California
graham.rickson
Puccini’s unlikely Spaghetti Western still convinces in Aletta Collins’ vivid new production. The incongruities in this uneven yet powerful work aren’t dodged but embraced. Most of them are musical: the sheer delight, for instance, of seeing stage action which occasionally resembles a jerky early Western played out to rich, blazing orchestral sonorities.Disappointingly, the honky tonk piano in the corner of the Polka Saloon is never heard. You giggle as the stage lights come on behind Giles Cadle’s witty curtain, the shadows shifting from left to right as an ominous-hatted silhouette appears Read more ...
David Nice
John Adams’ millennial conflagration of musical poems about childbirth, destruction and the divine made manifest not only served as a seasonal farewell and a transcendent epilogue to the Southbank’s year of 20th-century music The Rest is Noise; it also stood pure and proud as a masterpiece.This is what maverick director Peter Sellars’ multimedia information overload had not allowed this already complex work to seem in the Barbican performance following the December 2000 Paris premiere (Adams soon came to admit the mistake of giving free rein to his usually trusty collaborator). God knows the Read more ...
paul.mcgee
There's been a quiet but nevertheless palpable sense of anticipation surrounding psych-folk enigma Linda Perhacs' first-ever European tour. Comparatively low-key advance publicity certainly proved no impediment to a sold-out house for the recent opening date at Berlin's Kantine am Berghain, a somewhat drab and unprepossessing bunker in the shadow of the city's notorious techno temple.The late bloomer/Indian summer narrative has become ever more familiar to music fans in recent years. Vashti Bunyan and Terry Callier were both rescued from obscurity via a combination of serendipity and a devout Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
While it wouldn’t have been fair to expect 100 percent authenticity from a performer whose last stage show began with her rising from a trapdoor with two giant peppermint patty pinwheels spinning over her breasts, the follow-up to Teenage Dream was never going to replicate the bubblegum formula of its predecessor. As the recent documentary Part of Me showed in heartbreaking detail, Katy Perry has had a tumultuous few years - and no amount of Scandinavian hit-factories-for-hire were ever going to paper over all of the cracks.Still, as infectious lead single - and PRISM opening track - “Roar” Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If there’s a problem with Jonathan Wilson’s astonishing second album, it’s the potentially distracting presence of the stunningly heavy list of contributors. Those mucking in to help out include Jackson Browne, David Crosby and Graham Nash who gather alongside Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench from Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. Former Fleet Fox Josh Tillman is on board too. But they all take a back seat to Wilson on Fanfare, the mind-blowing follow up to 2011’s Gentle Spirit.Gentle Spirit was good, and a terrifically assured echo of LA’s early Seventies Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter scene. But Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dino Valente: Dino ValenteDino Valenti’s reaction to his sole solo album being credited to Dino Valente isn’t recorded, but any confusion probably wouldn’t have mattered as he had such high-profile cheerleaders. Before its release in October 1968, Ralph J Gleason, then America’s most important commentator on rock and pop, called Valenti – who died in 1994 – “an underground Bob Dylan”. After its release, Lillian Roxon, New York’s most trenchant observer of musical trends, said he was “a macrobiotics-solar-energy legend”. In Rolling Stone in January 1969, Ben Fong-Torres repeated the " Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Some people are lucky enough to have the sort of friends that, no matter how rarely you see them, you can call them up and instantly pick up right back where you left off. Some people are even luckier, and have the sort of friends that they see even less but yet, when they reconnect, they can spill out their most intimate longings and hopes and discomforts and immediately feel unburdened. Seasons of Your Day, Mazzy Star’s first album in 17 years, is like that friend. The band’s core duo - singer and multi-instrumentalist Hope Sandoval, and writer and guitarist/keyboardist David Roback - sound Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Last week Anne Boleyn, this week Mary Queen of Scots. Donizetti’s trawl through the Tudor monarchs and their victims was more a recurrent obsession than a systematic exploration. WNO, on the other hand, seem to be implying some Ring-like continuity.Maria Stuarda has a different director in Rudolf Frey, but the same designer, Madeleine Boyd; and court fashion hasn’t changed in the half-century or so since Anne Boleyn went to the block – the same unflattering black skirts and suitings, the same gloomy box interiors. Only Mary defies the monochrome motif with a plaid skirt and knee-length boots Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There’s something about the Arctic Monkeys that calls to mind the Rolling Stones. Not now, obviously - it might feel like it’s been forever since four messy hairdos and northern accents burst out of Sheffield, though in truth it’s only been about a decade - but the Stones that scandalised an America expecting another Beatles with their sleazy, bluesy rock. Recorded in California, if there’s one thing AM does not sound like it’s an album by a band whose name still sounds like a practical joke dreamed up in some spotty kid’s bedroom.Because AM is - despite a collection of song titles that come Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Beach Boys: Made in CaliforniaMade in California is a fantastic thing. Six CDs slot into the inside of the back cover of an LP-sized, full colour hardback book with a padded cover. As an artefact, it’s a triumph. As a career-spanning summary of the best of The Beach Boys’ music it’s flawless. Quibbling about individual tracks which aren’t included is possible, but ultimately pointless. Everything which needs to be heard is here. Made in California is a statement of who The Beach Boys were, are and even – as revealed by some of the originally unreleased tracks – who they could have Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There is no guarantee of success in any area of rock and pop but those who wish to succeed through sheer graft might look to metal as their main chance. While multiple bands in other genres have fleeting, unpredictable moments in the sun, a decent metal act ticking the right boxes with the fans and initially willing to slog the circuit for 350 nights of every year, especially in the endless wilds of Middle America, can build and build and build. Look at Iron Maiden, possibly the biggest band of their vintage in the world. They do what they do with thundering, enjoyable efficiency, are beloved Read more ...
David Nice
Rodgers and Steinbeck: sound unlikely? Well, self-proclaimed “family show” man Hammerstein may have baulked at words like "whorehouse" when he created a play for music out of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. But by 1955 the R&H duo had already dealt with issues like miscegenation and ageism (South Pacific), domestic violence (Carousel) and slavery (The King and I), so Steinbeck’s north Californian coastal community of amiable social dropouts, drunks and whores might not have been totally unexpected territory. Tough Pipe Dream isn’t: "It’s a beautiful show," declared Steinbeck Read more ...