New music
peter.quinn
Featuring two of the most celebrated bands in traditional Irish music, this mouth-watering double bill as part of the ninth Temple Bar TradFest drew a capacity crowd to St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. With incredibly tight tune playing, pinpoint phrasing and a powerhouse backing section, Frankie Gavin & De Dannan kicked things off in dramatic fashion. By the time fiddle player Gavin launched into “The Wild Irishman”, his impressive bow work was sending clouds of rosin flying off in all directions. The second set of tunes, three barndances (including the great “Lucy Farr's”) plus another Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Croz is everything a David Crosby album should be. That’s not to say it’s the sound of laurels being rested on or evidence of an artist coasting and returning to default settings. Rather, that instead it’s a statement of who this man is and why he is unique. The album – his first solo outing in 20 years – is crammed with jazzy arrangements and melodic shifts. The warm yet spare instrumentation is sympathetic and instantly identifiable as Crosby’s. The lyrics, observational and personalised, are never predictable. And his voice, still bell-like and pure, is as seductive as it has ever been. Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Warpaint, the all-female four-piece band from Los Angeles, introduced themselves to the UK in 2010, with the release of their debut album, The Fool. While not the most dynamic set of tunes, there was spirit and atmosphere, and the song-writing talents of Theresa Wayman and Emily Kokal generated fans in both the music and mainstream press. The band was even nominated for the BBC’s Sound of 2011 award after “Shadows” received plenty of airplay on Radio 1.The eponymous second album takes a different tack, with many of the songs apparently being written by the whole band through jamming and Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The musical concept behind this constellation of international stars at Ronnie Scott’s last night was simple. Take a sextet of some of the world’s finest improvising jazz musicians, give them either a funky groove, gentle swing or a bass-fired post-bop beat, and ample space to improvise. Sit back and enjoy the sonic fireworks.Russian alto saxist Zhenya Strigalev is only half a dozen years out of music college, but has already played extensively in three cities, moving to London from St. Petersburg to study, then on again to New York in 2010, where he recruited most of Smiling Organizm. He’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
In a world where everyone is expected to be a “brand”, Gilles Peterson sets some very interesting precedents. Probably best known as a radio DJ – currently on BBC 6 Music, plus his globally syndicated Worldwide show – he also remains as in demand to play in clubs as at any time in his 25-year career, he runs the Brownswood label, and has his own Worldwide Festival, currently with winter and summer editions in different locations in France plus four years running in Singapore and one in Shanghai. And somehow his individual personality remains at the heart of all of this.His annual award show Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Damien Jurado last surfaced as one of Moby’s collaborators on the Innocents album. From the sound of Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son, Beck might have been a more logical musical partner. Texture-wise, Jurado’s new release sits alongside Sea Change-era Beck as well as the dense, fuggy atmosphere of his own last outing, 2012’s Maraqopa.Like that album, Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son is produced by Richard Swift. He has become integral to helping Jurado move from the lo-fi folkie he was characterised as to becoming an auteur breaching musical barriers. The songs are lyrically Read more ...
mark.kidel
Ed Harcourt – with his vulnerable tenor vocals – treads the knife-edge between melancholy and self-indulgence, romantic yearning and comfort-zone sentimentality. At his best, he delivers literate songwriting, with poetic imagery that is inspired and imaginative rather than contrived. At his weakest, the sombre colours of his emotional palette and the meandering introspection grow wearisome, and soon grate.His new mini-album, mercifully concise (at 28 minutes) in this time of digital ramblings that far exceed the useful rigours imposed by last century’s LPs, is billed as a stab at Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Small Faces: Here Comes the Nice - The Immediate YearsWhen theartsdesk last covered Small Faces’ reissues in May 2012, the review concluded “the Deluxe Editions are probably (who knows what might lurk in obscure archives?) the last word on these albums.” As anticipated and as revealed by this box set, more did indeed lurk in obscure archives. Moreover, the appearance of Here Comes the Nice calls into question just what half of those Deluxe Editions of the band’s four albums used as their sonic source materials. This new release boasts that it is “all sourced and remastered from recently Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It is almost 20 years since Mogwai emerged into the post-rock scene with their particular brand of ambient art rock. In recent years, they have also dipped into producing soundtracks for French television’s Les Revenants (which appeared in the summer of 2013, as The Returned, on Channel 4) and Douglas Gordon and Philippe Pareno’s film Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait. However, they have never strayed far from their dreamy, fuzzy (yet not necessarily mellow) and largely instrumental style. Indeed, Rave Tapes sees them continue to press on in that direction with no radical change. In fact, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It was almost a decade ago, when that Mercury-winning Antony and the Johnsons album was everywhere, that I learned that there was no such thing as critical consensus. The writers who raved about the album were correct in that Antony Hegarty’s voice gave me chills, but they were the chills of a morning shower with a boiler malfunction rather than of rapture. Post Tropical, the second album from James Vincent McMorrow has received similar reviews and performs in what, from the opening bars of single “Cavalier”, could almost be the same voice. But as the song, and the album, starts softly to Read more ...
Josiah Howard
Cher was the multi-platform performer of her day, a singer, TV personality, cabaret artist, and Oscar-winning actress. She came up as the initially teenage half of pop duo Sonny & Cher (pictured below left) in the mid-Sixties with her partner (and later husband) Sonny Bono, hitting the charts with megahit "I Got You, Babe". The pair went on to helm a successful TV show in the early Seventies but when they split up Cher was given her own self-titled variety show in 1975. New York journalist and writer Josiah Howard has focused on this in his new book Cher: Strong Enough. Below Howard tells Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This debut album came out a couple of years ago in New War’s native Australia but is now receiving a full international release courtesy of All Tomorrow's Parties. It deserves it. The quartet from Melbourne give rock, indie, punk - and a whole lot else - a dramatic shake-up, notably boasting lyrics by frontman Chris Pugmire that are intriguing, literate and sometimes poetic. The band also add weight to their driven sound with keyboards and effects utilised in a way that recalls the explosion of millennial New York bands such as Interpol and Out Hud.Try these lyrics - from "Revealer" - for Read more ...