New music
Tim Cumming
A curious and rather marvellous sonic chimera manifests in the twilight of the rock gods, an album from 1977 finding its physical release 46 years after it was committed to acetate, and then abandoned, reasons unknown. Neil Young’s Chrome Dreams comprises 12 songs, including early versions of "Powderfinger" and "Like a Hurricane", among others, and was recorded at various sessions and stage shows between 1974 and 1976, including at Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch with his band Crazy Horse.Sixteen years ago, Neil Young decided to release Chrome Dreams II, while the original, unissued album Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Sky at Night” begins Radio Red. Its brooding atmosphere is shared with Saint Etienne’s “Hobart Paving.” Also, a sinuous sense of melody is at one with Todd Rundgren’s finest ballads. Melodic filigrees suggest Laura Nyro or Brighton band The Mummers. It’s some album opener.Subsequently, the Shipley-born, London-dwelling Laura Groves’ first album under her own name takes in gently soulful reflections and floating creations – mostly built around an electric piano and her multi-tracked voice – which are hard to pin down. Perhaps she’s been listening to The Carpenters, maybe Tin Drum-era Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The world might end with a whimper or an inferno, but it’s hard to imagine a day will dawn that extinguishes John Lydon’s scorn for other people’s fecklessness and idiocy. That hand-made polemic typically drives the cauterising post-punk hosannahs and disarming post-pop ditties on Public Image Limited’s 11th studio album.Maintaining the momentum of This Is PiL (2012) and What the World Needs Now (2015), also recorded with the settled lineup of Lydon, Lu Edmonds (guitar), Bruce Smith (drums), and Scott Firth (bass and keyboards), End of World opens with two barnstormers. "Penge", seemingly Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone who has seen the Hives playing live will know that they far transcend their rakish lounge lizards playing garage rock image.The Hives live are a truly life affirming experience. Their performances are full-on from beginning to end and are not unknown to feature guitarists crowd surfing on their backs while still playing and vocalist, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist brings enough energy to light a city – albeit with plenty of knowing humour. In short, The Hives are about fun and they are about exhilaration. And that’s about it.Clearly expending that kind of energy all the time can be Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Düsseldorf’s most famous band is Kraftwerk. Neu!, La Düsseldorf, and, a little later, D.A.F also helped mark-out the west German city as the home of musical boundary pushers – folks doing their own thing. Fellow Düsseldorf residents Die Toten Hosen took a different musical tack, but were as individualistic as those lumped in with Krautrock or kosmiche music. And where there’s the known, there’s also the unknown.In this spirit, Klar!80 - Ein Kassettenlabel aus Düsseldorf 1980-1982 digs so deeply into Düsseldorf’s post-punk musical underbelly that the names assembled are mostly unfamiliar: Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I first saw Erol Josue on stage in Essaouria, Morocco, during the Gnawa Festival of 2011, when he fronted Jazz-Racine Haiti. The Haitian-born voudou priest turned R&B singer struck me as one of the most flamboyant frontmen ever to hit a stage.He cut a striking figure – half-cat, half Little Richard, all ordained prelate of the Voudou religion, into which he embarked on a long initiation into its priesthood before emigrating to Paris, and later to America, where he refashioned himself as an R&B singer in Florida before relocating to Brooklyn, New York, where he released his debut Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ruarri Joseph is not a household name but in a Sliding Doors scenario, he might have been. Scottish, raised in New Zealand, and based in Cornwall, he signed to Atlantic in 2007, and had the same management as Damien Rice and David Gray. His output was, however, too early for the folk micro-boom engendered by Mumford & Sons, and his songs weren’t whiney enough for mass 21st century tastes in singer-songwriters. He’s consistently been making music, though, and his latest proves the fires are far from out.Seven years ago, Joseph focused his attention on a new project, William The Conqueror, Read more ...
theartsdesk
theartsdesk team arrived at the WOMAD site with a degree of trepidation this year. Coming at the end of one of the wettest Julys in recent memory and the day after a serious deluge, was it going to be another Womud?Fortunately, Thursday was a day with enough sunshine and wind to dry the ground reasonably well and apart from the odd mud puddle, things weren’t too bad. However, once we’d consumed a welcome beer and started snacking on the fantastic food that was on offer, everything felt even better.At last year’s festival, there had been a discussion session that had involved Peter Gabriel and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Despite contemporary cultural zeitgeist fair zingin’ with reappreciation of under-celebrated female artists of previous eras, Girlschool haven’t been much shouted about.This is partly because they’re a metal band. The music media ignores most metal. But it’s also likely because Girlschool have never had much interest in actively espousing doctrinaire feminism, despite their whole career being a feminist statement. They’re generally more interested, as on their new album, in kicking up a rock’n’roll good time.The band, led by unstoppable frontwoman Kim McAuliffe, have been around the block a Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 15 years since Judy Collins last stepped out at the Cambridge Folk Festival. She was a mere 68 then and, in the time since, little has changed except her hair, the famous rock-star mane lopped so that she now resembles the cover of those classic early Sixties’ albums.By the time she recorded Wildflowers in 1967, Collins had already become the woman whom Stephen Stills would immortalise in song (“Chestnut-brown canary/ Ruby-throated sparrow/ Sing a song, don’t be long/Thrill me to the marrow”). Stills would play on her 1968 album, Who Knows Where the Time Goes, the title song of which put Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Dark Horse is Maria Wilman’s first album, it feels as though it’s the latest entry in a string of releases. The songs are fully formed. The delivery is assured. The overall character of what’s heard is cohesive, suggesting the person who recorded these 12 tracks draws from previous experiences with framing what they want to express, and how it should be expressed. But there it is, Dark Horse is a debut.Dark Horse shares its attitudinal stance with Americana, but mostly lacks nods towards country or rootsiness though a gospel-soul feel surfaces on the pedal-steel-aided “Mastermind.” Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Restraint wasn’t the watchword. Around March 1965, Heinz was in Joe Meek’s North London recording studio taping “Big Fat Spider,” which became the B-side of his April single version of “Don’t Think Twice it’s Alright.” A run-through which didn’t end up on the record found guitarist Richie Blackmore tossing off blistering lead runs so frenzied, so spikey, so wayward they might – had the track been issued – have caused radio producers to check whether the single had a pressing fault.It’s the same with previously unheard versions of Heinz’s “Movin’ In” and “I’m Not A Bad Guy,” the next tracks Read more ...