New music
joe.muggs
Yes, Peter and Joe are back, with a humdinger of a show this time, once again recorded in the insalubrious but highly conducive surrounds of Hoxton's MeatMISSION burger bar.Their continued explorations of the past, present and future of cross-cultural intermingling this time takes in jazz-acid, prog-electro, French roots'n'culture, pizzicato Elvis, sardonic Balkan beats, Belgian trip-hop, Appalachian dubstep, ambient country, Euro urban decadence, some Amazon grooves, Grace Jones and Françoise Hardy. Jump in! The Arts Desk 14/03/14 by Meattransmission on Mixcloud Tracklist: Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Aloe Blacc is at a crossroads. The 35-year-old Californian soul singer arrived slowly via the hip hop underground and Peanut Butter Wolf’s smart Stones Throw label, then blew up with the monster hit “I Need A Dollar”, which will surely be used as a recession anthem for decades. His next sliver of profile was as singer of Swedish EDM cheese-merchant Aviici’s chart-topping country’n’western’n’happy hardcore monstrosity “Wake Me Up”. Blacc’s new album, his third, can surely, then, be used as a guide to see which way he’s going to jump?You’d have thought so, but the man born Egbert Dawkins III, a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
About 25 years ago, the Cult decided that they were going to turn the punk/alternative crowd onto “classic rock”. While they were widely derided by most of the music press of the time, they did manage to increase their record sales immeasurably. The Afghan Whigs are also admirers of seventies’ guitar music, with band leader Greg Dulli previously stating that he wanted them to sound like a mix of the Band, the Temptations and Neil Young in Crazy Horse mode. While the Afghan Whigs may have achieved their artistic aim on Do to the Beast, the band’s first album since 1998’s 1965, it seems an Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“The most influential band of the last ten years. Period,” said Jez Nelson, of BBC Radio 3’s Jazz On 3, announcing Polar Bear to the XOYO audience last night. It’s difficult to live up to an introduction like that, especially when the band wanted the audience to focus on their new album, which was launched that night. They gave a typically committed and masterful performance of their well-received new album, In Each And Every One, which drummer, bandleader and composer Seb Rochford introduced with his trademark bashful charm. The playlist followed the order of the album quite Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Norwegian saxophonist Marius Neset is not yet 30, and he already has several acclaimed albums with smaller forces to his increasingly neon-lit name. With this release of new and adapted work for 12-piece big band, he sets out to work on a larger (and notoriously complex) canvas. It’s intense, dramatic and finely wrought, with numerous changes of style and direction.Some tracks are adapted from two previous albums, Birds and Golden Xplosion; others are original. The lion theme is everywhere: the Nordic blonde Neset himself, his gleaming sax over one shoulder; the Read more ...
joe.muggs
It seems that the gradual leakage of avant-garde-post-classical-call-it-what-you-will music from the rarefied environment of concert halls and into the spaces traditionally inhabited by alternative and club music is now inexorable. And violinist Aisha Orazbayeva is one of the instrumental (pun intended) figures in this move from trickle to flood. As one quarter of the organising team for the London Contemporary Music Festival (along with erstwhile classical editor for theartsdesk, Igor Toronyi-Lalic), she has helped bring Parmegianni, Schwitters, Radigue and other 20th/21st century composers Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's rare that you can trace a genre to one man. But house music is well documented: “house” originally simply meant the music played at the Warehouse club, by one Frankie Knuckles, who died yesterday in Chicago from diabetes-related complications. Knuckles was a disciple of New York disco, who'd served his DJ apprenticeship in the city's spectacularly decadent gay bathhouses in the mid-Seventies as an understudy of Larry Levan (who would set up the Paradise Garage, which itself gave its name to another genre – garage).Seeking a club where he could have complete creative freedom, he moved to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tina Turner has recorded an album of American blues and folk classics, as well as one original song, with the remaining members of Led Zeppelin. theartsdesk can exclusively reveal that the 74-year-old pop star and soul-funk legend met Led Zep guitarist Jimmy Page through her husband, the German music executive Erwin Bach, and that recording took place last November near her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland.The new album, as yet untitled, was recorded over a fortnight with Page, and included sessions involving Zep singer Robert Plant, bassist John Paul Jones and drummer Jason Bonham, son of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s strange to think that music recorded 45 years ago in what was once an old Yiddish theatre turned rock 'n' roll palace on the Lower East Side in the summer of 1970 – a few months before Jimi Hendrix’s death, as war raged in Vietnam and riots in the US – still sounds way ahead of our time, let alone the time in which it was made.Robert Glasper recently complained that jazz was stuck in the past, with Miles Davis, 22 years dead, still able to knock him off the number one spot. Fair enough, but Davis was playing the future, not the past, and on the strength of a remarkable third volume in Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
By the time I reached “Coming Home” - the second track on Kaiser Chiefs’ fifth album, and the band’s "comeback" single - I was predicting not a riot exactly, but certainly a few snide comments below re: my knowledge of the Leeds lads’ back catalogue. While not wholly unpleasant, its drivetime radio-friendly smoothness seemed an odd choice for a band best known for anthemic, stadium-filling indie swagger - particularly as it was always going to be seen as something of a mission statement for their first album without chief songwriter and drummer Nick Hodgson.But then Education, Education, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Elton John: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road box set“Elton John plays cricket as he plays piano; dressed to kill and as if his life depends on it.” The commentary on the film included in the box-set version of this reissue of 1973’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is hugely over the top and rococo, and treats its subject as a form of showbiz Moses. Brian Forbes’s 45-minute Elton John and Bernie Taupin say Goodbye to Norma Jean is crammed with eyebrow-raising moments, but none more so than when John declares he writes songs in just 30 minutes. “It takes me on average about half-an-hour per song,” he Read more ...
Guy Oddy
As anyone who has a television will know, Rebecca Ferguson is a graduate of The X Factor – having come runner-up in the 2010 competition. In fact, with her heavily-promoted back story of overcoming heart-ache and disappointment, it looks as if she is presently being set up as the successor to Simon Cowell’s previous Queen Bee, Leona Lewis, whose career seems to have hit the buffers of late. So, armed with songs of survival and redemption that she has largely co-written for her two albums, 2011’s Heaven and last year’s Freedom, she took to the stage in Birmingham to the sound of Billie Read more ...