New music
Kieron Tyler
This column last encountered Cocteau Twins in 2015 when the compilation The Pink Opaque and the Tiny Dynamine/Echoes in a Shallow Bay album, which collected two EPs, were reissued on vinyl only. Now, it’s the turn of two albums-as-such: 1983's Head Over Heels and 1984's Treasure.The overriding question from then still applies: neither record is rare in its original form and neither fetches a high price. The reissues sell for around £17. Decent-shape first pressings fetch £3 or £4 less than that. Why would anyone buy a vinyl reissue of either?And, upending a review’s normal structure, the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although its opening minute suggests one of Can’s Ethnological Forgery Series tracks, Jungle? Quelle Jungle? quickly sets its stall with gentle whacka-whacka guitar, a Cerrone-type or South African-styled female chorale, fusion-jazz woodwind, shimmering electric piano, Latin percussion, squelchy bass and a touch of Space’s space disco. There is a lot going on.Essentially, the album – its title a reference to Supertramp’s Crisis What Crisis – marries yacht rock and the smooth, Côte d'Azur side of disco. Fire Island, this is not. Instead, this could have packed the light-up dance-floor of Paris Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Oh dear. After a bumpy couple of years which included an all-too-public arrest for domestic violence to which he pleaded guilty, Don McLean is releasing his first new studio album in eight years. Metaphorically (and sometimes literally) it hits a lot of bum notes and often tips over into self-parody.For a singer-songwriter whose back catalogue includes such genuine classics as “Crying”, “And I Love You So”, “Winterwood” and of course “American Pie” (the manuscript for which recently went for $1.2 million at auction), and whose talent was (according to some) is hymned in the Charles Fox-Norman Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Full disclosure: I have never quite gotten over Alexandra Burke's rendition of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. I'm not sure I ever will.And now I'm unsure as how to cope with the fresh outrage of realisation that it is now 10 years since that flagrant disregard of a soul-crushing classic, when clearly I haven't aged at all.A decade on, the X Factor winner celebrates by signing with Decca Records, capitalising on her recent stint on Strictly Come Dancing, and releasing an album of epic power ballad proportions.It's a strange mix of 90s femme-pop that I am accidentally crushing on and cheesy Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Malcolm Middleton (b.1973) is a Scottish singer-songwriter whose music has a devoted fanbase. Instead of the faux-vulnerable, non-specific, sub-Jeff Buckley flannel touted by many of his contemporaries and younger peers, Middleton’s work is grounded in the physical grit of the everyday, boasting a social realism underpinned by mordant humour and, often, heartbreaking emotion.Middleton first came to the attention of music fans as a member of pithy indie observational duo Arab Strap with Aidan Moffat. By the time they wound down in 2006, he had already launched a solo career defined by literate Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The delicious flame-grilled burgers and the vast array of bourbons on offer at the Lexington, hard by yet another “King's Cross Quarter”, added atmosphere to the opening night of Diana Jones’s European tour. Finger licking is (quite rightly) not allowed during the music so those arriving early for a bite might have spotted Jones herself, refuelling with friends between sound-check and curtain-up.Not that the singer-songwriter called variously “the Emily Dickinson of song” and “the female Johnny Cash” needs props of any kind. In venues far larger than the Lexington, Jones creates the kind of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s difficult to dislike Kim Wilde, whatever you think of her music. Even more so after her pissed Christmas sing-along on a tube train a few years back became a massive YouTube hit. Or how about her appearance at Download Festival in 2016 with thrash metallers Lawnmower Death? There’s something boisterous and everyday about Kim Wilde. She has that early Spice Girls thing, whether she’s acting raunchy or silly, of being a human woman you might really meet, and who’d be fun, rather than a plastic, photo-shopped, faux-sexy lollipop-head. Her new album, despite its faults, makes her seem even Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s now 24 years since Pink Floyd pretty much stopped being a going concern and 33 since the departure of artistic powerhouse Roger Waters. So, apart from a brief band reunion at 2005’s Live8 concert, Floyd-heads have had little to keep them happy apart from periodic album reissues for the best part of a generation. It is a truism, however, that nature abhors a vacuum, and into this vacuum has strode a substantial tribute-act industry. Once upon a time it was the Australian Pink Floyd Show that dominated this stage. These days, however, Brit Floyd have taken up the challenge to reclaim the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Since forming in 2013, The Gloaming have set about transforming how Irish traditional music is heard, received and performed. There is no other group like them, and none with the sheer heft of brilliance that fiddler Martin Hayes, viola/hardanger player Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, sean nos singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, American pianist Thomas Bartlett and guitarist Dennis Cahill demonstrate on their two studio albums, and on this superlative live set from Dublin’s National Concert Hall, which has become something of a home-from-home for the group (Martin Hayes is the venue’s artist in residence) – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The similarity is intentional. The cover design of When the Day is Done – The Orchestrations of Robert Kirby nods explicitly to that of Nick Drake’s debut album Five Leaves Left. That wasn’t just the first record by the singer-songwriter, it was also first time most people heard Kirby’s string arrangements. He and Drake had been friends at Cambridge University. The album’s producer Joe Boyd commissioned arrangements by Richard Hewson but Drake rejected them and the call was made to Kirby, who had already worked with him live.For Kirby, this was the beginning of a career which flourished until Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Looking to the 'net to help fund a project is nothing new. Getting strangers to help with the actual creative process, though, is still pretty novel. It's what David Schweitzer's In Analysis project does. Schweitzer is best known for children's TV scores, like Charlie and Lola. Now he and collaborator Mary Richards have created a virtual analyst's couch. Visitors to their website were invited to anonymously submit personal stories, on the theme of mothers, which Schweitzer then turned into songs. The album comprises 11 tales of people's experiences of the person who brought Read more ...
howard.male
Is it fair to say that Seun Kuti’s fourth album is just more of the same? I believe it is, because more of the same is more or less the point with protest music, particularly if what you’re protesting hasn’t gone away. You have no choice but to keep singing that same tune (sometimes literally). So what we have here are variations on the theme of struggle and liberation – corrupt politicians, the unjust jailing of the poor, police and army brutality, the promise of jobs as more factories close, and the need for education so that the young are intellectually armed for an uprising. Oh and, to Read more ...