New Music Reviews
Susheela Raman, Jazz CafeWednesday, 12 November 2014
If a band gets up and says “We are only going to be playing songs from our new album, not actually released here yet” normally most audiences would groan mightily. But somehow Susheela Raman has educated her audience to expect the unexpected. Her somewhat wayward musical path has included Indo-jazz, rock covers, Tamil voodoo music and introspective songs. It has not been one that a manager or record company would have recommended. They tend to like more of the same. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Cyril Davies, Girls With GuitarsSunday, 09 November 2014
The Cyril Davies' All-Stars: Radio Sounds of Cyril Davies Various Artists: Girls With Guitars Read more... |
Just in From Scandinavia: Nordic Music Round-Up 12Friday, 07 November 2014
The voice is unmistakably Icelandic. Fluting and dancing around the notes, the words it carries are broken into segments which don’t respect syllables. Although singing in English, Hildur Kristín Stefánsdóttir hasn’t sacrificed her Icelandic intonation. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Love, The Red CrayolaSunday, 02 November 2014
Love: Love Songs The Red Crayola: The Parable of the Arable Land Read more... |
Sheryl Crow, Royal Albert HallSaturday, 01 November 2014
Sheryl Crow doesn’t do genres. She may have recorded her first authentically country album, Feels Like Home, in Nashville recently, but for her, the tag seems to mean little. “It’s country, but it just sounds like a Sheryl Crow record,” she told the BluesFest audience last night, and whenever the subject came up afterwards, she put finger-wiggling inverted commas around the term “country”. Read more... |
Elvis Costello, Royal Albert HallThursday, 30 October 2014
Georgie Fame opened the evening with a five-piece band, including the singer on his old Hammond organ. Favourites such as “Yeh, Yeh” were belted out to pleasing effect, as well as covers that included Van Morrison’s “Moondance” (Morrison played the packed-out BluesFest the previous evening). It was a strange, “extended” version that paid homage to a Paul Robeson number – Fame boomed out an African chant that bookended the song. Read more... |
Fuse ODG, Under the BridgeSunday, 26 October 2014
The Afrobeats scene is coming to a venue near you. Anglo-Ghanaian artist Fuse ODG, who won the best African Act MOBO last week for the second year running, launched his first album T.I.N.A. last night with a relentless, exuberant performance that brought out the African party flavour to these songs. His album release and tour, on the back of the MOBO success, marks a significant moment in his progression from niche internet popularity to the mainstream. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Minny Pops, The Pop GroupSunday, 26 October 2014
Minny Pops: Drastic Measures, Drastic Movement The Pop Group: Cabinet of Curiosities, We are Time Read more... |
Lady Gaga, O2 Arena, LondonFriday, 24 October 2014
Gaga’s relationship with her fanbase, her “Little Monsters”, is quite a thing. I’ve not seen the O2 so permanently on its feet. Large swathes of her capacity crowd are up and dancing right from the opening number. They adore her and are dressed to show it, from middle-aged ladies to gay men to teenage girls to many multitudes of humanity in between. Read more... |
John Cooper Clarke, Town Hall, BirminghamFriday, 24 October 2014
John Cooper Clarke has assumed many roles since he came motoring out of Salford in the mid Seventies, spitting out poetry from a distinctly untraditional view point. There were tales of how you’d never see a nipple in the Daily Express (“This paper’s boring mindless mean, full of pornography, the kind that’s clean”) and marrying a monster from outer space (“We walked out tentacle in hand. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Small-scale shows, nurtured in offbeat places, are becoming all the rage in the...
As he approaches his 70th birthday, Masaaki Suzuki has not just travelled into pastures new but proved himself thoroughly at home in them. The...
In 1903, Wassily Kandinsky painted a figure in a blue cloak galloping across a landscape on a white horse. Several years later the name of the...
On Friday evening, dance veterans Orbital touched down in Birmingham to celebrate two of the most significant and acclaimed albums in...
An appearance on Taskmaster and the publication of her acclaimed memoir Strong Female Character have helped propel Fern Brady...
The Lemon Twigs aren’t shy about telegraphing their inspirations. A Dream is all we Know, their swift follow-up to last May’s ...
Four years embracing pandemic, genocide and rapid environmental degradation predicted by Wagner’s grand myth have passed before the Southbank Br...
Edinburgh’s Rezillos were booked to play Middlesbrough’s Rock Garden on Wednesday 14 September 1977. “I Can’t Stand my Baby,” their debut single,...
The last of the old maestros is standing tall. Marco...
Cricket has always been a lens through which to examine the legacy of the British Empire. In the 1930s, the infamous Bodyline series saw the new...