New music
Kieron Tyler
Lewis: L'AmourImagine a very subdued Antony Hegarty whispering over the spookiest moments of Angelo Badalamenti’s music for Twin Peaks. Or conjure up a marriage of Arthur Russell’s shimmering World of Echo and John Martyn at his most intimate, but shorn of all but the most necessary instrumentation. To say that L’Amour, the only album by Lewis, is arresting underplays it. This is one of the most direct and affecting series of songs ever captured in a studio. Yet until a few years ago it was unknown and, even then, only available as a dodgy download with added colour from the scratches Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ostensibly folk, Emma Tricca’s second album Relic sounds more like a devotional song cycle heard in a church than on a club or festival stage. The massed chorale of Tricca’s voice which opens “Sunday Reverie”, the spectral organ of “Golden Chimes” and the lyrics of “Take me Away”, which yearn of being transported to somewhere she has never been where the trees are aging, all invoke the search for the spiritual.Initially pegged as a Greenwich Village-fascinated folkie inspired by encounters with John Renbourn and Bob Dylan's early champion Odetta, Tricca's voice is as singular and as Read more ...
Matthew Wright
DJ, broadcaster and all-round musical pioneer Gilles Peterson is one of the most influential figures in contemporary music. In a career that has grown from a DIY pirate station to running a succession of record labels, global DJing appearances and his own Worldwide Awards, he’s become famous for his commitment to the most unexpected combinations of new sounds and genres, drawn from restless collaborations worldwide. His support for his own kind of jazz has been a consistent feature of his career, but he’s certainly not the purist of beard-stroking jazz folklore. His interest in Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Maybe they really just don’t make ‘em like they used to. The latest in 2014’s prestigious roll-call of bus-pass rockers is Judas Priest - back minus one original guitarist (relative youngster Richie Faulkner replaces K.K. Dowling). Redeemer of Souls may have been recorded by a bunch of guys mainly in their sixties but the LP feels almost as preposterous, exhilarating and entertaining as anything they’ve ever done. It’s also a real contender for metal album of the year.Comparisons will inevitably be made with Sabbath’s recent 13. Both are comebacks of sorts and both bands are synonymous with Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Minstrel of Misery or the Poet Laureate of Bedsitland: Morrissey has been musical marmite since he first entered the public consciousness with The Smiths’ debut single, “Hand in Glove”, over thirty years ago. World Peace Is None Of Your Business may be a return to form, but it is unlikely to change his public image. No doubt he will be fine with that.The lyrics, predictably enough, are from the Morrissey that we have all come to recognise and the music is still mostly dominated by the white boy, indie sound that he has long made his own – albeit with occasional trumpet and acoustic guitar Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Right from their lo-fi beginnings, Glasgow’s Honeyblood have always been able to deliver the perfect kiss-off. It’s why it’s a relief to see that the duo’s self-titled debut album retains a fair slice of that crackle and hiss, Stina Tweeddale’s candy-coated vocals still providing a deceptive delivery method for her often venomous lyrics.It’s not always big and it’s certainly not always clever - new single “Super Rat”, for example, combines three minutes of likening a cheating ex-boyfriend to the titular rodent with a playground chant of “scumbag, sleaze, slimeball, grease” - but Honeyblood Read more ...
joe.muggs
As dance music once more sweeps the mainstream, we're returned to the situation of the 1990s where singer and song can seem to become a little detached. Parades of “featured vocalists” deliver refrains for the producer teams who are queueing up to repeat the success of Route 94, Clean Bandit, Duke Dumont and above all Disclosure. And as the field gets more crowded, so the requirements for the singers to sit back, know their place and deliver the simplest hooks become more pressing.Some new generation singers do manage to step into the spotlight of course. Rita Ora parlayed her big hit with DJ Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This year’s edition of the Gnawa Festival in the medina of the beautiful coastal town of Essaouira featured two spectacular fusions – between Bessekou Kouyate with Hamid El Kasri on the closing Sunday night, and on Saturday night – in the early hours of Sunday morning, in fact, on the main stage at Moulay Hassan – bassist, band leader and Miles Davis alumni Marcus Miller with Mustapha Bakbou, forging a dense, deeply rhythmic fusion to match the pounding Atlantic ocean on one side, and the long, curving bay on the other (with its own late-night beach stage in the distance).Earlier in the day, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Sia Tolno was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, had a violent father, was forced to leave the country due to the civil war and ended up in the harsh world of Conakry nightclubs. Life was no bed of roses, in other words. The inspiring thing about this album is how she now stands loud and proud in the tradition of powerful African women like Angelique Kidjo and Miriam Makeba. This, her fourth and most ambitious album is her take on Afro-beat. Her collaborator is Tony Allen, Fela Kuti’s legendary drummer and co-architect of Afro-beat 40-plus years on from the original sound when Allen was the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: CSNY 1974Considering that their 1974 tour was the world’s first series of dates limited to outdoor stadia since the Beatles in 1966, it’s appropriate the long-gestating collection chronicling Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s mammoth jaunt is an all-encompassing three-CD box set which also includes a DVD and a hefty, copiously illustrated booklet with a definitive in-depth essay on the tour.Although previously bootlegged and not hard to find, the dates did not – curiously, since it was a landmark tour designed to rake in cash – spawn a live album Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If you're not familiar with Jon Allen, here's a few facts: he possesses a fine gravelly voice, and nimble fingers. More than anything, though, Allen has an uncanny knack for penning a good tune. He learnt his craft while sequestered up in a woodland shack. Actually no, that’s Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. The truth is Allen’s back-story is a little prosaic by today’s standards – he studied song-writing at a performing arts college in Liverpool. Still, what he lacks in romance he makes up for with sweat and perseverance. In keeping with its cover, Deep River, Allen's third LP, mainly flows at Read more ...
Matthew Wright
If, like Wynton Marsalis, you’re a gatekeeper of the jazz tradition, there’s little you’ll defend more staunchly than the Blue Note back catalogue. With the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, in London on a short tour, he presented a glossy and intriguing selection of Blue Note repertoire before an ecstatic audience in last night’s Barbican concert. Technically, this was a tour de force. Where the components of some big bands lose definition and melt into a raucous fudge, JALC boasted talon-sharp brass bite, regal articulation, and a deeply golden lustre. Marsalis’ traditionalism is well Read more ...