New music
Jasper Rees
Far too many years ago, Roddy Frame – masquerading as Aztec Camera – took his first bow with an album of wonderfully vital pop songs. High Land, Hard Rain was jaunty with youth but somehow freighted with musical wisdom, the fruit of ingesting a smorgasbord of influences. More than three decades on, the face that stares out of the cover of his fourth solo album - his first since 2006 - wears the marks of middle age, but the thread connecting that first utterance with the voice on Seven Dials is remarkably strong.What's clear on Seven Dials, which was released in May, is that Frame has lost Read more ...
mark.kidel
Leonard Cohen, grand rabbi of poetry and the blues, turned 80 this year, and like a perfectly matured brandy, he only gets better and better. On his most recent European tour, he managed to combine an atmosphere of deep and communal spiritual devotion with consummate entertainment. Many artists cannot always make the leap between live magic and studio precision, but he has succeeded with a new album that shines in a way no other did for me in 2014.Following hot on the footsteps of the excellent Old Ideas (2012), in which the Canadian singer and songwriter trawled the abyss with a mixture of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There are, probably, two things standing in the way of Against Me! topping as many best-of lists as they deserve to this year: firstly, the January release date, which tends to lead to many fine records being abandoned for the newest and shiniest; and secondly, the tortuous route it found to release at all. Label issues, intra-band politics and the small matter of the additional attention paid to the band's songwriter and frontwoman Laura Jane Grace's first album since coming out as transgender in 2012. However, right from the thudding, drums-only beginnings of the album's opening salvo (" Read more ...
Matthew Wright
There were silly hats, and venerable, bouncy songs for all the family at the O2 last night. The traditional Madness December tour was Christmas come early for most of the audience, who sang about home, love, and the Middle East as they might do in church next week with rather less enthusiasm. The band’s original hits still hit the spot, though there was also a sense that, as with Christmas carols, the new ones mean well, but just aren’t as good.The best half-dozen of Madness’ pop-ska fusion songs are among the most distinctive pieces of pop music ever created. They’re even better live, Read more ...
peter.quinn
Pianist Jason Moran's Grammy-nominated tribute to the legendary pianist, singer and composer, Fats Waller, effortlessly captures the joyousness and melodic beauty of the Harlem stride master's music. Joining Moran is vocalist Meshell Ndegeocello, and from the über-slow jam of “Ain't Nobody's Business” to the utterly seductive grooves of “The Joint Is Jumpin” and “Honeysuckle Rose”, the kind of galvanic presence that she brings to the project takes the material to entirely new emotional places. There are coruscating instrumentals, too, including a barnstorming solo spot for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Millions Like Us - The Story of the Mod Revival 1977–1989A “testosterone-fuelled youth movement” is how the opening paragraph of the introductory essay of this box set tags the mod revival. Aficionados of the “clean-cut, neatly dressed younger sibling of punk” were members of “an often violently defined tribe”. Concerts are described as battlegrounds: “punches were thrown” at “live appearances by The Chords.” In the individual commentaries on the 100 tracks collected, there is talk of “boot boys in parkas” and, for the band Small Hours, “live appearances sometimes Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jack White (the former John Anthony Gillis) was born in Detroit and now lives in Nashville, a geographical progression you can hear in his music. He loves rude, dirty rock'n'roll but also has a fine instinct for country music, both of which tendencies are splurged all over this consistently inspired album (his second solo venture and the follow-up to 2012's Blunderbuss). You won't hear any country music played sweeter than "Entitlement" (not that the lyric's particularly sweet, mind), yet White can also create a rockin' wall of chaos like "Three Women", which sounds like Jerry Lee Lewis and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
We have been told for years by the media, the record industry and “taste-makers” everywhere that popular music is resolutely a young person’s game. Carefree youth is what it’s all about and any sign of ageing, maturity or artistry and most musicians will be shown the door and put out to pasture unless they are revisiting past glories. In 2014, Swans put paid to this myth by releasing To Be Kind, the most impressive album of their 32 year (on-off) existence under the direction of Michael Gira – the band’s 60-year-old vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and band leader.To Be Kind is a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The year 2014 has been dominated by this woman's arse. The furore surrounding the video for Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" put the rest of the bewigged New York hip hop superstar's career in the shade. Her steamy twerk-fest and rejig of Sir Mix-A-Lot's 1991 mega-hit "Baby's Got Back" ("I like big butts and I cannot lie...") opened up internet-breaking levels of debate. Did she represent modern womankind, strong and in charge of her sexuality, pushing the boundaries for the Afro-American body-shape and fighting air-brushed anorexic celeb culture? Or was it all a load of porno dodginess? I'd veer Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Have you been to a record shop lately? Now that our honeymoon with virtual music is revealed as completely lacking romance, record shops are thriving again. And it’s not CDs these shoppers are after. Those have been squeezed off into a far corner stocking only immediately sellable fare such as The Beatles, The Smiths, Led Zep, and early Oasis. No, the rest of the shop has been taken over by hoards, layers, tranches of alphabetized 12” vinyl, ordered by genre. Whether it’s regarded as whacky retro chic or simply a return to the “good old days”, vinyl boom times are here.For many music lovers, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Pity everyone who's already published their albums of the year lists. Like Beyonce in 2013, D'Angelo has just thrown the most humungous spanner in the works, and changed the year's musical landscape in a single day. Pity, too, everyone else who's released a record even vaguely in the vicinity of hip hop / soul / R&B today, as they might as well be shouting in a vacuum (especially poor Tenessee rapper Starlito who managed to drop an album on the same day as Jay-Z's Magna Carter Holy Grail last year, and now has to deal with this).Yes, this was just released today, and yes, it is an album Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
2014 has been a juicy year for albums which places Nick Mulvey’s solo debut on an especially high pedestal. A straightforward review can be found elsewhere on theartsdesk, when I first thrilled to his music earlier in the year. In the meantime, those other contenders deserve a mention, the ones that came closest to unseating Mulvey during prolonged listening sessions here at Gomez Mansions.The new one from Canadian DJ-producer Richie Hawtin’s lysergic techno persona Plastikman has done serious time on the late night system. Composed for and recorded live at an event in New York’s Guggenheim Read more ...