New music
Kieron Tyler
Tyrannosaurus Rex: A Beard of Stars/T.Rex: T.Rex, Tanx/Marc Bolan & T. Rex: Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of TomorrowReactions to these reissues are going be determined by what level of fandom the band's acolytes subscribe to. These are not for the casual purchaser. Each is stuffed with masses of bonus tracks, many previously unreleased. The primary content is overwhelmed by the bonuses. Whether it's good or bad to put original albums in the shade is a matter of taste. The volume of extra material makes it hard to appreciate what Bolan intended each album to be in the first place.With Read more ...
Russ Coffey
They've been indie and they've been (quite) pop, but this time the band has firmly nailed its colours to the art-rock mast. The Take Off and Landing of Everything is a subtle, reflective piece which befits the age and intelligence of its creators. And while some will, of course, miss their arms-in-the-air anthems, it’s worth remembering 2011’s Build a Rocket Boys had already left much of that behind. How then has this post pop-rock Elbow progressed? It's not just the musical style that has evolved, but also the general landscape.That familiar northern, “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There was a poignant moment last night as the Stranglers performed the song “Never To Look Back”. It hails from their 1990 album, 10, the last to feature singer Hugh Cornwall heading their original line-up. Behind the band, four giant gilt frames flash a slide-show of their career. We see them, all lean black leather and venom, transform slowly into the band before us, a greying, likeable, punk-adelic war-horse. In some of the final images drummer Jet Black – who, bear in mind, was 40 when The Stranglers' career took off in the late Seventies – wears an oxygen mask (as in the image above). Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
For better or worse, it’s not enough these days to be a perfectly serviceable pop singer. With Saturday night TV shows churning them out by the dozen, you need more than an attractive face and an ability to hit the right notes to stand out. With her brassy voice and purposefully idiosyncratic looks Paloma Faith, who herself will shortly be mentoring a musician as part of yet another nationwide talent search, always seemed like somebody doing her own thing - it’s just a shame that doesn’t come across on her third album, A Perfect Contradiction.While this may be to do with the lengthy cast of Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Bastille didn’t so much raise the roof at Alexandra Palace last night, as ask it politely if it wouldn’t mind elevating itself a touch. Their gentleness belies their success over the past year, since their first album, Bad Blood, was released. The album, most of which they played last night, is characterised by surging melody, sexlessly tumescent choruses, marching band drum solos, string parts as glossy as nail varnish, and cascading synth lines. Critics couldn’t agree, some finding it inspiringly tuneful, others derivatively risk-averse. Live, though, it’s difficult not to get carried away Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Just when you were getting sick of music that just offers wafty platitudes, Laibach return to save the day with Spectre, their first proper album since 2006’s Volk. While there is none of the laugh-out-loud subversion of their infamous covers of Queen’s “One Vision” or “Live is Life” by eighties horrors Opus, Spectre still packs a mighty punch of dirty, electronic beats and provocative and intensely political songs. This album is not polite background music.Opening track “The Whistleblowers” is a tribute to modern digital anarchists Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, set to a camp, Euro- Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
On paper this sounded promising: a gothicky song-cycle of historical London and the dark, seamy side of the city, performed a stone’s throw from where they do Jack the Ripper tours. Lead performers were Marc Almond, whose distinctive voice we have loved for 30 years, ever since his pervy soul debut with Soft Cell, and John Harle, a more than useful jazzy classicist who is often original and known for his TV theme tunes. Thown in the mix was some Iain Sinclair psycho-geography. An intriguing combination with a positively reviewed album The Tyburn Tree, of which this show was a presentation. Read more ...
mark.kidel
Fusion – so ubiquitous in the music of our time - can be contrived or blessed. Imed Alibi’s debut album, a rich tapestry of North African, Turkish, Brazilian, Balkan and rock sensibilities, works a treat because nothing feels forced: the conjunctions are happy ones, creating a web of contrasting connections that flow with a sense of inevitability rather than irritatingly clash.Built like a suite, “Safar” plays on changes of mood, each track leading into the next, with a perfectly judged sense of drama. There are widescreen cinematic moments, with multiple tracks built into a breathtaking wall Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Beyoncé is a fascinating tangle of mixed messages. She stirs people up and, most especially, she confuses men. On the train back from the first concert of her six-night stand at the O2 a group of blokes who heard we’d been to see her rabidly objected. She was, they said, just “selling her pussy”, and selling it cheap. Ire roused, they became very heated. They were lashing out fiercely, apparently under threat, for Beyoncé’s career exists at the populist vanguard of contemporary sexual politics. She gets it wrong some of the time, as in the black’n’white Helmut Newton-esque softcore of her Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If English Oceans is the Drive-By Truckers finest album since 2004’s The Dirty South - and I’d argue that it is - I doubt it was intentional. A little time away; more of a partnership of equals between founder members and songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley; and inspirations rooted as much in real life (“Grand Canyon”, dedicated to the memory of crew member and friend Craig Leiske) as in fiction (“Pauline Hawkins”, named for a character in a Willy Vlautin novel) find the southern-fried country rock veterans in a creative place that sounds both vibrant and effortless.What probably helps Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The Barbican brought two of the great originals of contemporary music together last night. Ralph Towner and Egberto Gismonti are temperamentally very different, but complement one another wonderfully, in an inspired piece of programming. Both are stylistically polyglot, straddling contemporary classical technique as well as jazz and, in Gismonti’s case especially, a range of folk idioms. Like two paths taking different routes up a mountain, they have both reached peaks of remarkable musical achievement, but taken different routes, and offered different views along the way. Read more ...
Russ Coffey
After years of similar-sounding instrumental albums many Oldfield fans may have been expecting Tubular Bells 4. But his return to the Virgin label starts with a more intriguing proposition: Oldfield has teamed up with vocalist and Freddie Mercury lookalike, Luke Spiller from The Struts to record his first rock album for decades. So, then, could the presence of this Young Turk herald a new chapter for the old progger? It seems not. What might have been rather eccentric and charming, in the end, turns out to be mostly throwaway.At least the videos offer fans a genuine treat - even if mainly Read more ...