New music
Liz Thomson
2018 has become a year of farewells as a mighty handful of musicians who have, in their different ways, defined popular music bow out. Among them is Joan Baez, a star on the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene when she made her unannounced debut at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. She was 18 and, it’s safe to say, never dreamed she’d be filling concert halls around the world 60 years later.Her latest album, Whistle Down the Wind, which brings her extraordinary career full circle, has enjoyed glowing reviews and demand has outstripped supply. So too has the clamour for tickets for her Fare Thee Read more ...
Ellie Porter
Ignore the associations that come with the name LUMP - this record is as far from leaden, dull and heavy as you can get. A dreamy, itchy collaboration between folk musicians Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay of Tunng, LUMP features vocals and lyrics by Marling and music, sound effects and "textures" by Lindsay. A furry man-creature – who looks a bit like the costumed prankster dad in the German film Toni Erdmann – sits mournfully on the cover, and is also the star of the oddly touching animated video accompanying fourth track "Curse of the Contemporary". The video sees Read more ...
Chris Harvey
For the past decade, Victoria Park in east London has been host to the Field Day and Lovebox festivals, both homegrown and both still growing in size and influence. Last year’s headliners included rare appearances from Aphex Twin (Field Day) and Frank Ocean (Lovebox), bringing huge crowds to this vast and beautiful Victorian lung. This year, however, both were outbid and unceremoniously booted out to search for pastures new when the American organisers of Coachella decided to set up a new London festival.All Points East, a 10-day event, spread over two successive long weekends, boasts Read more ...
Echo & the Bunnymen, Symphony Hall, Birmingham review – Mac and Will hit the road with added strings
Guy Oddy
This Echo and the Bunnymen gig in Birmingham is one that almost didn’t happen, on a tour to promote the soon-to-be-released The Stars, the Oceans and the Moon, their first album since 2014’s Meteorites. With their beloved Liverpool FC playing Real Madrid in the Champions League final, the band initially tried to shift the show to another day and put out a press release stating that long-stays Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant wouldn’t be able to put their hearts and souls into things with their minds firmly focused on events in Kiev.It seems that their fans in the Midlands aren’t quite so Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s four albums all centre around off-kilter pop and flirtations with distortion; their latest LP, Sex & Food, carries this tradition forwards in a more laid-back manner. Their current European tour in support of the album seems to have lined up nicely with the schedules of American acts Deerhunter, Black Lips and Sam Evian (as well as much-hyped British act Boy Azooga), with all five artists descending on the Albert Hall in Manchester for the six-hour Strange Waves III.Between the criminally early start time of 5pm and Transport for Manchester’s bus timetabling Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Many will remember Jennifer Warnes as the backing vocalist on a mighty handful of Leonard Cohen albums, and from his touring bands – she was on the 1972 and ’79 European jaunts. The latter was in support of Recent Songs, mocked at the time for its painting-by-numbers sleeve and for just about everything else. For Cohen had become a figure of some derision (punk rock et al has much to answer for) and was as unhip and irrelevant as it was then possible to be. The notorious Phil Spector collaboration hadn’t helped.The ’79 London concert lives on in my memory still (and not just because I Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In William S, Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch, a simopath was “a citizen convinced he is an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army and discharge cures it.” Being in uniform, then, reversed evolution.In October 1967, a British band called Nirvana released their debut album. With its Burroughs-referencing title, The Story of Simon Simopath was a 10-track concept album telling the story of a boy longing for the wings of butterfly. Getting his wish, he flies away from reality, suffers a nervous breakdown and then boards a rocket, meets a centaur and a goddess named Magdelana who Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ryuichi Sakamoto has conquered underground and mainstream with seeming ease over four decades, never dropping off in the quality of his releases. Indeed his most recent projects, following his return to public life after treatment for throat cancer in 2014-15, are among his best. The async album was rightly listed by many, including theartsdesk, as one of 2017's best; the async remodels remixes showed him absolutely keyed in to the electronica zeitgeist, and Glass, his live collaboration album with Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto is a worthy addition to the duo's extensive Read more ...
joe.muggs
Everything on this record changes shape. One moment in “RayCats” Far Eastern instrumentation is being glitched beyond recognition, then suddenly it sounds like something from a relaxation tape. “Same” shimmers and twists between 20th century avant-classical, Depeche Mode at their stadium peak and pure electronic sound. “The Station” sounds like Drake or Future crooning over the bassline from a 90s grunge track, but periodically dissolves into Autechre type abstraction.But that's Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, all over. Since he emerged from the US electronic noise scene, he's Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Before starting this review a decision was taken: that the over-used description of singer-songwriter Malcolm Middleton as a “Scottish miserablist” would not appear. However, this has proved impossible. Middleton is renowned, to the coterie who enjoy his music, for songs ripe with dejection but the first half of his set tonight is especially heavy with stark soul-searching. From the opening number, “Gut Feeling”, which contains the line, “I’ve got rows of wankers in my head shouting my gut feeling down”, to a song called “Love is a Momentary Lapse in Self-Loathing”, he assays a stark, poetic Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Their ninth album should please Morcheeba fans. Take the song “Find Another Way”, for example. It rolls in like a haunted breeze, an acoustic/twangy combination preceding front-woman Skye Edwards, one of the sweetest-sounding vocalists in pop, and she still has it. Tarred with the brush of being the bland dinner-party face of 1990s trip hop, due to their easy way with a pop song, there was always more to Morcheeba than many credited. “The Sea”, “Part of the Process”, “Trigger Hippy”, “What New York Couples Fight About” and others are simply delicious songs. The happy news is that Blaze Away Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Few bands divide opinion quite like Snow Patrol. Their fans see their slow, intense anthems as cathartic friends. Others - myself included - tend to regard their music as an insidious, dreary presence. As Nicky Wire (of the Manics) once put it, "the same drab little thing, over and over". Wildness, their first album in seven years, is being billed as being something completely different - more passionate, and with a lighter touch.Apparently, the shift in musical direction is down to various changes in the band members' lives. Singer Gary Lightbody has given up drinking. He's also been Read more ...