New music
Matthew Wright
New Orleans. New York. Kansas City. Chicago. These are the places where the soul of jazz breathes free. In London, you’d head to Soho. Dalston, or Camden; none of these places have a blade of grass to share between them. Jazz must be one of the most determinedly urban genres of music. Even rap these days has flirted with country music. (Look up Spearhead’s entertaining “Wayfaring Stranger” if you don’t believe me.)So when I heard about an Austrian festival subtitled “Jazz am Bauernhof”, which literally means jazz on the farm, or jazz in the farmyard, the very idea of reconciling this musical Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Lana Del Rey can be a polarising figure among music lovers. This seems to be largely due to media claims of “inauthenticity”, whatever that means these days. This viewpoint, of course, totally ignores that she has produced plenty of great tunes from breakthrough single “Video Games” onwards.Ultraviolence does take more than a slight stylistic lead from Del Rey’s previous album, 2012’s Born to Die. The cigarette-husky voice still characterises her singing, which is very much to the fore at all times. Her lyrics will ensure that she’s unlikely to be covered by Taylor Swift any time soon, though Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dead Moon: In the Graveyard, Unknown Passage, DefianceAfter a few notes of barbed-wire, bent-string guitar, a descending riff kicks in. It’s a relative of the uptempo version of “Hey Joe”. The voice starts. It’s high-pitched, as if Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant had only Love’s Arthur Lee and The 13th Floor Elevator’s Roky Erickson as an influence. The lyrics are hard to make out but touch on mean days and a girl who turns the singer cold. He might as well be dead and in a graveyard. The momentum is tempered by a break borrowed from The Elevators' “You’re Gonna Miss me”. The production is Read more ...
Katie Colombus
While you give your tent an airing in anticipation of festival season, think about the imaginative adventures your teenyboppers might enjoy – from colourful creative activities to bushcraft workshops and babysitting services, there’s much on offer for burgeoning revelers as well as their party-hardy-folks to enjoy. 1. Cornbury, July 4-6, Great Tew Park, OxfordshireAffectionately nicknamed "Poshstock" for its middle-class blend of old school headliners, sub-swanky bars and a glamping section, Cornbury has a range of creative and exciting areas for kids aged six months to five years. Read more ...
joe.muggs
OK... a dozen and a half fine trout... a large barrel... and one 12-gauge shotgun – let's blast away! I mean, one tries to be charitable but let's face it, this is the lowest common denominator right here. Tijs “Tiësto” Verwest is by many measures the most popular DJ in the world, regularly playing to crowds of several trillion, often from a helicopter made of diamonds and unicorn skin, and sending them into religious ecstasies with trance music that is so relentlessly dumb and predictable it makes most house and techno sound like Stockhausen in comparison.There are 18 tracks here, and every Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The Eventim (Hammersmith) Apollo, where Pat Metheny’s Unity Group last night gave a spellbinding, if sometimes baffling, performance, has hosted a goodly range of gigs in its time. Few of these can have offered such diversity within a single evening. Piece after piece left last night’s audience whooping with exhilaration, though Metheny’s fondness for mechanical innovation briefly threatened the audience’s otherwise adoring reception.Metheny opened with a solo on his 42-string Pikasso guitar, a Hydra-headed invention with a very delicate harp-like upper register. Watching him grapple in the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Plastikman's return filled many a techno geek with trepidation. DJ Richie Hawtin’s alter-person toured a spectacular live show in 2010, successfully proving he could hold his own in a world ruled by Skrillex, Tiesto et al, but there hasn’t been a new album since the wonky, pitched down, vocoder’n’cyborg grind of Closer in 2003. Since then Hawtin has gone from being a boys’ own techno totem to a bona fide superstar DJ. In holier-than-thou “underground” clubland his ambivalence about EDM, his working with Deadmau5, his audaciously huge Ibizan ENTER extravaganza, all apparently added up to “ Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Gilles Peterson has been a fan of Brazilian music since a furtive teenage liaison with pirate radio. Now, very much at the other end of the radio wave, and after many decades’ advocacy of Brazilian music, he’s created Sonzeira, a collaborative band featuring his pick of the contemporary scene. This is no bossa nostalgia: the concept’s serious and football-free; the artists are little known outside Brazil; and the recording is cleanly, neutrally rendered. Even the traditional repertoire sounds new. Vasconcelos’ opening, a solo drum track, celebrates the centrality of rhythm to the Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Decidedly diverse in its musical offerings as ever, this year’s Field Day, which for the first time was spread over two days with the Pixies as a fitting finale, was gifted with glorious sunshine and a chipper ambience. Fresh ferocious voices breaking out and established names reaching back to their roots made for a harmonious mix of boldness and greatness.Thurston Moore’s exceptionally tight guitar skills and sparse melancholy lyrics gently weaved across the sunny afternoon breeze with the sublime sound similar to that of early Sonic Youth delivering a delightful wave of nostalgia. Meanwhile Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Hank Marvin (b 1941) was born Brian Rankin in Newcastle. At 16 he and his school friend, fellow guitarist Bruce Welch, headed for London to seek their fortune as musicians. They quickly found work at the 2i’s Coffee Bar in Soho, a seminal British rock’n’roll haunt. The pair were soon hired as Cliff Richard’s backing group, initially known as The Drifters and, eventually, as The Shadows. As well as accompanying Cliff Richard on early hits, the Shadows fired out a series of era-defining instrumentals such as “Apache”, “FBI” and "Kon-Tiki”. Together these releases came to sum up Britain’s take Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Bob Mould is one of the patron saints of that uplifting punk-pop sound married to angsty lyrics which has gone down so well with the alt-rock crowd since the first wave of hardcore punk ran out of steam in the mid-Eighties. First with the mighty Hüsker Dü and then the more straight ahead Sugar, his fuzzy guitar sound was instantly recognisable and clearly made some impression on the likes of Pixies and Nirvana.It is a sound that he has kept at arm's length for much of his solo career though, opting instead for stabs at reflective, acoustic maturity and even electronica. 2012’s Silver Age, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Something about First Aid Kit has always seemed a little too polished, too perfect. While there can be no denying that their 2012 breakthrough record The Lion’s Roar is a rich, lovely listen – in no small part thanks to the charm of Klara and Johanna Söderberg’s effortless harmonies – its strict adherence to the trail blazed by its transatlantic influences kept me from finding it as magical as the rest of the world seemed to. If the question is how do two sisters from Stockholm follow something as technically perfect as that album on their major label debut, its first single “My Silver Lining Read more ...