guitar
Thomas H. Green
The credibility of blues-rock has ebbed and flowed wildly for 40 years. Once upon a time it was simply the common currency for all major British and American rock bands, as exemplified by Led Zeppelin. Punk’s Seventies heyday put the kybosh on all that and blues-rock has been a less loved creature since, redolent of lazy parochial pub jam bands. However, from George Thorogood and the Destroyers to the White Stripes via Mississippi’s Fat Possum Records, it’s also become a major niche flavour for connoisseurs of raw guitar Americana - the scuzzier, the better.Leading the contemporary blues-rock Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It must have been difficult for Mexican acoustic instrumental guitar duo Rodrigo Sánchez and Gabriela Quintero to know where to go next. Initially discovered in Dublin as high-end buskers, they’ve built a career on energised acoustic pyrotechnics, combining complex Hispanic flourishes with heavy metal tics. It’s an invigorating concoction, especially live, and eventually they were courted by Hollywood, writing pieces for Puss in Boots and the last Pirates of the Caribbean film.The bigger picture, however, is that they’re seen by some as a one-trick pony. There’s a touch of the Gotan Project Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Of all the unlikely and incompatible collisions of genre imaginable, thrash metal with clubland trance must be pretty near the top of the tree. One is beefy, roaring, angry and punctuated by vocals akin to a dyspeptic troll burping, the other is electronic, poppy, air-headedly euphoric and can contain divas wailing banalities. This combination, however, was the horse a young St Albans band chose to ride for their 2006 debut single “Sorry You’re Not a Winner”. It summed Enter Shikari up and – although they’ve moved on musically since – it still does; the gutsy earnestness of metal but with Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The albums that work their way under your skin are few and far between. The second CD by Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, is one of those earworm-laden offerings that leave you wanting for more and haunted by seductive phrases and catchy tunes. There is something irresistible and addictive about the symphonic pop that Vernon has crafted as the follow-up to his crystalline exploration of lost love, For Emma, Forever Ago. While his first album – a demo he produced alone in a forest cabin – was a single-hued masterpiece of simplicity, Bon Iver is a tone poem of many colours, a segue of Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If anyone tells you that Deep Purple’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra (1969) wasn’t a masterpiece then they’re an idiot. In fact, it was, more or less, the only successful use of an orchestra with a rock band ever. Now, 40 years on, a pensionable Purple have hit the road again with a full symphony orchestra. But they’re not playing the Concerto. They’re playing their hits. Critically, they’re performing them without founding keyboardist, Jon Lord, and guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore. So, at 8.30pm when support band Cheap Trick had failed to ignite the room, even with a five-necked guitar, a 12 Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The Dreamer is the relatively low-key swansong from one of soul’s greatest divas, a mountain of barely restrained power, who inspired and influenced several generations of singers. Why some musicians survive lives of excess and others don’t is something of a mystery. While Janis Joplin, for whom Etta James was the ultimate vocal and performance model, crashed early in her wild career, James has soldiered on, in spite of serious heroin addiction and a number of illnesses that would have felled most women of her age.James has always manifested irrepressible energy, an intense force field that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fusion is a pretty difficult word to deal with. Miles Davis's Bitches Brew might have inspired a raft of jazzers to embrace rock, but an awful lot of the crossover that followed – like prog rock – became the musical equivalent of the love that dare not speak its name. Shoot!, the debut album from Norway’s Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen, might fit that bill, but it’s not that straightforward.A formally educated guitarist, she was the 2009 Molde International Jazz Festival’s Jazz Talent of the Year. Her work with The Trondheim Jazzorkester and her own Trio Thomassen (whose repertoire includes the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Tubular Bells, the first half of which is being currently revived as a live piece in the UK, sold between 15 and 17 million units worldwide. Quite apart from the work’s innocence being co-opted and made spooky in William Friedkin's The Exorcist, there was something about Mike Oldfield’s first stab at quasi-symphonic rock which seduced the music-consuming public.Borrowing the repeated motifs of Minimalism – most specifically Terry Riley’s Rainbow in Curved Air – and similarly cyclical tropes that made Ravel’s Bolero and Grieg’s Peer Gynt so audience-grabbing, Tubular Bells wallowed in cliché Read more ...
david.cheal
It’s guitar rock, but not as we know it. Anna Calvi, the Londoner in her late twenties whose debut album created a stir earlier this year and earned her a Mercury Prize nomination, makes music that has all the familiar, recognisable elements of the music that we call “rock” – guitar, vocals, drums – but her treatment of it is idiosyncratic; she exploits the spaces between the instruments as much as the instruments themselves to create a dark mood, an atmosphere of heightened sexual tension.It takes a bit of getting used to. At a sold-out Shepherds Bush Empire, on the London leg of her UK tour Read more ...
peter.quinn
Spoiler alert: this CD contains grooves that will bring out your inner air guitarist. From the album's lead-off song, “Tenderly”, whose sumptuous voicings lesser artists can only fantasise about, to its towering sign-off, “Fingerlero”, George Benson's 24-carat gift for free-flowing improv remains a thing of wonder. “Fingerlero” also features one of the most recognisable and heart-stirring sounds in jazz: Benson scatting in perfect unison with his deftly picked guitar lines. He makes you wait, but it's so worth it.Heard in both combo and solo settings, the 12-track set includes nods to Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Martin Scorsese’s mammoth, authorised survey of the life of George Harrison is a strange old thing. Deeply moving, poetic, full of love, wit and warmth, it's also at times oddly assembled and, at a shade over three and a half hours, runs wide but not always terribly deep. Using archive footage - including much unseen film and photography - and music that's both instantly familiar and previously unheard, the film's narrative voice is stitched together from old interviews with Harrison and the comments of other principals: the two surviving Beatles, wife Olivia, son Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The great folk guitarist Bert Jansch died early this morning, aged 67. Whether as a prime mover in London's 1960s folk scene, or as part of pioneering folk-jazzers Pentangle, or as a songwriter and solo artist, his influence on everyone from Paul Simon, Donovan, Led Zeppelin and Neil Young to, later, Johnny Marr, Graham Coxon and Beth Orton is simply immeasurable. Young compared Jansch's impact on the possibilities of the acoustic guitar as comparable to that of Jimi Hendrix's on the electric. Right up until his illness (he died after a struggle with lung cancer) Jansch remained one of music' Read more ...