New music
Katie Colombus
For those amongst you who listened obsessively to the soundtrack of Call Me By Your Name, the idea of an album by cult singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens of ‘film music’ will probably fill you with deep joy. Although this isn’t a collection of music made for film.It’s a collaborative project between Stevens and Angelo De Augustine with films as their first point of inspiration. The pair spent a month in upstate New York watching films in the evening, then co-writing corresponding songs the morning after.The ensuing lyric edits, chord re-writes and production are much less about music that would Read more ...
joe.muggs
Lil Nas X is good at being a pop star. Like, what could pop culture need more than a young, flamboyant, witty gay rapper from the deep south who can top the US country charts then just when it appeared he might not be able to live up to the success of “Old Town Road” lap dance Satan in the video for the Latin-tinged “Call me by Your Name” and storm to mega sales all over again? He is in many ways the culmination of the deconstruction of hip hop machismo, being from a generation that grew up on the dweebiness of Drake, the thoughtfulness of Kendrick Lamar, the camp of Nicki Minaj, the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Incredibly it’s now 40 years since the release of Duran Duran’s debut album. To mark this event, the remaining members of the band’s classic line-up decided to return to Birmingham. Not to the NIA or any similar-sized venue, but for a couple of intimate gigs at the city’s O2 Institute. Fortunately, “intimate” didn’t mean getting out the acoustic guitars for rounds of their greatest hits but it was nevertheless quite a shock to see these megastars playing a room that holds 1,500 on a good day and must be little more than 30 metres from the stage to the back wall.In keeping with the premise of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Phantasmagoria, or A Different Kind of Journey instantly sets its controls for an excursion into the interstellar void between gaseous and solid objects. Opening cut “Intoxication” begins with lightly pulsing bass and a keyboard texture. Shimmering guitar floats over the top. Though more sparse and lacking vocals, it’s as if Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them” were performed by an earlier model of the band which had focussed on reducing performative grandeur as much as possible.There’s another evocation. When “Intoxication’s” treated guitar arrives, it has a Robert Fripp flavour. The King Crimson Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This was, said bassist Michael Janisch, his first gig since January last year, and his crack group’s Monday evening set, kicking off at the un-jazzy hour of 6.30pm, was an energising, dynamic group performance from A-list British musicians who are band leaders in their own right. They are Empirical’s alto-saxophonist Nathaniel Facey; his childhood friend – and one of Britain’s finest drummers (and fellow Empirical member) – Shaney Forbes; fellow Whirlwind Recordings artist, tenor saxophonist George Crowley; and on the keyboards and synths, Rick Simpson, whose own quartet was touring its Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There’s a modesty to the Felice Brothers, an absenting of ego, even as they seek glimmers of transcendence in the vast American night. These working-class Americana veterans are enriched by their native upstate New York, with its economic scars and natural beauty, fitting between the region’s folk mythologisers The Band and more cosmic Mercury Rev. Their music also exist in a vivid landscape, at once ruefully realistic at their nation’s ills, and aching for grace.From Dreams to Dust is bracketed by panoramic visions. Balmy sax curls through the motorik boogie of “Jazz On the Autobahn”, which Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In October 1964, New York’s Goldie & the Gingerbreads boarded the RMS Mauretania for Southampton. In the midst of the British Invasion, they were taking on the beat boom at its coal face. The Beatles, Animals, Dave Clark Five, Rolling Stones and more were cleaning up in their home country but – counter intuitively – Genya Zelkowitz aka Genya Ravan aka Goldie and co went in the opposite direction. Their champions in this venture were The Animals and their manager Mike Jeffrey. Rolling Stone Keith Richards also claimed to have discovered them at a New York party he’d attended with Stones’ Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Dylan’s 1980s weren’t great in terms of critical acclaim. As an emerging new fan, I knew that first hand from the scathing reviews accorded Shot of Love by the British music press when it was released in the summer of 1981, it seemed about as welcome as a door-knocking Jehovah’s Witness first thing on a Sunday morning. Saved’s proselytising may have tipped the balance. “The hand is in the hand” Picasso once remarked – describing the most reliable marker of an artists’ skill – and the hands raised up in the album art for 1980’s Saved stuck out in the wider culture like Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It may not be a totally new phenomenon, but just recently there seems to have been a rash of techno and electronica producers and DJs working with musicians of a psychedelic bent to record side projects of one kind or another. Stand outs include Amon Tobin and Stone Giants’ West Coast Love Stories and Nicolas Jaar’s Darkside album Spiral but without any shade of a doubt, Laurent Garnier’s new collaboration with Lionel and Marie Limiñana is a project that stands head and shoulders above all the others.The Limiñanas have been turning out their own twist on psych-rock for well over a decade, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Dazzling. That was the first adjective with which the illustrious Marian McPartland described Helen Sung’s piano playing, when she had the remarkable Houston-born pianist as her guest for an episode of the NPR radio show Piano Jazz in 2006.On Quartet+ (Sunnyside), Sung is celebrating “landmark women in jazz”, including McPartland (a new arrangement of “Kaleidoscope”, the theme from the radio show, worked in with a string quartet version of “Melancholy Mood”), and also Mary Lou Williams, Geri Allen, Carla Bley, and Toshiko Akiyoshi. “True pioneers and giants all,” as Sung describes them. Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
"I've seen things you people wouldn’t believe." It’s one of the most famous lines from Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, though in the past 18 months we’ve all seen things we would not have believed back at the start of 2020, when I originally secured my tickets for this show that had been scheduled for 26 March 2020.Set in 2019, Scott’s version of that year correctly foretold issues arising from overpopulation and the climate crisis, though instead of synthetic humans and flying cars, real-life 2019 saw the advent of a deadly virus and an ensuing global lockdown from which the UK Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Hey What is 47 minutes long and includes 10 tracks, it comes across as shorter due to its homogeneity. That’s not to say it all sounds the same, but that it has the overarching feel of a suite where the individual songs equate to movements within a long-form piece. It means that Low’s 13th full-length studio outing is an album as such, rather than a grab-bag collection of disparate compositions.Hey What is also astonishingly powerful. Metallic bursts of noise open the album. As they pass, “White Horses” emerges from the maelstrom. The pulse running throughout the first track suggests Read more ...