New music
Barney Harsent
The post-Christmas headlines could barely contain themselves: HMV sells one turntable per minute! UK vinyl sales set to hit two million in 2016! Tesco stocking records! Vinyl was officially back.And now Record Store Day 2016 is upon us and likely to be the biggest one since its 2007 inception. There has been much discussion about the merits of RSD, on which shops around the country will be stocking limited releases to sate the public’s newfound appetite. For some shops, it’s a boost as increased awareness, footfall and income can see them through fallow times. Buying in swathes of stock is a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The cape is not an everyday item of clothing. Worn by magicians, it brings an air of the extraordinary. It billows in the path of superheroes. The cloak of invisibility confirms the cape’s singularity. Basia Bulat was first seen in a sparkly gold cape on the sleeve of her recent Good Advice album and last night it was integral to the renewed vigour of her music and stage persona. Moved to say how hard it was play guitar with its folds fluttering, she nonetheless did not take the easy path and discard it.None of this is to say that Bulat would lack anything without the cape, but it is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was in August 1968 that Graham Nash, then still a member of The Hollies, took a cab from LAX airport in Los Angeles to Joni Mitchell's house in Laurel Canyon. He was just embarking on a love affair with Joni, but also about to blast off on a different kind of adventure with the two musicians who greeted him at her house, David Crosby and Stephen Stills.When Nash added his high vocal harmony to the other two voices as they sang a new Stills song, "You Don't Have to Cry", it was the first spark of a California soft-rock revolution. Crosby Stills and Nash, later joined by Neil Young, would Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Considering that it was recorded in North California, that she now lives in Los Angeles, that her musical co-conspirators include a member of The Red Hot Chilli Peppers and that the album’s co-producer Noah Georgeson was behind a raft of Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom albums, Cate Le Bon’s Crab Day could sound American. It does not. Her fourth album proper evokes the greatest mavericks of pre-punk British art rock: Kevin Ayers, the Brian Eno of Taking Tiger Mountain, Slapp Happy and Robert Wyatt all come to mind as its 10 songs unfold. So do the slightly later Art Bears and David Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Absolute heartbreak has been part of country & western since before Hank Williams pined that he was so lonesome he could cry, way back in the 1940s. There’s a strand of country that’s an endless paean to the cowboy’s (and cowgirl’s) wandering soul, to messy lives lived among empty bottles and broken relationships. Texan Hayes Carll falls very much within this tradition and his fifth album, from its title onwards, is a warm bath in melancholy and broken-heartedness.In truth, it gets a bit much over the whole ten songs, drifting into the realms of the maudlin but, taken in smaller doses, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The youthful old master of European jazz raps on the Doors of Perception for his latest album, Beauty & Truth, with his piano trio of drummer Eric Schafer and bassist Chris Jennings. Their subject for analysis is The Doors’ “The End” and “Riders on the Storm”, delivering distilled and deconstructed versions of the band’s music and the singer’s intent – both dark, apocalyptic Sixties tone poems of dread and release, and both led by Shafer’s superb drumming, with Jennings’s supple double bass tacking between that and Kühn’s finely fractured piano lines.Around them, he and ACT producer Siggi Read more ...
peter.quinn
Masterly improvising, outstanding compositions, a complete understanding between the musicians. On every count this was an exceptional set, as emotionally engaging as it was lovingly delivered.Working for three years in her late teens with the great Vinicius de Moraes and the singer-songwriter Toquinho, the Sao Paolo-born, New York-based pianist, vocalist and composer Eliane Elias grew up with bossa nova. So it seemed entirely appropriate that her trio, featuring Marc Johnson on bass and Mauricio Zottarelli on drums, kicked off their set with a sparkling arrangement of the Jobim/Moraes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“If we want to keep this free and democratic Europe of ours free and democratic, we must enlist ourselves, our skills and our commitment to liberty and justice. The problems we face are too great to simply say let the politicians do it. I say this as a President.” Making this declaration in his country’s capital on the opening morning of 2016’s Tallinn Music Week, Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves stressed that the power for change is in all our hands and also confirmed the all-too prevalent view that the international political class is unlikely to address, let alone solve, the world’ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Turn the clock back to early 2007. It’s not so long ago, but at this point Nils Frahm had issued just one album, Ólafur Arnalds was about to release his first, Jóhann Jóhannsson was one year into what would be two-album relationship with 4AD, and Max Richter had made two albums for 130701, the British offshoot of FatCat Records. Christian Wallumrød was performing solo, but still recording collaboratively. What would become a recognisable genre-breaching, minimalist, post-classical groundswell hadn’t yet been quite codified but it was clear something was in the air.Hauschka was introduced into Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
PJ Harvey's ninth album is one with a message. I know this because it marks the first time that my pre-release copy of an album has come with a lyric booklet, despite the fact that it is perhaps the least oblique thing that the Dorset-born songwriter has ever recorded. Inspired by a series of trips to Washington, Kosovo and Afghanistan, and partly written in full public view as part of an art installation at Somerset House in the summer of 2015, The Hope Six Demolition Project is effectively a travelogue set to music: its lyrics, a series of postcards scrawled from a taxicab window; its music Read more ...
Andrew Cartmel
Anyone who has been to the movies in the past 30 years will have heard the work of Hans Zimmer. His music is part of the very fabric of our lives, as was dramatically demonstrated last night at the packed Wembley SSE Arena when the opening notes of The Lion King were greeted with a huge roar of appreciation from the audience. Zimmer, who moved from instrument to instrument with aplomb throughout the evening, was playing guitar on this one as Lebohang Morake and Zoe Mthiyane sang rousingly and woodwind maestro Richard Harvey accompanied them, piercing and lyrical, on the penny whistle. It was Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Hawkwind are one of rock's stranger institutions. Enigmatic too – despite inventing 'space rock', and teaching Lemmy his trade, they're still essentially known just for singing "Silver Machine". Yet search within their canon and you'll find real depth. Indeed, at their best Hawkwind's cosmic musings have the sense of humanity and society worthy of some futuristic folk music. You could call them prog rock's Fairport Convention.The Machine Stops looks at the tribulations of society, via an E. M. Forster short story with a very H.G. Wells theme. The story concerns a people Read more ...