California
Demetrios Matheou
I can’t help thinking of Mad Men when watching the opening sequence of Alma Har’el’s marvellous documentary Bombay Beach. Newsreel footage from the 1950s excitedly trumpets the “miracle in the desert” of the Salton Sea, formed by accident when the Colorado River ran wild, and the heart of a development scheme that was to turn the area into “the recreational capital of the world”. One can imagine the likes of Don Draper having a field day with the promise of the American Dream in this strangely idyllic Californian setting. Not surprisingly, the dream soon turned to dust, as the reality of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Debut albums often set the bar high. How are you going to top a Psychocandy or a Piper At The Gates of Dawn? The answer is, not easily and, with rare exceptions, not at once. All those ideas that had been growing forever splurge out in those first excited studio sessions, years of passion and imagination explode into the open and the thrill carries to the listener.This especially applies when a debut album rewrites the book. It’s almost impossible to completely shift the musical landscape with the same finality twice, especially just a year or two later. Beardy Californian yoga mystic Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gonjasufi, AKA Sumach Ecks (b 1978) was raised in San Diego by a Mexican mother and an American-Ethiopian father. His musical ability first came to more than local prominence when he appeared on the Flying Lotus album Los Angeles in 2008. His own debut album, A Sufi and a Killer, produced by Flying Lotus, Gaslamp Killer and Mainframe, appeared in 2010. It was an extraordinary, uncategorisable piece of work that wandered across a musical landscape of Gonjasufi’s own making, taking in global rhythms, hip-hop, folk, heavy rock, pop and much else, all sung by him and bled through with trippy Read more ...
graeme.thomson
This was the year I finally fell in love with Laura Marling’s music. I liked her first two albums well enough, but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that the endless chorus of critical hosannas was more about what people wanted her to be than what she actually was. Well, A Creature I Don’t Know certainly changed all that.Perhaps it was the newfound sense of playfulness I fell for. Produced by Ethan Johns and recorded in a week, Marling’s third album feels like a more wayward, somewhat wanton older sister to her first two records. It pulls at the hems of her music, musses its hair, smudges Read more ...
graham.rickson
Recorded music has a lot to answer for. Until its arrival, most people made their own music – at home, using whatever resources were to hand. If you were lucky, you might have owned a piano. The less well-off might have had access to a ukulele. Tony Coleman and Margaret Meagher’s enchanting, lo-fi documentary stakes a bold claim for the ukulele’s pivotal role in 20th-century music history.A variant of a folk instrument introduced by Portuguese immigrants to Hawaii in the 1870s, it was championed by King David Kalakaua, who was beguiled by the ukulele’s sweet sound. The annexation of Hawaii Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the mid-Nineties, America had a bit of a moment with electronic dance music. The most emblematic sign of this was The Prodigy’s Fat of the Land topping the Billboard charts in 1997. The truth was, however, that despite inventing house music and techno, en masse nationally they didn’t really get rave culture. The US liked their electronic dance stylistically performed as close to a KISS concert as possible. They liked it, in other words, to be rock’n’roll.Now it’s happening again, but on a broader scale. On the one hand American R&B superstars have absorbed Euro-pop and dubstep, on the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ah, the Duke of York’s Picture House, the oldest consistently operating purpose-built cinema in the country. It’s a beautiful venue, just over a century old, and almost too comfortable. It’s been jazzed up a few times over the decades and, tonight, bathed in red light, wears its history with lazy insouciance, merging it with the current interior design’s burlesque Art Deco spin. My seat is at the back of the balcony, plush and comfortable, with a little shelf where I place my salted popcorn and horrible pear cider (the latter, a mistake). Mostly the Duke of York’s is still a cinema but they Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, all women were dressed by Frederick's of Hollywood and all men were a cross between David Lee Roth and Jon Bon Jovi. The Eighties-set Rock of Ages is so outlandish, it might as well be set on another planet. Instead, the all-singing, all-dancing action centres on a bar along LA’s Sunset Boulevard.There’s no doubt that Rock of Ages is absurd, but that hasn’t stopped it being reconfigured for a film that’s in production now. The high-octane cast includes Alec Baldwin, Mary J Blige, Tom Cruise, Paul Giamatti and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Its Broadway run Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By 1977, disco was a cliché to be mocked. But a few years earlier, before its ubiquity, disco was a liberating music uniting minorities on the dance floor. Funk, too, became a cliché, little more than a reductive musical cypher. Two new reissues celebrate these genres when both were still vital, still able to surprise. Disco Gold: Scepter Records & The Birth of Disco is exactly what its title says it is, while Darondo’s Listen to My Song: The Music City Sessions collects A-grade funk that had languished in the vaults until now.Disco wasn’t just the place to dance, but the music, too: a Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Summertime and the living is easy. Gershwin wrote it but it could almost be written by that apostle of California sun, Brian Wilson, who sung it with his band last night. Wilson wouldn’t have come up with a line like “your daddy’s rich, and your mama’s good-looking” - a bit too knowing. Wilson’s music was focused on surf, girls and cars, but had elements in common with Gershwin – working with brothers and burning out early, among other things.Gershwin died at 38, and by 38, Wilson, a sensitive soul, one of the walking wounded of the psychedelic wars, was into a couple of decades of catatonic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hiatt's regular band play as if they're taking a road trip from Nashville to... well, California maybe, Hiatt's former home which he sings about eloquently on the wistful country-rocker "Adios to California". Despite its title, it's the Golden State that springs to mind once again when he sings "Detroit Made", a dust-raising automobile ode not a little reminiscent of Chuck Berry's "Promised Land" and its tale of a trip out west.Hiatt has some serious stuff in his sights too. He wrote "Down Around my Place" after freak flooding wreaked havoc in his home town of Nashville last year, and the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having arrived in the Golden State via Detroit and Amarillo, Texas, John David Souther became one of the architects of the Californian soft-rock sound. It didn't hurt that he shared an apartment with future Eagle Glenn Frey and lived upstairs from Jackson Browne. Souther never became a superstar in his own right, but thanks to his high-profile collaborations with assorted luminaries, his songwriting royalty cheques must have been artefacts of many-zeroed beauty.Natural History is a collection of songs from the Souther catalogue, tastefully recorded with a skilful chamber-rock ensemble using Read more ...