Americana
Odaline de la Martinez
This year is the sixth London Festival of American Music, and I could not be more excited about it. From the first festival in 2006 – 10 years ago now – I had a very specific idea about what I wanted the London Festival of American Music to be like. At its heart the festival is designed to celebrate the contemporary American musical landscape, and to bring the best America has to offer to UK audiences.The American music scene has never been stronger – there is an amazing range of styles and works being produced all across the states. UK audiences, however, tend to be solely familiar with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1969, a tranche of American musicians looked back to the country’s past for inspiration. Bob Dylan followed John Wesley Harding with Nashville Skyline. The Band’s eponymous second album hit the shops. The Flying Burrito Brothers debuted with The Gilded Palace of Sin. The rootsy was a default. But choosing to draw on country and Appalachian traditions did not have to mean playing it straight. On the amazing Farewell Aldebaren, Judy Henske and Jerry Yester used banjo and hammered dulcimer. They also employed the Chamberlain, a Mellotron-like instrument where the keyboard triggers tape Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Honestly, you wait years for a lengthy project to come to fruition, then two turn up at once. However, while The Avalanches had to contend with people tapping their watches and sighing wearily, The Earlies’ John Mark Lapham had only his own clock to watch. The measured pace and unhurried approach are reflected in the languorous song spectres he presents here.Starting out life as an idea for his short-lived 4AD outfit, the Late Cord, the project soon outgrew its shell and ended up a huge collaborative effort which sees turns from, among a Hollywood-sized cast, Sara Lowe (the Earlies), Swans’ Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Though composed after and based on a play by the same author, Puccini’s spaghetti western is in no way a sequel to Madama Butterfly, his whisky-sour eastern. Fanciulla is Butterfly’s opposite in almost every respect, and to tell the truth it isn’t much at home in a small theatre like the one at Grange Park. Where Butterfly is delicate and light-handed, its successor is loud and punch-drunk. Its heroine is no frail Puccini victim but a tough mother figure surprised by true love. Simpering geishas are replaced by rough gold-diggers, and mawkish tragedy by the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We’ve been visiting libraries on this tour and it’s a lot of fun learning people still read.” The words of The Burning Hell’s main man Mathias Kom before launching into “Give Up” stress he and his band are not typical rock‘n’rollers. “Give Up” itself is the rollicking song-story of a call-centre worker who goes to a library, finds inspiration in Herman Melville and then meets a mysterious woman who rings in. She gives him a poster of a kitten captioned “Never Give Up”. In the song’s pay off, Kom’s protagonist declares “when the going gets tough, I give up.”Canada’s Burning Hell don’t Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The cape is not an everyday item of clothing. Worn by magicians, it brings an air of the extraordinary. It billows in the path of superheroes. The cloak of invisibility confirms the cape’s singularity. Basia Bulat was first seen in a sparkly gold cape on the sleeve of her recent Good Advice album and last night it was integral to the renewed vigour of her music and stage persona. Moved to say how hard it was play guitar with its folds fluttering, she nonetheless did not take the easy path and discard it.None of this is to say that Bulat would lack anything without the cape, but it is Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
News that Richmond Fontaine were calling it a day with one final album and tour was not itself a surprise: across latter-day releases, from at least 2009’s We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River, the music had become progressively incidental, an increasingly subtle backdrop to frontman Willy Vlautin’s surprisingly widescreen storyteller’s vision of small-town Americana. Their decision to tie up loose ends with one final album, described by Vlautin as “an end piece for all the characters who inhabited the world of Richmond Fontaine over the years”, is not one most bands would take Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Music is no exception to the rule that history is littered with winners and losers. In commercial terms, however they are looked at, San Francisco’s Charlatans were losers. They issued just one single in 1966 and a belated album in 1969. While the world hummed along with Scott McKenzie’s "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" in 1967, these pioneers of the city’s scene were without a label and left adrift in the rush to sign Bay Area bands. Big Brother & the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape and Quicksilver Messenger Service saw their stock Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Back in the early 2000s, it was rumoured that Ryan Adams had covered Is This It by The Strokes in its entirety. According to my extensive cataloguing of the career of Americana’s enfant terrible, only “Last Nite” ever surfaced (I have a live version, which opens with a couple of versions of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”), but the point is that Ryan Adams is no stranger to these sonic experiments. Which is why, as a huge fan of both artists I have found it both amusing and perplexing to watch the internet collectively lose its shit over Adams’ version of Taylor Swift’s 1989.The parallels between Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When you’re a big Bruce Springsteen fan, as I am, there’s a game that you end up getting quite good at: one in which you have to separate the stories, about the hard-drinkin’, hard-livin’ workingman, from the multi-millionaire songwriter. Roots rocker Jason Isbell writes from a similar place as Springsteen – albeit on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line – but his work has never presented as much of a dichotomy. Sure, it’s not like he’s at Springsteen’s level of success, but with his understated, gravelly vocal delivery and gentler melodies, his portraits of Southern life are Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I often think that, once a band hits certain milestones – longevity, moderate commercial success, critical acclaim – it can be difficult to know where to begin. I don’t mean the big bands, with the songs you’d recognise if you heard them in an advert or at a festival, their big hits acting as gateway drugs to those who’d like to find out more; but rather those mid-level indie bands beloved by those in the know and yet whose names prompt glazed looks when your colleagues ask you who you went to see at the weekend. By all means, after almost 20 years and nine albums together, Calexico should be Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Your mum told you (or at least, I hope someone did) that it wasn't about being pretty, it was about having personality. True wisdom though this is, you probably also noticed that there are some jobs where it appears to be necessary to conform to a certain model of style or appearance. Playing the princess roles in ballet is one of these, though it's not about prettiness: for practical reasons you have to be shorter and considerably lighter than the men who will partner you. Tall ballerinas do become principals, but, especially in smaller companies, they don't often get to dance the Auroras Read more ...