New music
Guy Oddy
The Warlocks are a psychedelic band from LA who dress not unlike the Velvet Underground in their prime and are clearly not given to star-like behaviour. They slope onto the stage at Birmingham’s Rainbow, tune up and burst straight into “Red Camera” from their 2009 album The Mirror Explodes. A heavy, dense mediation that comes on like a deep, Spacemen 3-flavoured drone, it whacks up the volume and sets the tone for the evening. It doesn’t get the audience moving around much but it certainly grabs their attention.As the track comes to an end, singer and guitarist Bobby Hecksher announces, “That Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Building Bridges - Eurovision Song Contest Vienna 2015Mind-bogglingly, Australia is a first-time entrant in Eurovision 2015. The nature of Europe may be a concern for some backwards-looking British voters in next week’s election, but the inclusion of Australia in a competition organised by the European Broadcasting Union extends the remit of being European beyond even the wildest imaginings of foolish fringe politicians. The competition may be seen on Australia’s TV screens, but is that any reason for them to perform? Apparently, it is.The booklet with the double CD of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Peter Perrett (b. 1952) is best known as the singer and songwriter of The Only Ones, a group who originally flared to brilliant life between 1976 and 1981. Born to an English policeman-turned-builder and a mother whose immediate heritage lay amid the tragedy of Austria’s 20th-century Jewry, Perrett grew up in London. Already precociously bohemian, at 16 he ran away with his girlfriend, Xenoulla “Zena” Kakoulli. She would prove to be his lifelong soulmate and partner.By the mid-Seventies the pair were making a decent living, involved in London’s cannabis underworld, and Perrett put together Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Mumford and Sons, world conquering as they are, still fall victim to various accusations. Some, for instance, loathe their blandness. Others detect a whiff of smug middle class about them. Perhaps a more interesting observation, though, is how the band takes an intimate, personal musical form – folk – and turns it into something anthemic. Well, not any more. There’s nothing folk about Wilder Mind. Not a single banjo.The anthems are fewer in number too. Like Noah and the Whale before them, the Mumfords have wholeheartedly waved goodbye to nu-folk and moved their sound Stateside. So, how Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“A lot of bands want to over-complicate their second album,” says Palma Violets bassist Chilli Jesson in the press release. “We know that we didn’t.” This is a manifesto they adhere to with results that are mixed. On the one hand, at a time when pop music is mired by utterly clinical precision, he’s right that it’s pleasing to hear music with the messiness left in. On the other, there are plenty of occasions when Danger in the Club emanates a lack of ambition.To get the negative out of the way first, the worst of it mingles the 1970s Clash at their laziest with dreadful lads’ sing-along Read more ...
Matthew Wright
San Fermin have enough brass to rock Mardi Gras and the vocal range to stretch an opera chorus, but they are, still, a pop group. The Brooklyn indie octet’s straight-through rendition of their second album Jackrabbit, released last week, inspired the Jazz Café on Monday night, their obliquely hyperactive compositions, by Yale graduate and Nico Muhly associate Ellis Ludwig-Leone, decked in the gaudy distractions of the carnival.With eight musicians, all with a relentless dance routine, on a modestly-proportioned stage, the energy is tangible. Even Ludwig-Leone, playing keys, squirms like a Read more ...
Barney Harsent
So, what I’m probably supposed to do when reviewing Django Django’s new album, Born Under Saturn, is mention the sleeper-hit success of their 2012 self-titled debut. I’m then definitely supposed to do a funny and find some suitable similes before summing up with something pithy and sage. The trouble is, I’m stuck here grinning like an idiot while thoughts flit in and out without ever finding room to land. Melodies can do that to you – stop you thinking and drag you into the moment, where meaningful reflection is all but impossible. Like being really pissed, but without the hangover. What Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Andreya Triana’s second solo album has been five years in the making, and with a title like Giants, it’s presumably intended to make an impression. As you’d expect from the time it’s spent gestating, this is a mature and nuanced release, certainly worth the wait, but it’s too diverse to pigeon-hole into an instant marketing hit. Its strengths – fine lyrics with a social conscience, a diversity of styles all executed successfully, and above all, Triana’s bronzed and supple dynamic vocals – repay repeated listening, and it takes some time for the album’s quality to sink in.You need listen Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dion: Recorded Live at the Bitter End August 1971By 1971, when he was playing the Bitter End in New York’s Greenwich Village, Dion DiMucci had already experienced the equivalent of two separate stints as a pop star. In 1961, he began a run of hits with the swaggering “Runaround Sue”. From then and into 1963 he racked up other classics such as “The Wanderer”, “Ruby Baby”, Donna the Prima Donna” and “Drip Drop”. The arrival of The Beatles in the US charts in early 1964 put paid to his run of hits. Times had changed. But in late 1968 he was back in the Top Ten with a heartfelt version of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Olivia Chaney’s reputation as a singular folk singer and songwriter has been bubbling on and off the radar for some years now. There were EPs in 2010 and 2013, and she featured on the excellent Peter Bellamy tribute, 2011’s Oak Ash and Thorn, and she has toured solo, as well as worked with Alasdair Roberts. She was part of a beautiful and impromptu vocal trio with Lisa Knapp and Nancy Wallace for the recent Bobstock celebrations for Bob Copper, and in 2013 was nominated for the Horizon Award and Best Original Song in the BBC Folk Awards, for the title track to her long-awaited debut album on Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Five songs. Five new songs is what we get. Not much on the face of it but this is still a very special occasion. Peter Perrett has resurfaced and in the basement of Rough Trade West he, with backing from his son Jamie, is performing. The place is entirely jammed, uncomfortable. There are people on the stairs listening despite not being able to see a thing. I only know the names of two songs, “I’m Yours” and the final one, “Sea Voyager”, a beautiful, elegiac ballad honouring Perrett’s wife, muse, partner-in-all since 1969, Zena, who’s also here, small and blonde.He does not play any Only Ones Read more ...
Tim Cumming
They begin with “My Door is Never” from 2007 album Reformation Post TLC, and close a little over an hour later with “Sparta FC”, from early in the century, and from a long-gone Fall line-up. In between, a flurry of blurred, brutal songs from the new and most recent albums set about pummelling a packed house at the Brixton Electric. There were toxic, thrilling elements to The Fall’s set – in particular the tight fist of vitriolic rock 'n' roll that is “Fibre Book Troll” (‘I wanna fucking Facebook troll’) and the extended highlight of both the new album and the set that is “Auto Chip 2014-2016 Read more ...