New music
Guy Oddy
Brighton’s guitar pop outfit, the Kooks have been churning out largely pleasant but fairly bland songs since their 2006 debut Inside In/Inside Out. Recent album Listen, however, has suggested that things might be changing. Less evident, but not entirely banished, are the unremarkable strum-alongs, with a rawer and funkier groove edging its way into a few of their tunes with some success. Similarly gone is the poodle hair and clothes that made them look like the Verve’s younger, more clean-cut cousins. When the band bounce onto the stage at Birmingham’s O2 Academy, they look like they’ve just Read more ...
mark.kidel
Antony Hegarty has one of those voices that’s poised on the edge of tears. With a singing style at times reminiscent of the great Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli, who broke a thousand hearts in the 1930s, he knows how to draw deeply from his most vulnerable self, gently but firmly taking his audience to the same fragile inner spaces.Explorations of androgyny in popular music have often made possible a form of creativity that rides a knife-edge. Fuelled by transgender freedom, Antony Hegarty plunges resolutely into the cloud of undoing, a place where courageous speaking from the heart can assume Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground Super Deluxe EditionMGM, The Velvet Underground’s label, didn’t have a clue how to promote the band’s third album. The press kit accompanying its March 1969 release described drummer Maureen Tucker as “not your typical virgin. She looks like a red-headed music hall tart and pounds the drums with the force of a weight lifter. A female Brendan Behan.” Lou Reed was said to have “a face that arouses interest but gives no satisfaction.”So it was no suprise that the album indeed became a poor seller and aroused little mainstream interest, which Read more ...
peter.quinn
Is it just me, or do Guy Barker's orchestral charts for Jazz Voice get more refined, more nuanced, more richly detailed every year? Effectively becoming earworm central last night, the Barbican resounded with tintinnabulating glockenspiels, delicately plucked harp strings, punchy horn charts and luxuriant strings, as Barker sprinkled his arranging magic over the customary epoch-spanning celebration of anniversaries, birthdays and milestones stretching back from 2014.Grounded by the fabulous rhythm section of pianist Dave Newton, bassist Chris Hill, drummer Ralph Salmins and the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you glanced too hastily at the sleeve you might think Bryan Ferry had made another album called Avalon, that epitome of the sleek autumnal heyday of Roxy Music. But no. Avonmore, though it may sound like a single malt whisky, is named after Ferry's studio complex in West London, not far from Olympia which gave him the title of a previous album in 2010.Avonmore is a worthy addition to the string of solo albums (the self-written ones, rather than his parallel stream of covers discs or the peculiar Twenties throwback The Jazz Age) which Ferry has made since the Eighties, with 1985's Boys and Read more ...
theartsdesk
Peter and Joe are back on MeatTransmission, and as ever their selection goes "Beyond Global" with quite a few voyages out of the world into territories cosmic, ambient and generally out there - stopping in Bamako, Mali, Fukushima, Rio, Jerusalem, Bucharest, Moscow, Lewisham and Avalon along the way for good measure. Expect surprises and brand new sounds at every step. The Arts Desk 02/10/14 by Meattransmission on Mixcloud Tracklist:Gong – I See YouCaribou – Back HomeHassell – Delta Rain DreamRodion GA – ContrastBonobo – DinosaurNuma crew – AromaSchneider TM – Be Ki Don (Cockpit Dub Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Even before Kate Tempest appears, it’s clear this isn’t going to be an evening of slam poetry jamming. Her band walk on, three guys who attack a line-up of electronic kit with vigour, one wielding drumsticks, alongside Anth Clarke, a striking black female MC, who looks like a 2007 nu-raver in baseball cap, white sunglasses and a crop top. They whip up a hammering electro racket before cutting out abruptly when Tempest walks on, all smiles, flowing blonde locks and a low-key black T-shirt. She breaks into “Marshall Law” from her Mercury Music Prize-nominated album Everybody Down. “Everywhere Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This October lo-fi, fuzzy VHS-style footage of Kylie Minogue in a ripped tee-shirt swaying on a mattress in a messy loft apartment singing Flight Facilities’ breakthrough song, “Crave You”, popped up in internet-land. It was an unexpected move that successfully amped up expectations for the Australian duo’s debut album. Kylie’s acapella appears on the album, uncredited, as well as the original, a smooth, sleepy, longing, slothful love song and lazy dance throb which first appeared in 2010. It made clubland sit up and pay attention. If this album had swiftly followed, ahead of the deep house Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
If a band gets up and says “We are only going to be playing songs from our new album, not actually released here yet” normally most audiences would groan mightily. But somehow Susheela Raman has educated her audience to expect the unexpected. Her somewhat wayward musical path has included Indo-jazz, rock covers, Tamil voodoo music and introspective songs. It has not been one that a manager or record company would have recommended. They tend to like more of the same.Susheela and her band did all the songs from the new album The Queen Between, only officially released in France I believe so far Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In the end, I had to disable every auto-correction feature in my word processing package to complete the sentence. Wiggly red lines and pop-up boxes were swarming all over the words “philosophy” and “Cheryl”. But eventually the machine understood: Cheryl’s fourth album has a philosophy. Not only that, but it also has a philosopher (Alan Watts) intoning worthily on the opening track about the meaning of life, with Cheryl first speaking, then (on subsequent tracks) singing her response.What she says is perfectly sensible at the level, perhaps, of a lifestyle column in a glossy magazine, though Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Jazz. Is there any other term in contemporary culture so widely recognised, yet so difficult to define? Now in its 22nd year, the London Jazz Festival offers an annual global snapshot of the condition of this most disputed of music form, with the usual big names, but more excitingly, many new, young ones, which is what I have focused on here: acts indicative of the scene today.Wherever you have a tradition, there’s always a temptation to turn it into a dogma, but one of the delights of jazz is the speed of its evolution, morphing before your eyes and ears into a new shape and sound. Surely Read more ...
Guy Oddy
When TV On The Radio released their breakthrough album, Dear Science in 2008, they were hailed in some quarters as saviours of indie music through a modest injection of intellectualism and an eye for throwing the unexpected into the mix. Six years on and three years since Nine Types Of Light, it all feels like we’ve been here before.Recent single, “Happy Idiot” is pure homage to New Order and is catchy and danceable without slipping into daft clichés. Elsewhere Tunde Adebimpe, David Sitek and their merry men show off their 80s fetish with hints of Echo and the Bunnymen on “Could You” and Read more ...