guitar
howard.male
Rarely has an album’s artwork better reflected its content: blackness, or the void from which light occasionally emanates. This is a collection of instrumentals enhanced by vocals, rather than what might be called songs. The opening minimalist piece “Lightshaft” begins with a single plucked guitar note and its long vibrato-laden after-echo, like the sonic equivalent of a lone flickering candle. Norwegian singer Anneli Drecker’s haunting contributions can’t be described as lead vocals because they are no more or less significant than any other texture on the record.This is only the former Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In 1990, Ride were in the first wave of the Shoegazing scene to get out of the blocks and into the studio to record their iconic debut EP. Four albums and a sack load of EPs and singles later, however, they called it a day and the four lads from Oxford slouched off to join Oasis, the Jesus and Mary Chain, put out solo records and, in bassist Steve Queralt’s case, to take up a career in retail at Habitat. And that seemingly was that. However, in 2015 fate intervened and the Coachella Festival came calling with the offer to get back together in front of a crowd of 70,000.Weather Diaries is Ride Read more ...
Liz Thomson
As Imelda May releases her fifth CD, it can’t but help that Bob Dylan has come out as a fan – it was, she wrote, "like being kissed by Apollo himself". No doubt his buddy T Bone Burnett passed him a copy of the album, for he produced it in Los Angeles, where it was recorded over seven days, with guest appearances from guitarist Jeff Beck and pianist and band leader Jools Holland, on whose TV shows May has guested several times.Life. Love. Flesh. Blood is the fifth studio outing for the girl from Dublin’s Liberties, and it's full of emotion, polished and stylised. May has performed with Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Tamikrest’s fourth album is well-presented, good enough, but a little hamstrung by what have become the clichés of the modern Touareg genre: the lilting rhythms of a camel cruising slowly across the dunes, intertwined guitars that smoothly swirl bewteen old Tamashek melodies and gentle riffs that might have come from the Deep South. The lyrics touch on the politics of the Southern Sahara, and the Touaregs’ tragic position at the mercy of conflicting interests – political, economic and religious.Music that bewitches around a campfire, under the vast canopy of the Milky Way doesn’t have the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The only British gig in Josh Ritter’s so-called work-in-progress tour took place in the somewhat unlikely venue of St Stephen’s Church, Shepherd’s Bush, a rather fine example of gothic revival style. It’s almost opposite Bush Hall, which would have been a more logical venue: an altar was not perhaps the most obvious setting for the Idaho-born alt folkie though the acoustics were splendid.But there Ritter stood, pulpit to his right, flying-eagle lectern (the symbol of St John the Evangelist) to his left. The numbers of last Sunday’s hymns were still on display. Leonard Cohen liked to mix sex Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In the era of star-making TV progs and here-today-gone-tomorrow musicians, just how wonderful is it to have a new album from a man who marked his 80th birthday three years ago by signing a new contract with Eric Corne’s Forty Below Records?John Mayall, Manchester-born “godfather of the British blues”, is a true guitar legend, an elder statesman to whom so many of rock’s key players owe a huge debt – among them John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, Mick Taylor and, of course, Eric Clapton. Whose collection does not include the 1966 classic John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton on which Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Fantastic Negrito, aka Xavier Dphrepaulezz, is a singer from Oakland, California. His music is steeped in the raw and urgent spirituality of the early blues, especially Robert Johnson. Yet he refuses to be pigeonholed as a blues performer, disdaining all talk of genre, and infusing his compositions with the grit and anger of punk, hip-hop and hard rock as well as the mournfulness of the blues, not to mention political protest that’s bang up-to-date. His current musical persona is what he calls his third incarnation, after a teenage major-label signing turned sour, and he spent years out of Read more ...
Barney Harsent
In an age where things change at a lightning pace, where we are programmed for progress, touchstones are crucial. There’s a need for something we can rely on to remain solid, unchanging and free of the burden of momentum. The noise produced by Dinosaur Jr, which comprises J Mascis, Lou Barlow, drummer Murph and others, is just such a thing – gloriously monolithic and fondly familiar.On this, the band’s 11th studio album, there is, if anything, an echo of past glories. Indeed, when the clatter and drums of “Goin' Down” starts up, their 1987 sophomore statement of intent, You’re Living All Over Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The guitar, the "little orchestra" beloved of Andrés Segovia, is an instrument for all seasons, and for venues from salons to stadiums. It isn't exactly the same instrument in all cases, of course. Comparing the traditional acoustic Spanish guitar to the electronic weapons systems used by Radiohead or U2 is like parking an Austin 7 next to a Tesla Model X.It's one of the loopholes in Guitar Star (★★★) that it seeks, somehow, to throw all known types of guitar and every playing style into a pot, whence (at the end of nine episodes) a winner will be plucked. Logically, it's an impossible Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In interviews, the Scottish songwriter RM Hubbert has described his new album as being the “mirror image” of his best-known work, the 2013 Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) Award-winning Thirteen Lost and Found. Like that album, Telling the Trees is a series of collaborations with other artists and musicians – but, this time, rather than hole up in a studio with his friends and collaborators, the musician known as Hubby reached out to people whose work he admired with new acoustic compositions and let them create something new, at a distance, in their own time.The process might have involved a Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Prince Rogers Nelson was the most gloriously disruptive presence in popular culture from the very start to the very end. Everything about him was off kilter and wrong: it's not for nothing that the first major biography of him was called The Imp of the Perverse. His songs were full of deranged filth, skewed social comment with a conspiratarian edge, had a very individualist take on Jehovah's Witness spirituality and mysticism, and all manner of personal cyphers and in-jokes. He was a constantly self-creating work of art of the most esoteric and incomprehensible sort – yet for all that he Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The post-Christmas headlines could barely contain themselves: HMV sells one turntable per minute! UK vinyl sales set to hit two million in 2016! Tesco stocking records! Vinyl was officially back.And now Record Store Day 2016 is upon us and likely to be the biggest one since its 2007 inception. There has been much discussion about the merits of RSD, on which shops around the country will be stocking limited releases to sate the public’s newfound appetite. For some shops, it’s a boost as increased awareness, footfall and income can see them through fallow times. Buying in swathes of stock is a Read more ...