New music
Katherine McLaughlin
The regal countenance of St. Vincent’s fourth self-titled solo album cover reflects the poise and confidence of Annie Clark’s otherworldly, powerful and playful music. This assured album marks her incredible progression as a unique and highly skilled artist and it brims with the kind of fearless honesty that her fans have become accustomed to.Complex compositions sit proudly alongside lyrics that scrutinise both the modern world and Clark’s personal experiences. The opening song "Rattlesnake" recalls a time when Clark threw caution to the wind, stripped naked, wandered through the desert and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Powder: Ka-Pow! An Explosive Collection 1967–68It’s an instantly familiar sound. Crescendo follows crescendo, and power chord follows power chord. For The Who, “I Can see for Miles” was the apex of this style. But this is not The Who. Instead, it is a band from California called Powder whose shelved album from 1968 was crammed with thrilling, British-influenced gems. Like Todd Rundgren's contemporaneous band The Nazz, Powder filtered a British sensibility through an American outlook.Ka-Pow! collects the surviving recordings by Powder and the band they seamlessly evolved from, The Art Read more ...
Barney Harsent
2014 has seen a fair few late lunges for the line in the race to be my best album of the year (a contest fought more for prestige and honour than hard cash in all honesty). I’m a mild-mannered sort, and hate disappointing the recording artists clearly hanging on my every word for validation, but Theo Parrish, Spectres and Craig Bratley will have to settle for commendations along with Goat, The War on Drugs, Peaking Lights and Klaus Johann Grobe this time. Jane Weaver’s The Silver Globe has taken gold – and done so with clear distance between it and the rest of the pack.Where the concept Read more ...
james.woodall
Summer was nigh. In May 1969 the Lennons bought Tittenhurst Park, an 85-acre estate in the same stockbroker belt as John’s first Beatles home, Kenwood. It needed work and a while would pass before they moved in. At EMI, John and Yoko busied themselves with their resistible third LP, The Wedding Album. Heroin intake was vigorous.There were many soi-disant Apple-Allen Klein business meetings through April and May, most of which went nowhere. One of them, however, at Olympic Studios in Barnes in south-west London (on 9 May), was overshadowed by three Beatles having, the previous day, pledged Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Morrissey went beyond parody years ago. Titles on his 10th solo album such as "Kick The Bride Down The Aisle” or “Earth is the Loneliest Planet” could easily come from a Buzzfeed spot-the-send-up list. But barge your way past this initial obstacle and World Peace Is None Of Your Business is one of the venerable pop poet’s best albums in years.It is also one of his most stylistically eclectic. A change in band personnel seems to have prompted a broadening of his musical canvas. For someone frequently accused of Little Englander tendencies there are exotic trumpet solos and flashes of flamenco Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s the subtlety of this album that gets you, stealthily, like an intoxicating vapour, until you wonder what your listening world was like before you encountered its heady, narcotic pulse. It seems a shame to get all musicological about a sound that breathes such sultry, natural life, but essentially, McFarlane fuses jazz and neo-soul. It's then filtered through her unusually broad personal and musical perspective, based on professional experience in musical theatre, pop and jazz, and a home filled with reggae.Black British women are rare in jazz; those who cover reggae songs, as she does Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The most extraordinary bunch of global musicians I met this year were the groups who were singing on the barricades during the Ukrainian Revolution on the Maidan Square, foremost among them the all-female Dakh Daughters, who describe themselves as "freak cabaret". The video below is well worth a look as they sing in front of massed ranks of police and army to an exhilarated crowd (the music comes in after five minutes): The band grab lyrics wherever they can – one of their hits “The Rose of Donbass” uses as a chorus a Shakespeare sonnet “Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud” and, Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Some say the albums that endure the longest are those that comfort us in our dark nights of the soul: LPs such as Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Joni Mitchell’s Blue. So what’s an artist to do when he’s outgrown the intensity of youth and the peaks and troughs have flattened out? Does life become less interesting? Or, necessarily, more predictable? Beck wrote Morning Phase while recovering from a back injury. More generally, though, it expresses a fine range of sentiments to meditate on as you grow older – melancholy, experience and cautious optimism.The “morning” referred to in the title is Read more ...
theartsdesk
From the clubs of Berlin to the pubs of Birmingham, via Somerset and New York, our new music writers select their most memorable gigs of 2014. Drenge, Hare & Hounds, Birmingham, FebruaryIn February, teenage drum and guitar two-piece Drenge were basking in the unexpected media glare caused by Tom Watson MP. They were also touring their self-titled debut album of high-octane rock ’n’ roll, and those curious enough to see them in a room above a pub in South Birmingham were treated to a spectacle of raw music and snotty attitude. Fiery tunes like “Gun Crazy”, “I Wanna Break You In Half” Read more ...
Tim Cumming
You’d have to go back almost 20 years, and to 1996's Spirit, to name a Willie Nelson album with more than one or two original new songs. The nine for Band of Brothers was a real cause for celebration. He may be 81, he may not fly over to perform in the UK again (I hope to be proved wrong) but he's not lost form.These new songs sound like they had to be written, and from the inside. They’re co-written with producer Buddy Cannon, and the working method was for Nelson to send Cannon demos of the songs, around which Cannon arranged a sympathetic acoustic band line–up of seasoned sessioneers – a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: I'm Just Like You – Sly's Stone Flower 1969–70Although a fixture on America’s mainstream charts since 1967’s “Dance to the Music”, Sly and the Family Stone’s August 1969 appearance at Woodstock changed things forever. After seizing the attention of a massive white audience at the festival, Sly Stone would move from the Bay Area to Los Angeles. The band then gradually fell apart. The greater success brought chaos yet also offered Stone the opportunity to stamp his personality on a new record label where he would be the house producer and writer. The appropriately named Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Finland’s album of the year, the number one, gold-selling and best-of-2014 poll-topper Pepe & Saimaa, has barely registered elsewhere. Probably not a crime but a damn shame nonetheless as the album, released in May, is undoubtedly an all-time great. Despite being entirely in Finnish, Pepe & Saimaa is crammed with beatific melodies carried by an emotive, warm voice evoking pre-falsetto Bee Gees, David Bowie, Scott Walker and Brian Wilson. The voice seamlessly meshes with music nodding to mid-Seventies Kraftwerk, similarly dated Isley Brothers and The Beach Boys. With full orchestration Read more ...