New music
theartsdesk
In the arts there is never a best of anything. There is good, great and glorious. But best? There is, however, Stop Making Sense. Talking Heads invited the director Jonathan Demme to film them in performance over three nights in December 1983 at Pantages Theater in Hollywood. The result is (arguably) the greatest concert movie ever made. And the good news, as a restored version is released on disc, is that time has not diminished its greatness, any more than it has shrunk the outsize suit David Byrne wears for “Girlfriend Is Better”, which if anything looks bigger in an era free from shoulder Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Peter Culshaw’s latest global round-up of new music and reissues features the usual spendidly earbending eclectic selection. There’s 1960s Indian lounge, 1970s Senegalese music unearthed by the ever-adventurous Analog Africa label, Arabic Jazz and a Cuban song about the dangers of lechery, not to mention hot off the press Four Tet and a couple of tracks from Lebanon’s brilliant current art-pop export Bachar Mal-Khalife. Two top Korean indie tunes are introduced by musician Jim Kim, and guest presenter Germaine-Nicol Hughes from the Asgard Agency plays some country blues and a Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's something reassuringly resistant to modernity about Jeff Lynne. In much the same way that his cast iron Brummie accent and demeanour have remained unchanged despite decades in Los Angeles, so his music remains in a late 20th century interzone – its real concerns being the songwriting of the Sixties and the huge, glossy production values of the Seventies and Eighties.And so it is here. The songs and vocal delivery are full of shameless nods to his sometime fellow Travelling Wilburys Bob Dylan (“Ain't it a Drag”) and Roy Orbison (“I'm Leaving You”), as well as to Paul McCartney (almost Read more ...
Tim Cumming
When it comes world music there are few countries bigger than Mali in terms of impact and popularity. (Cuba probably ranks a close second.) It’s from Mali that Songhoy Blues hail, one of the few major new successes in world music to emerge in the past few years. In many ways, it is a dwindling genre, where the chances of “discovering” a little-known great like Ali Farka Touré or Cesaria Evora are getting close to zero – most people, like everywhere else, don’t listen to that old stuff anymore: by and large it’s hip-hop, R&B and digital beats. The fresh and the fine-ground does still Read more ...
Travis Barker
We had an awesome producer, Jerry Finn, who was just a few years older than us. Jerry was usually wearing a Replacements T-shirt and Vans sneakers. He had worked with Green Day, Jawbreaker, and a bunch of bands on Epitaph Records, including Rancid and Pennywise. Jerry wasn’t some asshole rolling up to the studio in a Bentley - he was one of us. He could be honest with us, and we would listen to him, which is really important.These days, “producer” means “I’m going to write some songs for you.” He didn’t do that - he was more about giving us ideas and lending an extra set of ears. He’d Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For those missing the glory days of pop-dance crossover acts such as Faithless and Basement Jaxx, Free School just might be the answer. Their second album bubbles over with euphoria and catchy tunes, shaded with a multiplicity of well-chosen dancefloor styles. Their name is ill-chosen, disappearing on Google unless you write “free school band Birmingham”, but these two Midlands producers have hit a purple patch and it’s time to pay attention.There are plenty of guest vocalists although only Mute Records’ wonk-tronic act Maps, who appears on the Dirty Vegas-style pop-house throbber “Good Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The idea of being a one-man band usually has a double edge to it, the pluckiness of independence undercut by intimations of ramshackle loneliness. Dan Turnbull, performing as Kent nu-blues musician Funke and the Two Tone Baby, touring his second album Balance, expresses the dilemma well. Singing and beatboxing, while also playing harmonica, guitar, tambourine, stompbox and loop pedals, he brings a frenzied energy and multi-faceted sound to original, contemporary, blues ballads of love, awe and contemplation.His songs usually begin gently, as he builds up the material to deploy on the pedals, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes appearances can be deceptive. The frontman on stage looks as generic it gets. His scruffy beard, retro specs, baseball hat, shapeless jeans and the bulging outline of a mobile phone stuffed in his trouser pocket don’t add up to suggest that his band Tahiti Boy & the Palmtree Family are going to be anything distinctive. But the studied casualness belies what actually takes place musically. This is exceptional.The all-purpose hipster is multi-instrumentalist/singer David Sztanke (pictured below, photo © Johanna Cafaro), who has also played as a sideman with Lenny Kravitz, Iggy Pop Read more ...
Katie Colombus
A pop album drawn from a musical could be off-putting to some. Images of Glee spring to mind or a tweenypop version of Idina Menzel – both of which seem quite a departure from Sara Bareilles’ hugely popular hits "Love Song", "Gravity" or most recently, "Brave".But for her fourth studio album – a follow up to 2013’s The Blessed Unrest – Bareilles has taken tracks from the upcoming musical, Waitress, set to hit Broadway in April 2016, for which she wrote both the music and lyrics. The result is a bit of a pick ‘n’ mix: I know I will play my favourite couple of songs on repeat until I know all Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Until last night, critics had a clear view of Esperanza Spalding as the virtuosic jazz bassist and singer, whose prodigious composing, performing and bandleading made her one of a small and precious group capable of re-making serious and popular jazz. In a rare moment of triumphalism, jazz critics love nothing more than recalling the fury of Justin Bieber fans, whom Spalding beat to the Best New Artist Grammy in 2011. Best get that story out the way before we go any further.Last night, however, she redefined her career with Emily’s D+Evolution, an extraordinary, zany multi-form experimental Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Can you have too much of a good thing? I ponder this as I scroll through the 109 watermarked MP3s of Bob Dylan’s recording sessions spanning 13 January 1965 to 16 February 1966, for Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. This is the six-disc Deluxe edition I’m talking about; a collectors’ set three times the size is available for a small mortgage, in a limited edition of 5,000 copies, or you can choose the 2CD best-of set of 36 tracks, all alternate, unreleased takes (“I’ll Keep It With Mine” and “Farewell Angelina” excepted) of what many say is his greatest Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a current running through the underground club / electronic music of the 2010s that cares not a jot for progress – but neither is it retro as such. It's been called “outsider house”, which is a pretty lame name for stuff that is often extremely accessible and welcoming, and is certainly not just house music. Rather it's a kind of neo-psychedelia, a sound that plays tricks with memory and expectation, collapsing oppositions between sophistication and naiveté, between kitsch and sincerity, and between low and high fidelity in the pursuit of beautiful discombobulation. And as the none- Read more ...