New music
Tim Cumming
Not many concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall culminate in a string of beautiful African women sashaying down the aisles to the stage to press fivers and tenners upon the still-crooning singer. After taking their hands in turn, as if in benediction, Kassy Made Diabate turned and dropped the fistful of notes at the feet of his ngoni player. Then, after the encore, the final bows, the raising of the house lights, the ngoni player got up with his instrument and left the money there behind him. Enough for a very good night out. Perhaps the roadies were going to get lucky.Kasse Mady Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Complaining about pop music sounding manufactured is something that, in these postmodern monoculture days, “serious” music fans are all supposed to be past by now. Certainly, since its US release last month, those who are paid to know better have been practically frothing at the mouth over the long-awaited third album by a third-placed 2007 Canadian Pop Idol contestant whose irresistible “Call Me Maybe” was the soundtrack to your summer a few years back. But while E•MO•TION crackles and fizzes in places with moments of pure pop joy, there are big chunks of this record that sound as though Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Listen to the latest edition of Peter Culshaw’s peripatetic round-up of some recent hot global music releases, including some re-releases of old classics and yet-to-be unleashed tracks including a fair chunk from South America. For your listening pleasure, there are some delicious Afro-Colombian grooves, psychedelic cumbia, new Peruvian sounds and up-and-coming Brazilian artists plus the odd side trip with some Arabic Rock, Welsh-Indian fusion and South Asian violin virtuosity.. Listen to the show here Tracklisting:Temple Of Light “The Rose and the Fire are One”Amara Touré Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Africa Utopia at the Southbank Centre is back for its third year with a raft of concerts and events, and for Friday night Senegal's Orchestra Baobab returned to the UK for the first time in three years, one of the great names of the post-independence African renaissance. They were joined by a young French-Cameroonian artist, Blick Bassy (pictured below), who was coming to London for the first time with his debut album Ako.He was here with his trio of cellist Clement Petit and trombonist Fidel Fourneyron, both superb, malleable players, and Bassy on banjo, singing songs inspired by Skip James Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Growing up is a pain in the arse. Actually that’s not true, my arse has remained relatively unaffected by advancing years. In the last few months, however, I’ve managed to put my back out getting up off the sofa and inexplicably hurt my knee while trying to stand after retying a shoelace. I’ve also developed an acute fear of cholesterol, without really understanding what it is.On the basis of the two tracks I’d already heard on Rattle That Lock, I’d assumed that David Gilmour had managed to avoid such bodily rebellion and was dancing his way through the days. Both the title track and single “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The oft-used phrase “Hackney drum & bass band Rudimental” is misleading. It sets the listener off on the wrong foot. Anyone up for a “Hackney drum and bass band” would likely want something with serious bite - big, bad and boomin’. I know I would. This is not what Rudimental are, as anyone who’s heard their chart-topping hits and debut album will attest. Their second album journeys even further away from such a description.In Autumn 2011 a shrewd trio of young Hackney DJ-musicians approached the successful producer Amir Amor, a man who already owned a Hoxton production house and had Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I was prepared to be fondly underwhelmed by Keith Richards' first album in 23 years: 15 loose-limbed tracks laid down with drummer Steve Jordan from 2011 on, with studio guests and old Xpensive Wino friends casually sitting in on keys, brass, strings, vocals. There's Bobby Keys with his last recorded blows of brass on “Blues in the Morning” and “Amnesia”; Norah Jones breathing sweetly over “Illusion”; Larry Campbell on fiddle and pedal steel on "Just a Gift" and "Robbed Blind".But mainly it's Keith, handling all the guitars and a fair amount of piano, carrying lovelorn ballads and songs of Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Jazz pianist Bill Evans was a titanic figure in jazz performance until addiction and death took him in 1980, his blend of strength and sensitivity unparalleled, while his collaborations with Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, among others, left epochal records. Yet Evans is covered much less frequently than his contemporaries, so this release by London jazz pianist Bruno Heinen and Danish guitarist Kristian Borring is a timely reminder of what we’ve been missing.Heinen is best known for the intriguing album Tierkreis, which re-worked a 1974 piece of the same name written for 12 music boxes by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: The London American Label Year by Year – 1966The arguments for 1966 as the year popular music irrevocably changed are sound. Rock began emerging from pop as its serious offspring. Earnest expression, as opposed to fluffiness or accessibility, would become the objective for many. With the 1967 release of Sgt Pepper’s, the album was set in stone as a different medium to the single. The foundations were laid when The Beatles began recording “Strawberry Fields Forever” in November 1966.A chaotic, kaleidoscopic 1966 single like The Yarbirds’s “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Coming to Foals without the baggage – without knowing, for example, that they’re a British guitar band of mid-Noughties vintage – is a disconcerting experience, not least where fourth album What Went Down is concerned. Opening with a huge, heavy title track that – at least by its mid-section – appears to owe a heavy, screaming debt to the band’s recent association with Metallica, by its end the album checks off anthemic indie rock, beats-driven electronic experimentation and the sort of widescreen, cinematic sound beloved of contemporaries from the other side of the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It’s nearly 40 years since bassist Steve Harris formed Iron Maiden and much has changed since then. Singer Bruce Dickinson has learned to fence, fly and kick cancer in the cock, and the band have continued to release albums – albums which, though rarely hitting the high points of their Eighties heyday, have often been pretty decent and admirably ambitious in scope.Speaking of ambition, Book of Souls, their latest, is comprised of 11 tracks and clocks in at an impressive 92 minutes. Now that’s a long album, but consider that, within those 11 tracks, there are three that go over 10 minutes and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
As someone who has always been completely indifferent to the retro New Wave stylings of The Libertines, I can’t say that I greeted the news of their reformation with anything more than a shrug of the shoulders. Sure, they had released a few toe-tappers around the turn of the century, but to view Pete Doherty and Carl Barât’s mob as culturally significant for their music seemed absurd. So I was somewhat surprised to experience all my prior prejudices go up in smoke on hearing Anthems For Doomed Youth, the band’s third album and first in over a decade.Whereas 2002’s Up The Bracket and their Read more ...