disco
joe.muggs
Let's get the obvious out of the way: yes, this is incredible. Not just the sounds, nor the ambitious staging of Hans Christian Andersen's last story as a ballet, but the fact that, 30 years since they met, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are still making music that's both relevant and gloriously excessive to a frankly crackerdog mental degree. They've tinkered with classical themes before, of course, from setting “Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat” in 1988's “Left to My Own Devices” to their 2004 live soundtrack to Battleship Potemkin, but this is something else. Piling on romantic themes Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A midwinter night’s dream at the Barbican. Those who like their pop music performed by chaps with jeans, preferably gazing at their shoes, and are attached to certain ideas of authenticity would have run screaming for the exit. The Irrepressibles were pop as icy spectacle, as dizzying melodrama, while Gabby Young & Other Animals were raiding the musical dressing-up box and emerging with bits of French chanson, German cabaret and slinky tangos, and having a ball doing it.Gabby Young’s band created their own party atmosphere and invited the audience along. Their brand of recession chic Read more ...
joe.muggs
2010 saw some major shifts stirring up the UK club music ecosystem and unleashing some fascinating hybrids and variants of existing sounds out into the wild. As the hefty bass of dubstep muscled its way firmly into the heart of the mainstream, everything else was forced to rearrange its position, with some surprising results. The most aggressive sounds proved to have a sensitive or celebratory side, the hoariest old rhythms were given a new lease of life and – despite the supposed globalisation of the weird wired world – highly localised club scenes were once more at the forefront of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s something going on in the North. Iceland’s Hjaltalín incorporate a disco sensibility and Sweden’s Concretes draw from the same well on their new album WYWH. Although this is probably not the future direction of Nordic music, it’s now an important part of it, showcases a reinvented Concretes and, judging by last night’s show, they might as well be a new band. Although still glacial – you could never imagine them breaking a sweat on stage – this show drew a curtain on their past.There’s something going on in the North. Iceland’s Hjaltalín incorporate a disco sensibility and Sweden’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s a moment during Hjaltalín’s encore when bolero rhythms take over and you wonder if the Reykjavik septet have invented a new musical hybrid: a Ravel-driven makeover of Seventies-slanted soul. As singer Sigrídur Thorlacius lets rip on the thrillingly anthemic “Feels Like Sugar”, it’s clear that Hjaltalín aren’t bothered with current musical templates. They take from the unlikeliest sources, smoosh them together and end up sounding like no one else. After all, this is a band with a stand-up bassoon player. At home, they topped the charts covering a song by Icelandic disco star and Read more ...
david.cheal
Some years ago I saw Muse playing at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge. Towards the end of the show, at a climactic moment (I think it might have been during their proggy epic, “New Born”), singer and guitarist Matt Bellamy reached into a bag attached to his microphone stand, pulled out a handful of shiny golden confetti and flung it into the air. It fluttered downwards most attractively. It was a terrific show, with some truly powerful music, but as far as visuals were concerned, the confetti moment was about as good as it got.Compare and contrast that little affair with last night, the first Read more ...
theartsdesk
CD of the MonthTom Jones, Praise & Blame (Universal/Island) by Adam Sweeting Reinvention is all very well, and indeed indispensable for any career that aims to last longer than a series of X Factor, but you can have enough of seeing Tom Jones hamming it up with Robbie Williams or Cerys Matthews or Stereophonics. Jones seems to have reached the same conclusion. On his last outing, 2008’s 24 Hours, he circled back towards his traditional strengths, revisiting some of the musical styles he became associated with in the Sixties and Seventies but with the aid of a submerged iceberg of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“You see! This is America! All races, genders and everything else blending together to make something beautiful!” This a quote from an American fan living in the Middle East currently on Pink Martini’s website. Thomas Lauderdale, the musical director of the band was involved in politics, about to run for Mayor in Portland, Oregon when he put Pink Martini together. When their first international hit came along in 2004, at the height of "the anti-American craze", as the singer Caetano Veloso put it, the band were an export from America that liberals could love.Pink Martini were multi-cultural Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Travelling along at 140kph in a Mercedes in a police convoy on the wrong side of the road with Prince, and Portuguese fado singer and his new protégé Ana Moura in the front, plus the artist’s agent and Rolling Stones sax player Tim Ries, is pretty rock’n’roll, I can assure you. But it was the only way to get to the gig outside Lisbon in time at last week’s Super Rock Festival. Otherwise it would have taken hours as the traffic jammed to a standstill. A lot of disgruntled paying punters didn’t make it, but over 30,000 managed to arrive, with cars trailing back half way to the city. And the Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month's most interesting new music CDs according to theartsdesk music team includes a dark take on sex and consumerism by The-Dream, which is CD of the Month, "morally ambiguous" South London gangsta rap from Giggs, disco pop from Sia, Scissor Sisters and Robyn, "indietronica" from Grasscut and Tobacco, heritage rock from Tom Petty, immaculate jazz from David Weiss and a compilation of old Colombian dance music. Stinker of the Month is Eminem who is cordially advised to take up religion, get fat or do charity work. Reviewers this month are Joe Muggs, Thomas H Green, Bruce Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the least lamented (by me at least) genres that has fallen foul of social changes in the past two decades is the 1980s gay drama. You know the kind of thing: right-on coming-out speeches, painful but ridiculous instances of homophobia, and the compulsory dying-of-AIDS scene. The irony is that Jonathan Harvey, whose 1993 classic Beautiful Thing did so much to pull the gay play out of its ghetto, has now returned to this 1980s genre. His latest play, which opened last night and marks his long-overdue return to the stage, revisits gay culture between the 1960s and today. Okay, it’s retro Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Quasi, Bye Bye Blackbird (Domino) The "Bye Bye Blackbird" on offer here is not the jazz stalwart favoured by everyone from Peggy Lee to Miles Davis. It is, instead, a garage guitar-pop concoction from perennial underdog trio Quasi from Portland, Oregon, that prolific centre of American indie guitar raucousness. At the core of the band, ex-husband and wife Sam Coombes and Janet Weiss have always appeared happy, throughout eight albums, to veer into wilful lo-fi messiness whenever their natural aptitude for a tasty melodic song threatens to interfere. This time, though, they've blown it.The Read more ...