suburbs, it’s fellow Montréal band The Besnard Lakes that are over here, playing dates on the back of their recent third album The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night. Both bands share a fondness for a full-on live assault that leaves audiences reeling. But beyond that and the geography, The Besnard Lakes are a different proposition, taking their cue from the fuzz and distortion of shoegazing, mixing it with a muscular rock that’s as much Led Zeppelin blast as Neil Young guitar flash.The Besnard Read more ...
theartsdesk
You may think the very well-presented comic Stuart Goldsmith - clean-shaven and wearing sensible Merrells (“which says I’m not wearing a fleece but I own one”) - is the sort of bloke your mum always hoped you would end up marrying or having as your best friend. His show is titled The Reasonable Man, and Goldsmith is indeed utterly dependable, he tells us, plus he comes from that most nondescript of towns, Leamington Spa. But he would like to break out a bit.Stuart Goldsmith, Pleasance Dome ****
There’s more to Goldsmith, though, than good looks, an extremely likeable manner and a bright Read more ...