New music
joe.muggs
At three decades deep in the creative industries, it's fair to say Trevor Jackson is a renaissance man. He is a designer, filmmaker, music producer, radio and club DJ, compilation curator, label owner (he introduced Four Tet and LCD Soundsystem among others to UK audiences), professional grouch – and impossibly prolific in all those spheres. Most recently, after a lengthy break from releasing his own music, he's been mining his catalogue of unreleased tracks, starting with with the “Format” project in 2015, featuring dozens of tracks from old harddrives, followed 50 tracks over nine EPs and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Precious to me” is a high-carat gold nugget. A guitar-pop song with cascading, lush Everly Brothers harmonies drawing on The Searchers’ version of “When You Walk in the Room”, its immediate tune instantly lodges itself in the head.Instead of being from the Sixties, “Precious to me” was a US hit in Spring 1981, a period when punk had given way to the acceptable face of new wave. The commercial door for concise, classically styled songs was open. Phil Seymour, the song’s writer and singer, had a pre-punk résumé, knew all about pop and rode the moment. His music fit the power pop profile: the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The queen of R&B is no stranger to struggle – the Staples Singers, led by Pops, played a key role in the 1960s civil rights movement, emerging from the gospel circuit as so many great black singers did. Mavis’ first paid gig was with her family in in 1948. Almost 70 years later, she’s often to be found on the road with Bob Dylan, who was sweet on her back in the early 1960s when they sang often from the same stage. Where once she marched with Martin Luther King, today she puts her energies into Black Lives Matter.The Civil Rights Act was passed into US law more than half a century ago yet Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
For a band as big as Depeche Mode, in a venue as big the 21,000-capacity Manchester Arena, on a tour as big as their current Spirit tour, it almost doesn’t need saying that the pre-gig atmosphere is buzzing. A major presence on the British music scene since their 1981 electropop debut Speak and Spell, they’ve since tried their hand at goth, new wave, rock’n’roll, industrial music, and classical piano, all of which has helped birth this year’s politically-influenced Spirit. Now, stood before hordes of people who grew up with their music, they’d be praised no matter what they played. That doesn Read more ...
peter.quinn
As moments of transcendence go, Laura Mvula’s guest spot at Robert Glasper’s EFG London Jazz Festival show provided one of the year’s most transporting musical moments.Powered by the huge harmonic slabs carved out by keyboardist Travis Sayles and the vast backbeat of bassist Derrick Hodge and drummer George “Spanky” McCurdy, Mvula’s delicately outerspacious “Bread” was recast as a 10-minute meditation. The mantra-like repetitions of the refrain "Lay the breadcrumb down so we can find our way", together with the uniquely affecting timbre of Mvula’s voice, succeeded in uniting and lifting up 2, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Over the last few months Paloma Faith has been talking up her fourth album, The Architect. There were self-perpetuated rumours of her rockin’ out, going off at a completely fresh musical angle, with lyrical content that sidestepped pop's usual concerns in favour of tackling societal issues and the state of things in our fucked-up world. Sounded good. However, a couple of clips of chatting about our duty to the welfare state and such, one featuring the writer Owen Jones, does not a political album make. In fact The Architect is business as usual, a continuation of the last album and not really Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Four albums in, Detroit’s Protomartyr have built up quite a following over the last five years. From the now-hard-to-find No Passion All Technique to Relatives in Descent, their lauded new album, Protomartyr’s precise post-punk has remained as thunderous as it is rich. As part of their current European tour promoting the release of Relatives in Descent, the band have come to the Deaf Institute, one of Manchester’s coolest mid-size venues, to bathe us in its murky waters.Oh Boland, the sole support band, sound like the musical child of the Modern Lovers and the Strokes. With insistent drums Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The family that sings together stays together… At least that’s true in folk music. Think of Waterson- Carthy and Seeger-MacColl. And last night at Cecil Sharp House, citadel of British folk music, Peggy Seeger and her sons Calum and Neill stepped out for a family concert.The fashions may have changed but the audience would be recognisable anywhere, and how comfortable it always feels to be among. Old friends, even if you don’t know them – though many of them knew Peggy and she them, as the stage banter proved. Singer, song-maker and activist, Seeger is 82 now but, rather like her half-brother Read more ...
peter.quinn
If having several projects on the go is a necessity for most jazz musicians, the US drummer Mark Guiliana is more protean than most, with a musical CV that traverses jazz, rock and electronic music. Like the pianist Robert Glasper, Guiliana – voted Best Jazz Drummer in this year’s Modern Drummer Readers Poll – has been hugely influenced by electronic music and textures, as equally inspired by Squarepusher and Aphex Twin as by jazz drumming legends Tony Williams and Elvin Jones.Across two perfectly paced sets in a packed Ronnie Scott’s, part of this year's EFG London Jazz Festival, we heard Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Morrissey inspires some pretty fierce adulation, but there surely can’t be a fan on the planet who loves Morrissey quite as much as Morrissey does. This is the man who was reported, lest we forget, to have insisted that his memoirs be published as a Penguin Classic. This move put him alongside Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Graham Greene and, of course, Oscar Wilde.It is a shame then that, despite having some pretty decent tunes on it, Low in High School is like having world affairs explained to you by a teenager who’s just spent the afternoon wanking and reading The Canary. Possibly at the same Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There are more clothes flying Kesha’s way than onto the stage at a Las Vegas Tom Jones concert in the mid-Seventies. She started it. As she introduced her 2010 single “Take It Off”, she announced that since things were so hot she’d be discarding a few items. Duly, she removes the heavy, dark velveteen jacket, decorated with embroidered red roses, that she’s been wearing so far, and undoes her shiny gold shirt down to her sternum, revealing her bra. The song kicks in and the capacity crowd go nuts as she attacks her ballsy ode to a party hole “where they go hardcore and there's glitter on the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Evanescence have been away for a while, and fans looking for a whole album of new material will be disappointed. There are only two proper new songs on Synthesis (plus a couple of instrumental interludes). Instead, it’s an album of operatically-inclined orchestral interpretations of music from the band’s previous three albums, tinted with a light touch of Gary Numan-esque gothic electronica. If you like the idea of Finnish symphonic metallers Nightwish having it out with Canadian mezzo-soprano balladeer Sarah McLachlan, then, hey, Synthesis is for you. Everyone else should stay well away. Read more ...