New Music Reviews
Bastille, Alexandra PalaceFriday, 07 March 2014
Bastille didn’t so much raise the roof at Alexandra Palace last night, as ask it politely if it wouldn’t mind elevating itself a touch. Their gentleness belies their success over the past year, since their first album, Bad Blood, was released. The album, most of which they played last night, is characterised by surging melody, sexlessly tumescent choruses, marching band drum solos, string parts as glossy as nail varnish, and cascading synth lines. Read more... |
Marc Almond, John Harle, The Tyburn Tree, BarbicanMonday, 03 March 2014
On paper this sounded promising: a gothicky song-cycle of historical London and the dark, seamy side of the city, performed a stone’s throw from where they do Jack the Ripper tours. Lead performers were Marc Almond, whose distinctive voice we have loved for 30 years, ever since his pervy soul debut with Soft Cell, and John Harle, a more than useful jazzy classicist who is often original and known for his TV theme tunes. Thown in the mix was some Iain Sinclair psycho-geography. Read more... |
Beyoncé, O2 ArenaSaturday, 01 March 2014
Beyoncé is a fascinating tangle of mixed messages. She stirs people up and, most especially, she confuses men. On the train back from the first concert of her six-night stand at the O2 a group of blokes who heard we’d been to see her rabidly objected. She was, they said, just “selling her pussy”, and selling it cheap. Ire roused, they became very heated. Read more... |
Ralph Towner and Egberto Gismonti, BarbicanFriday, 28 February 2014
The Barbican brought two of the great originals of contemporary music together last night. Ralph Towner and Egberto Gismonti are temperamentally very different, but complement one another wonderfully, in an inspired piece of programming. Both are stylistically polyglot, straddling contemporary classical technique as well as jazz and, in Gismonti’s case especially, a range of folk idioms. Read more... |
Limp Bizkit and Friends, 02 Academy, BrixtonSaturday, 22 February 2014
Other than for die-hard fans, expectations for this Limp Bizkit tour have been, well, pretty limp. Nu-metal has been on the wane for years, and Limp Bizkit have aged the worst. Small wonder: surely even hardened metal fans must raise their eyebrows at a 43-year-old in a red baseball cap telling us to go fuck ourselves, whilst he takes our bitches (as Fred Durst does on the new single). So, if Limp Bizkit are a spent force, who goes to their concerts these days; and what exactly goes on? Read more... |
Gipsy Kings, Royal Albert HallFriday, 21 February 2014
With their self-conscious blend of flamenco, Latin and pop creating the improbable-sounding Catalonian rumba, the Gipsy Kings, who played to an ecstatic Royal Albert Hall last night, are one of the pioneers of the world music genre. Their contribution has just been recognised by the Grammys, where they shared this year’s World Music prize (with Ladysmith Black Mambazo) for their new album Savor Flamenco. Read more... |
Shlomo, Purcell RoomThursday, 20 February 2014
Ever since becoming a parent – given that it's my job to look at how music connects to its audience – thoughts about what gets children engaged with it have rarely been far from my mind. It brings home a lot of questions about how much of our reactions to music are learned and how much instinctive, about the functions it serves in our lives, about whether old platitudes about music bringing people together carry any weight and so on. Read more... |
Drenge, Hare and Hounds, BirminghamThursday, 20 February 2014
Drenge certainly pull in a diverse crowd to their shows these days. Prior to the band coming on stage for this sell-out gig, there was a group of 40-somethings in fairly new-looking leather jackets to my left, talking about Tom Watson MP (who famously recommended the band to Ed Miliband in a resignation letter), and to my right a group of teenagers, sniffing from a bottle of amyl nitrate and trying not to puke. Read more... |
Berlinale 2014: 20,000 Days on EarthMonday, 17 February 2014
He cuts a dash, that man Cave. Very tall, gangly, with his idiosyncratic snub nose and upside-down-U-shaped hair, the Australian is a one-off. His growly music isn’t always easy to like. In his fury days with the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds, he was a post-punk rock poet. He has, of course, oceans of fans. Read more... |
The Strypes, Concorde 2, BrightonThursday, 13 February 2014
The Strypes broke through initially with an amped-up version of the blues, akin to the sounds of the early Sixties London blues rock explosion that gave us the Rolling Stones. Tonight proved that they’ve since taken a Tardis through the decades - although no further than 1992 or so - but have kept fast hold of their smash’n’grab garage band ethos. Read more... |
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