New music
joe.muggs
I have seen Roberto Fonseca play before – in Havana backing Omara Portuondo and in London with the incomparable Ibrahim Ferrer - so although I was well aware of his ferocious talent I had no idea of how he would fare as a solo star. And I have seen plenty of jazz before, including Latin-style jazz – but only in venues the size of pub function rooms, generally full of nicotine-stained old men, so I had some trepidation about how it would come over in a venue as clean and swanky as the Royal Festival Hall.
But before Fonseca's “jazz Cubano” came the young, cosmopolitan and – let's be frank Read more ...
joe.muggs
Londoners, we know, can be spoilt. Certainly the crowd, predominantly of nerds in rare and expensive trainers, at the Lightbox last night didn't seem to be overly bubbling with enthusiasm despite an exciting lineup of talent and astonishing surroundings. The main dancefloor area of Lightbox lives up to the club's name, being an arched space with the entire wall/ceiling surface covered in colour-changing LED lights that allow pictures and patterns to dance across the room. But the nerds – and a very few women, mainly in equally modernist trainers – seemed almost oblivious to the fabulous Read more ...
robert.sandall
Martha Wainwright’s decision to perform and record a selection of songs by the late Edith Piaf is a bold, not to say high-risk strategy that made for a fascinating one-off concert at the Barbican last night. Plenty of pop divas from Minelli to Bassey and most recently Grace Jones have covered Piaf evergreens such as “Non, je ne regrette rien.” But none has dared to take the Wainwright route and build an entire concert and live album around interpretations of more obscure items from the soi-disant little sparrow’s giant catalogue.While tribute albums loom ever larger in pop’s rear view mirror Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The stage of the Barbican is alive with black dudes in wheelchairs going bonkers. It's an extraordinary spectacle. To rocketing afro-funk, backed by a drum-kit of boxes and bells, Staff Benda Bilili's frontmen are rolling their chairs back and forth. Two of them face each other and perform loosely synchronized hand dances, another wearing an ecstatic grin clambers out of his wheelchair.Despite having legs shrivelled by polio to almost nothing, he scuttles round the stage, his arms agile, his movements a surreal breakdance. The audience claps wildly, pockets of dancing breaking out at the Read more ...
howard.male
Many hip-hop artists go on about “respect” ad nauseam, but perhaps you need to be outside the Western consumerist bubble before such language can be turned from mere solipsistic hot air into a heartfelt plea on behalf of a continent. May I point you in the direction of a YouTube clip in which a surprisingly camera-shy Nneka shares a Nigerian proverb with the interviewer: “One day the bushmeat go catch the hunter,” she says in pidgin English. In other words, one day the prey of the hunter will catch the hunter. This proverb’s specific resonance to Nneka is only hinted at by the twinkle in her Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Slagsmalsklubben, Sponsored By Destiny (Zarcorp)When white 7" singles drop though my letter box with commercially suicidal band names, they're usually from artists just starting their career, boutique vinyl being cannily collectable in our MP3 age. Slagsmalsklubben, however, which means The Fight Club in their native tongue, are a six-piece from Norrkoping in Sweden who have three albums under their belt.I don't know what they usually sound like but "Sponsored by Destiny" is a cracking combination of bass techno throb and a ridiculous catchy arcade game motif. It shouldn't work but it Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month's roundup of new music CDs is a selection of the most interesting releases and compilations to come our way in October, from Céu to Mariah Carey, Patrick Cowley to Julian Casablancas, Bob Dylan to Seasick Steve. Our reviewers this month are Peter Culshaw, Adam Sweeting, Joe Muggs, Robert Sandall, Thomas H Green, Russ Coffey, Veronica Lee, Sue Steward and Marcus O'Dair.If you are enjoying theartsdesk.com, please spread the word on your sites, e-lists, Twitters, Facebook etc.
CD of the Month
Céu, Vagaros (Six Degrees Records)
by Peter Culshaw
The São Paulo scene, dubbed in some Read more ...
joe.muggs
The first signs were good. I've been to a lot of shows by “heritage bands” in my time, but I don't think I've ever seen a crowd for a band of Fleetwood Mac's vintage that had such a relatively even age distribution. Sure, it was weighted towards the greying end of the scale, but every age group down to teens – including teens there in groups under their own steam, not just with parents – was well represented, right across class boundaries too.But then Fleetwood Mac have always been a lot of things to a lot of people. From the bluesy sixties underground Peter Green era, through the spectacular Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The exploratory outer edges of jazz have been rich and fecund in recent years. Among other things, bands such as MoHa and The Thing have pushed jazz into avant-garde noise and heavy rock, wild-haired drummer Seb Rochford has come up with project after project that fascinates far outside the jazz community and even Radiohead have been accused of dabbling. It's in this area that Bellows reside, musical territory that doesn't yet fall under strict genre categorization but touches on post-rock, electronica, cinematic orchestration and, of course, jazz.The Brighton four-piece, signed to Cake Read more ...
joe.muggs
Browsing through various past reviews of The xx, two adjectives which occur time and again are “fragile” and “tentative”. These are wrong – but understandable. Certainly the young south-west London band (the members have all turned 20 in recent months), habitually clad entirely in black and quietly spoken if they speak at all, give the superficial impression of diffidence – and the construction of their music is skeletal to say the least, never more so than last night playing as a three-piece with keyboard/guitar player Baria Qureshi absent (whether temporarily or permanently was not made Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
"Hip-hop has been a commercial proposition since the release of 'Rapper’s Delight' in 1979. That’s 30 years, a long time for any genre," writes Sasha Frere-Jones in this week's New Yorker. The genre, according to Frere-Jones, is on the way out. Not so for Chap-Hop, however, which has been going for about six days since the video below was put up on YouTube, featuring Gentleman Rhymer Mr B.The eponymous Mr B, who lives in Hove but comes from Surrey (of course) accompanies himself on his idiosyncratic banjolele, and manages in the video to telescope the history of hip-hop into five minutes. As Read more ...
howard.male
Helen Chase’s biography of post-punk band Magazine is in some ways a textbook example of how to do the job correctly. In fact, with its classically austere cover (designed by Malcolm Garrett, who did many record sleeves for the band) this handsome paperback even looks like a textbook. Back in the late 1970s Magazine never quite made the same impact as the grim and intense Joy Division or the emptily anthemic Simple Minds, who went on to huge cult status and stadium glory, respectively. As for why things turned out this way, to a large degree Helen Chase just lets Devoto and co tell their own Read more ...