New music
robert.sandall
Before Matthew Herbert’s triumphantly anarchic appearance in the second half, stiflingly good taste ruled at last night’s concert at the Barbican. Middle-aged suits were out in force to celebrate the British Council’s 75th anniversary and a comfortable faith in liberal values permeated the hall, and the bill.Most of the acts featured were well-meaning collaborations designed to emphasise the spiritual and musical harmony shared by musicians from different continents or contexts. This is exactly the kind of cross-cultural exchange the august institution that is the BC has been promoting since Read more ...
robert.sandall
It’s taken David McAlmont over 15 years to find the right outlet for his remarkable voice and songs but, fingers crossed, it looks as if he's finally done it. In prospect, McAlmont's collaboration with Michael Nyman and his band, which received its first public airing last night at the Union Chapel, seems rather random. What, you might well ask, has a man with the vocal chops of a soul legend such as Curtis Mayfield got to say to a minimalist composer and soundtrack specialist with a gift for classical pastiche? Seldom have the musical codes of the street and the salon been more obliquely Read more ...
robert.sandall
It’s taken David McAlmont over 15 years to find the right outlet for his remarkable voice and songs but, fingers crossed, it looks as if he's finally done it. In prospect, McAlmont's collaboration with Michael Nyman and his band, which received its first public airing last night at the Union Chapel, seems rather random. What, you might well ask, has a man with the vocal chops of a soul legend such as Curtis Mayfield got to say to a minimalist composer and soundtrack specialist with a gift for classical pastiche? Seldom have the musical codes of the street and the salon been more obliquely Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's over-egging it a bit to equate Krautrock with the entire rebirth of Germany. It's also slightly jarring to entitle the film Krautrock when its narrator then blames the World War Two-obsessed British music press for inventing such a disparaging term (cue supplementary evidence of Spike Milligan and John Cleese pretending to be Nazis.)Nonetheless, I liked this film so much I watched it twice. There were loads of insightful and entertaining interviews, and most of the music was great, though the extracts weren't long enough. In fact the whole film wasn't long enough, and how often do Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Astonishingly tall and surmounted by a luxuriant clump of dramatic red hair, Brett Dennen couldn't be mistaken for any other singer-songwriter. It's possible to detect any number of musical echoes in his songs - Neil Young, Dylan, Paul Simon - but thanks to his huskily soulful voice and a gift for conveying complicated sentiments in a resonant phrase, he manages to stand apart from the crowd here too.As a songwriter, Dennen was a late developer, hardly getting started until he was 21 or 22. "I think it's one of those things where it was just brewing for a while," reflects the tunesmith from Read more ...
robert.sandall
The success of Spandau Ballet's ecstatically received reunion lies in no small part in its impeccable timing. The band could hardly have chosen a better moment to re-form and revisit their well stocked catalogue of 1980s hits. Not only are their original fans now stuck firmly into middle age and feeling the usual nostalgia for the soundtrack of their youth, but a younger generation of listeners has at last decided that Eighties pop is cool.LaRoux, Florence and the Machine and Friendly Fires are just three of today's hot acts who derive their musical influences and fashion cues from Read more ...
howard.male
Portuguese singer-songwriter Sara Tavares trades in understatement. She strokes rather than strums guitar chords, her two percussionists are more likely to brush a drum than whack it hard, and her soft close-to-the-mike voice specialises in gentle yearning rather than soul-girl histrionics. So the intimate space of the Jazz Café seems much better suited to her than, say, the Barbican where she had the unenviable task earlier this year of being a viable support act to the larger-than-life Malian diva, Oumou Sangare. As it turned out, Sara did a perfectly good job of warming up Oumou’s crowd, Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Edward Seckerson talks to actor/singer Nigel Richards about his new album A Shining Truth - a handsome compendium of 14 hitherto unrecorded musical theatre songs by major talents as Howard Goodall, Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa, Conor Mitchell, Richard Taylor, and others no less significant. Musical Theatre aficionados will recall Nigel's unforgettable performance in the title role of Adam Guettel's masterpiece Floyd Collins at London's Bridewell Theatre and will know that few have done more to champion the cause of new writing than he has. This isn’t an album it’s a manifesto - and you Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s interesting to ponder why, after 22 years in the business, the Indigo Girls aren’t more successful or better known outside the cognoscenti and their very loyal fanbase. Their intricate harmonies and beautifully constructed guitar-based folk-rock has attracted many fans (and sometime collaborators) in the music industry - from Natalie Merchant and Ani DiFranco to Lucinda Williams and REM - and one of their albums went platinum. They even won a Grammy, so what’s not to like?Ah, well there’s the small matter of their political activism - for indigenous peoples’ rights, on green issues and Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Most boys grow up playing Cowboys and Indians. Thing is, I never grew out of it. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to write my own variant on the great American road book. I pinpoint three pre-adolescent experiences that warped my mind: reading Huckleberry Finn, seeing Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and hearing Bo Diddley. Inevitably, reading Kerouac ruined me. Not that I headed to the US expecting things to be as they were in Jack’s time. Yet just how harsh poor America can be to live and travel amongst did surprise me. The title of More Miles than Money: Journeys through American Read more ...
joe.muggs
It comes to something when the logic of a German act calling themselves “Gas” is the least troubling element of a perfomance. Not that Wolfgang Voigt's ambient music, or the slowly-evolving digital art of Petra Hollenbach projected on the Barbican's cinema screen, contained any obvious shock tactics – but the whole 80 minutes created just about as unsettling an experience as one could imagine from abstracted sound and image.As a club music producer and as one of the co-founders of Cologne's Kompakt label, Voigt has been responsible for some of the most emotive and lastingly affective techno Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Would-be axe murderers of the BBC often propose to lop off (among other things) TV channels Three and Four, but Four’s music coverage is vastly better value for viewers’ money than the executive pension fund. Synth Britannia stuck firmly to Four’s “Britannia” formula, being a bunch of talking heads and clumps of archive footage interwoven with synth-pop classics from the late Seventies and early Eighties. But that’s OK as long as the raw material is strong, and this saga of post-punk, pre-New Romantic gadget-pop was often fascinating and sometimes even thought-provoking.Not that they didn’t Read more ...