New music
james.woodall
This is the most frustrating film. It’s probably no fault of the makers, but it’s rare to have to assess a documentary for what it doesn’t have. Over nearly two hours of celebrating the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Beatles period – late 1966 to their record label Apple taking off in 1968 – there is not a note of the group’s music.Well, alright, in the opening animated credits you detect a phrasal shimmer of George Harrison’s sitar-driven “Within You Without You”, but that’s it. The score, by Andre Barreau and Evan Jolly, is a confection of atmospherics and rhythms that could be the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On its release, Linkin Park's recent single, the ironically titled "Heavy", caused outrage among fans. It wasn't so much the warbling vocals, as much as the total reversal of the band's customary controlled rage. Some took to writing mock obituaries on Twitter; others wrote worse. So might this be the end of Linkin Park, or can change actually be a good thing?First things first – how does One More Light actually sound? In a nutshell, this is simply a sleek, occasionally R'n'B tinged, modern electro-pop album. And, other than the cognitive dissonance of it being a Linkin Park LP, there Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As the producer of the early Kinks and Who, Shel Talmy’s status as one of British pop’s most important figures is assured. He is, though, American. Despite being integral to the mid-Sixties boom years when the Limeys took over, he was born in Chicago in 1937.It didn’t stop with his two most successful clients. As the new collection Making Time: A Shel Talmy Production more-than amply demonstrates, his ears were always to the ground and the lesser knowns he worked with were as striking as the Top Ten acts. Pitch The First Gear’s sandpaper-rough version of “A Certain Girl” against The Kinks at Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Notwithstanding the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays’ underwhelming reunions, it comes as something of a shock to realise that the Charlatans are the last men standing of the early 80s Madchester scene. Bringing elements of acid house into indie pop, it was a serious shot in the arm for guitar music generally and before long, everyone was discovering the funky drummer beat and growing a fringe. Time, tastes and inspiration change for all musicians though and it is no different for Tim Burgess’ mob – who now sound far closer to the easy listening pop of Haim than the grubby funk of Shaun and Bez Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Finally, a new band that lives up to a fine name and great cover art. Then again, Shitkid do a whole lot more than that. Their music sounds like the antithesis of contemporary chart-pop, which is refreshing, but even better, also doesn’t do the usual things artists do when they want to prove, absolutely, that they’re anti all that stuff. Shitkid is 24-year-old Åsa Söderqvist from Gothenberg, Sweden, and most of this album sounds like it was recorded down the bottom of a well, but in the best possible way.Söderqvist’s M.O. is a punk-bored, sometimes cutesy, always teen-like, dry-as-the-Gobi Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Yasmine Hamdan has gone from being an indie star in Beirut a decade ago with her adventurous band Soapkills to being a bona fide solo star with a couple of sophisticated albums behind her, the latest Al Jamilat recently released.She sings in Arabic, is based in Paris, has a Belgian label and has a multi-cultural band and treads an inventive cultural tightrope between orient and occident. The melody of “Douss” sounds almost Chinese and could be sung in a Hong Kong karaoke bar but is actually about the let-down of the Arab Spring “feeding us lies, deceit and slogans”.The packed Read more ...
Matthew Wright
From a residency at a low-key Hollywood piano bar, jazz fusion collective The West Coast Get Down has seemingly launched a global takeover of jazz. First, saxophonist Kamasi Washington went stellar; currently four other members of the group are releasing their own albums. Of these, upright bassist Miles Mosley is possibly the slowest burn, but after collaborations with the likes of Joni Mitchell, Kendrick Lamar, and Chris Cornell, he, like Kamasi Washington before him, is in danger of being handed the saviour-of-jazz mantle. It’s passed around many a young(ish) cat with broad shoulders and an Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I’ve long cherished south London folk singer Lisa Knapp’s Hunt the Hare - A Branch of May EP, released in a limited edition in 2012, so to have Till April Is Dead: A Garland of May come in the full bloom of May is a charm indeed. It is her third album since her 2006 debut with Wild and Undaunted, and her voice, and the discrete musical settings featuring her partner and producer Gerry Driver, as well as drummer Pete Flood and Knapp on strings, organ, keyboards and hammered dulcimer, is layered in the fabric of birdsong, clock chimes, bells and Victorian-era barrel organs, mechanical devices Read more ...
mark.kidel
Contemporary music from Mali hovers delicately (and creatively) between purist tradition and more or less successful attempts at making things more attractive to a younger and worldwide audience. Oumou Sangaré’s first five albums for the British World Circuit label stuck mostly to the raunchy Wassoulou style, characterized by pentatonic style and irresistible loping polyrhythms; but her first with No Format, who have, paradoxically, distinguished themselves with very fine acoustic albums for Ballaké Sissoko, Vincent Ségal and Kasse Mady Diabaté, launches into new territory, the great singer’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Electronic music, feedback, imaginative identification with colours and art and unique sounds is our art-from. We feel we are contributing to the new ‘total sound culture.’ This culture will take its place in the world just as the Renaissance and Picasso’s blue period has.”The September 1966 press release accompanying The Creation’s second single “Painter Man” wasn’t shy. Its front page declared “We see our music as colours – it’s purple with red flashes.” If all that weren’t enough, the quote was attributed to Creation 1 v ii, as if the bible was being quoted.Just as the band’s name Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As if listening in on the heart of a robot, it begins with a throb over which a disembodied voice sings as a classic motorik rhythm kicks in. The song, “H>A>K”, perpetually builds and then abruptly ceases. It ends with “I Wish”, where a folky melody is underpinned by rattling drum machine, insistently strummed guitar and analogue synth wash. In between, songs of secret societies, a mysterious architect and attempts to find a destination by tracking the paths of butterflies which may or may not be there.Conceptually, Modern Kosmology is a triumph. Though inspirations are not hidden – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The two main commands coming from the stage at this evening's Brighton Festival event are “Everybody jump, jump” and “Put your hands in the air and go side-to-side”. The crowd are mostly under 30 and emanate dancing energy from the moment the doors open, as DJ Molotov warms up. The set-up is basic, a DJ and some mics, but that’s as it should be for, on one level, this evening takes hip hop back to its Bronx block party origins, away from all the bling nonsense that’s taken it over. On another level, it’s a very British affair.High Focus, a Brighton record label founded in 2010, are Read more ...