guitar
Russ Coffey
Explosions, 40ft flames, light shows and back projections. It may have been at the Dome but at times it felt more like being in a music video. A mini-film opened the concert. Rush circa 1973 were boys called Rash, and they’d play only when professor Alex Lifeson operated his music machine. The contraption also had a button marked “Time Machine”. When pressed this catapulted the band, on stage, back and forth through their 37-year career. Every time the trio played songs from a different era, screens announced the year. Hours later, when we shot forward to the song "2112", several thousand Read more ...
graham.rickson
The trick is to transform something relatively easy into something dazzling and bewilderingly complex. Seeing the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain is like watching eight masters of close-up magic. You’re not quite sure where to look, unable to believe quite what you’re hearing. These are boom times for the four-string ukulele. You can pick up a functional instrument for a tenner and learn three chords in five minutes, meaning that a huge repertoire of Western pop songs is yours for the taking. Simply strumming isn’t particularly difficult. But what the Ukulele Orchestra do is pluck Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Always renowned as an interpreter of other artists' material, Emmylou Harris has been a late developer as a songwriter. On 2008's All I Intended to Be, she successfully balanced cover versions with her own songs, but this time she has written eight songs single-handed, and three more in collaboration with Will Jennings. It's a sign of her writerly progress that her own work comfortably holds its own against the non-originals "Cross Yourself", composed by producer and multi-instrumentalist Jay Joyce, and Ron Sexsmith's slightly turgid title track.Hard Bargain was cut in a brisk four Read more ...
David Nice
Bear with me while, like supergroomed rising star Miloš Karadaglić retuning his guitar to a mellower vein, I adjust my concert-hall vocab and describe this as a no-gimmicks sell-out gig underground with young musicians from the London Philharmonic’s Foyle Future Firsts scheme presenting two varied sets and Karadaglić headlining. And now I’ll just revert to old habits and declare the meat to be a slice of Classicism chromatically spiced (Mozart) and a 20th-century maverick pushing Neo-Baroque into near-atonality (Stravinsky), our top guitarist serenading by way of late-night coda. All this to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Pål Moddi Knutsen is from Senja, an island off north Norway’s west coast. Inside the Arctic Circle, it’s so far north as to be all but adjacent to the borders with Sweden and Finland. Due east, Murmansk is less than half the distance of Oslo. It’s no surprise that Moddi’s debut album evokes solitude, the endless light, the unbroken night and the contemplation that has to come with the territory.Accordion is his lead instrument. He also plays acoustic guitar. Floriography was produced in Reykjavik by Valgeir Sigurðssun, who has filled out the sound with gentle strings, pattering percussion, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Jet Harris was one of the architects of British rock'n'roll. His death rams home just how distant that era now seems. A former skiffler, he joined The Shadows after a spell backing Terry Dene, British rock's first bad boy. In time, Harris became a bad boy too, setting the template for the self-destructive lifestyle that would become a cliché. But his moody image will survive too. His rumbling bass guitar will forever be synonymous with those evocative Shadows' hits.The Shadows' world-changing moment came in August 1960 when they topped the British charts with “Apache”. Everything in British Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This impressive debut from the Devon-born Bray teems with allusions to a raft of classic British songwriters, not least Nick Drake and John Martyn, though Bray also claims to have had his synapses jangled by everyone from Led Zeppelin and Nirvana to Crosby Stills & Nash and Joni Mitchell. It's his English Pastoral mode which leads off the disc in the shape of opening track "The River Song" (obviously no possible relation to Drake's "Riverman"), with its wistful acoustic guitar, strings and harmonica.
It's followed by the gorgeous "Rise", a rolling elegy to memory, nostalgia and Read more ...
david.cheal
There are some glorious sounds to be heard in the world of music: a big band in full swing; a symphony orchestra in full flight; a gospel choir; the Hammond B3 organ. But to my mind there’s nothing quite like the sound of a line of electric guitars – not chugging along like the Quo or Lynyrd Skynyrd, but meshing, interweaving, thrumming, humming, threshing, shredding, screaming; like Mogwai.It’s more than 15 years since these five guys from Glasgow pioneered the largely instrumental form of music that’s become known as “post-rock”, a description that some may find pretentious but which seems Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There's been a lot of waffle lately about rock'n'roll being dead. This is down to mainstream radio turning its back on guitar music in favour of a stew of electro-pop and R&B, and the fact that just three spots in the Top 100 UK bestselling singles (ie downloads) of 2010 were held by rock songs (for the record, Journey's "Don't Stop Believing", Train's "Hey, Soul Sister" and "Dog Days are Over" by Florence + the Machine). Whenever this sort of media babble starts, it's time to run for cover because there's undoubtedly another tedious wave of guitar bands waiting gleefully in the wings. Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
February is guitar month in New York City. Synchronicity rules at those two giants, the MoMA and the Met. At MoMA, Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 shows his austere guitar paintings, collages and drawings - often using newspaper, wallpaper and sand - as well as constructions of guitars made of cardboard and one of sheet metal and wire. “What is it? Painting or sculpture?” asked snooty visitors to his Paris studio. “It’s nothing, it’s el guitare,” Picasso, who didn’t play an instrument, is said to have replied.(Pictured right: Still life with Guitar, 1913. Paperboard, paper, string and painted wire Read more ...
theartsdesk
From a guitar by Matteo Sellas dating back to Germany before 1630 to one made in New York by John Monteleone in 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Guitar Heroes exhibition is will go down as the longest guitar solo slot in history. Including one of the four surviving models by Stradivari, it monitors the guitar’s development in Italy and the instrument’s migration across the Atlantic. Angelo Mannello, born in Italy, made the mandolins seen here in America. It is clear from this gallery, which includes a bespoke instrument made for Paul Simon, that the skill exhibited by the great Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It's quite funny to hear a rock band with a reputation for sounding like the inside of an aeroplane engine making something that's just gorgeous. But, even with its grimly jokey title, and silly offhand track titles like “You're Lionel Richie”, that's exactly what this album is. Mogwai's uncompromising reputation is not entirely undeserved: they've certainly had their moments of creating music which delivered its pleasures only after something of an endurance test, and the Glaswegians remain a spikily independent, politically committed force within the music world.However, even at their Read more ...