New music
Matthew Wright
Three releases into their career as a duo, the Sydney-based Stone siblings have named an album after themselves. Whether the muse simply couldn’t supply an alternative (several of the tracks, particularly “Main Street” and “Heart Beats Slow” might have communicated more) or new producer Rick Rubin was aiming at a mini relaunch after the pair supposedly split and embarked on solo careers, has not been disclosed.Musically, we’re in the middle of the road, with American folk going one way, rock the other, and the Stones are on the small island between lanes, waiting for the little green man. Read more ...
joe.muggs
Due to summer festival mayhem and a technical glitch or two, June's show is here slightly belatedly - but it's more than worth waiting for as it's an absolute beast of a two-hour spectacular.Peter and Joe are culturally globetrotting as ever, and bring you everything from Philadelphia space-travellers to Shakespeare-repurposing Ukrainian revolutionary cabaret troupes; dreams of Fife to dinner with one of the USA's most important composers; Finnish supermarket-themed indie-rock to ambient Mexican grime. Tune in, turn on and bug out... The Arts Desk 05/06/14 by Meattransmission on Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Volume X is the tenth album by American post-rock originators Trans Am – which could, quite reasonably, encourage listeners to assume that there is nothing new here. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as the band push themselves to reinvent their approach not just for the album as a whole but as each new track unfolds. Despite taking on by turns the likes of industrial trance, hardcore punk thrash, trippy motorik sounds and prog-folk though, Volume X never strays too far from the dancefloor – albeit in a parallel world where lowest common denominator, EDM, is given the short shrift Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not quite true to say no one would have heard of JJ Cale without Eric Clapton. Clapton’s cover of “After Midnight”, released in 1970 as the first single on his debut solo album, put Cale on the map as a songwriter and paved for his own inimitable recording career. But Clapton didn’t actually record “Cocaine” until Slowhand in 1977. In between Lynyrd Skynyrd slipped in with their account of “Call Me the Breeze”, the song which lends its name to this Clapton-led tribute a year on from Cale’s death.Cale was a reticent inspiration to more than Clapton. The major singer-songwriters of a Read more ...
Jonathan Sheridan Jones
After a manic B-road wriggle to avoid traffic that was at a standstill I arrived in glorious sunshine, gazing benignly down on rolling green English fields, complimented by a lake and river. Secret Garden is undoubtedly one of the best settings for a festival I have ever seen. Within its boundaries for four days, 24 hour party people meet in a bubble of Bohemia found, surprisingly, just the other side of Huntingdon. Who’d have thought it?There is an eccentric mix of entertainment, with every taste catered for, much of the action concentrated around a grass bank walkway that starts at The Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
If I had to pick the highlight of this sun-drenched WOMAD it would have to be the fresh, emotionally charged set of Ukrainian band Dakha Brakha. I can’t recall seeing such a unanimously positive response for a relatively unknown band at the Festival. It wasn’t as if the music was obviously crowd-friendly, and parts were quite challenging, mixing soulfully sung Ukrainian folk tunes with other influences – Nigerian drumming, Bulgarian singing and Japanese koto.They call it “ethno-chaos”. As an untypical folk band, their jaunty stovepipe hats are not traditional but do give them an instant Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Context is everything. It’s the difference between that “lady without a baby” line that’s got everybody talking delivered straight up, and the knowing smile and cross-dressing Hollywood actresses that come with it in the song’s accompanying video. It’s why Jenny Lewis, child starlet turned indie rock frontwoman turned accomplished alt-country singer-songwriter, is that rare artist who has made not only the best album for herself at every stage of her career, but also the one that her fans needed to hear.Depending on your reading of “Just One of the Guys”, it’s a song about confounding Read more ...
mark.hudson
Remember when festivals were only about what they were ostensibly about? When, say, Reading offered nothing beyond hard rock bar disgusting toilets, overpriced hamburgers and the prospect of a punch-up. When literary festivals dealt only in, well, literature. Nowadays, the average music festival offers all the amenities of a small city, not just music, but shopping, comedy, ballet and every form of spiritual and bodily therapy. But even in these times of festival as free-form lifestyle experience Port Eliot is something else.Arriving at the festival site, in the grounds of a neo-gothic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A theatrical pop song-cycle of musical postcards from the hotspots of memory from a semi-immortal polysexual sensualist’s life” is how the fourth solo album from Erasure's Andy Bell describes itself. The story and album begin with “Freshly Buggered”, where Torsten, born 1906, arrives at school to tell all that he is gay. “He had found a love so real, so pure” declare the lyrics.The extraordinary Torsten the Bareback Saint can't fail to provoke, raise a smile and carry anyone along with its sheer verve. Torsten’s itinerant life is evoked in 22 songs portraying encounters, frustration, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Tonight, in the Faroe Islands, we’re going to find the greatest dancer.” It’s not an exhortation which often rings out. It could even be a first time The Faroes have been invited to demonstrate their disco prowess. Sister Sledge are on stage and about to launch into their 1979 Chic-produced world-wide smash “He’s the Greatest Dancer”.This, though, is 2014 and the Sledge sisters are playing G! Festival, the Faroes’ annual celebration of their own culture and popular music. The other Nordic countries are here too – bands from Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden are playing.But G! is about the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Loudon Wainwright III is the closest the Americana tradition gets to a stand-up comedian. It’s there in the punctilious insistence on his place in the dynasty (a dynasty which has spawned a couple of singer-songwriters of a less humorous bent). One of the gags in Wainwright’s 25th studio album in a recording career that began in 1970 is the indignity of old age, and naturally he tells it well: “Brand New Dance” is a hymn to the failing body (“Here comes the hard part here’s the bad news/You go to bend over and put on your shoes”). The observational wit is also on the prowl for life’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Troubadours - Folk and the Roots of American Music Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4This is one of the most important reissues of the year. As the year ends, it may become the most important. Troubadours - Folk and the Roots of American Music is a set of four, individual three-CD sets charting the evolution of the American folk-based singer-songwriter style from its roots and influences to when it became a default mode of expression in the mid-Sixties and later.All-encompassing are words underselling Troubadours. Everything which should be, and everyone who needs to be, is here Read more ...