New music
Russ Coffey
From David Attenborough’s spoken introduction to the blonde, robed backing singers, Biophilia Live sees Björk in full experimental flow. Sometimes the film seems almost as if documenting the ceremonial workings of a science-based cult rather than covering an avant-garde pop show. Musically it is reverent, the atmosphere is cerebral, and, above all, Björk’s persona is shamanistic.Biophilia (literally love of nature) was released in 2011 as a conceptual, multiplatform project. In addition to the CD the diminutive singer oversaw a series of interactive educational IPad apps. In Iceland the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As vaporous as the haze on its cover, the sound of Kiasmos resonates like clouds sweeping across low mountain peaks, intermittently breaking into a storm or opening to reveal wan sunlight. Although firmly within the boundaries of electronica, the self-titled debut instrumental album by Kiasmos still beats with an organic heart.There are touches of a Balearic pulse on “Looped”, a pattering glitchiness on “Lit” and even a hard house beat opening and punctuating the acid-esque “Swayed”. But live drums, grand piano, viola, violin and cello temper the wash of electronics and softly throbbing Read more ...
Guy Oddy
From the sonic vantage point of the Ting Tings’ new album, Katie White and Jules De Martino’s explosive appearance in 2008 with hit single “That’s Not My Name”, with its lively mix of indie guitars, electronics and bolshy vocals, seems a long time ago. The dominant sound of Super Critical is emphatically funk, disco and chart pop.The title track is a lively, Prince-like groove with brass embellishments, a funky bass and even the Purple One’s trademarked high-pitched backing vocals. “Green Poison” is a mash-up of Prince-like funk pop and the riff from Stevie Wonder’s “Superstitous”. “Daughter Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Since part of every star’s make-up and appeal is their backstory, can we ignore how unremittingly dull Jessie J’s has been? She cut her teen teeth on a TV talent show, left the Brit School (pop star university) the same year as yawn-inducing Leona Lewis, apprenticed as a Sony songwriter, creating ditties for the odious Chris Brown, then “graduated” to official pop stardom. What a yawn! Sounds like a CV, like a proper job, all good, honest hard work and very boring for it. And that first album, with the perennially irritating “Price Tag”. God alive, that was annoying. So listening to her third Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If you’ve ever found the idea of “cock rock” to be unnecessarily gendered, then the debut album from Ex Hex – an all-female trio who, between them, have created the best 35 minutes of ballsy rock 'n' roll I’ve heard since Sleater-Kinney’s “The Fox” – is for you. If you haven’t, and you’re just looking for something new to listen to that’s uncomplicated and up-front that will blow the cobwebs out from between your ears, then Ex Hex is also for you. And if you’ve been struggling to find a record that would match the giddy girl-rock high you got the first time you listened to Wild Flag’s first Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Bevis Frond: MiasmaMiasma wasn’t meant to have an afterlife. The Bevis Frond’s debut album wasn’t even by a band. Its creator, Nick Saloman, wrote all the songs, played every instrument and recorded it in a Walthamstow bedroom on a 4-track system which used cassette tapes. Saloman pressed the album in 1987 and had few expectations beyond, as he says in the liner notes included with this reissue, “giving it to friends and family and sticking the rest [of the copies] up in the attic forever.”Today, The Bevis Frond are still a going concern and a Saloman-fronted band as such. Their Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Towards the end of her set Caro Emerald performs “History Repeating”, a hit song from 1997 that revived Shirley Bassey’s cool quota when she sang it with successful big beat duo, the Propellerheads. It’s perfect for Emerald, just the right ratio of hip electronic touches and classic showbiz pizzazz. This is where she lives, musically, dipped in swing-era vintage, but lathered in modernist sonic frolics. It’s a shame the same cannot be said for public perceptions of what she does, as is born out by her Brighton audience. Their response for at least two thirds of the hour-and-three-quarters set Read more ...
Guy Oddy
No Romeo is the debut album by Nottingham-born, singer-songwriter Indiana. If this suggests acoustic guitars and warbling on in a vaguely folkie way, it is misleading. For while Indiana sings throughout, her musical accompaniment is electronica. Electronica that has no truck with 21st century hip hop beats or post-dubstep grooves, but often reaches back into the 90s for inspiration.“Never Born” sees Indiana rain curses on some poor unfortunate to a tune that is initially reminiscent of veteran trip-hoppers Lamb, before it whacks up the volume to a chant of “I will rise up!” “Solo Dancing”, a Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Bebel Gilberto seemed very tentative when she first appeared onstage; dressed in semi-Goth black, she kept saying how nervous she was. “Calm down, Bebel. It’s only the Barbican,” she muttered and we did get a sense of the terror and exhilaration of performing live to a big crowd. Her shambolic approach is in some ways, though, preferable to some slick operators who have their stage patter timed to the second. There’s a problem with a wire, she goes off-stage. Then she can’t work the mic stand and tells the stage hand to get her a drink. It’s all a bit of tightrope act, and there’s a sense of Read more ...
peter.quinn
Since self-releasing his debut album Heard It All Before in 1999, Jamie Cullum has gone on to become the UK's biggest selling jazz artist of all time. Since April 2010, he has also presented a weekly jazz show on BBC Radio 2, for which he won a Sony Gold award this year.Following the pop stylings of Momentum, Cullum's seventh studio album, Interlude, sees him return to the jazz repertoire. Available in both standard and deluxe versions, the latter includes a DVD of Cullum's performance at Jazz à Vienne plus an exclusive photo booklet containing tour and studio pictures, for which Cullum Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“Wildern” means “poaching” in German. That’s as in pheasant, rather than egg. On this album, German jazz singer Tobias Christl goes poaching (foraging might be more accurate) for iconic rock songs, which he adapts for his jazz quintet. Retaining on some level the basic emotional character of the song, he otherwise manipulates freely, to the point where in a couple of cases it’s not obvious which song he started with. We end up with familiar melodies made radically unfamiliar, with saxophone improvisation, eruptions of krautrock, distorted vocals and stretched rhythm turning familiar songs Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“Were we leaving Rio, or were we in New York?” Stacey Kent sings in “The Changing Lights”, the title song of her latest album, before moving on seamlessly to “Les Invalides, or Trafalgar Square”. The prosperous, wistful ennui that some of her recorded songs exude, propelled by her impeccable enunciation and glistening tone, is cosmopolitan with a slightly laminated, departure-lounge sameness. It can feel a little bit like a global franchise in polite enervation. The lyrics, by her regular collaborator, the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, are in fact leagues away in subtlety from the rhythmical Read more ...