New music
Matthew Wright
Setting bankers, Baroness Thatcher, tax-dodging multinationals and Woody Guthrie to music? These days, it could only be a Billy Bragg gig. Reports of Bragg losing his political teeth, based on slightly guarded reviews of his latest album, Tooth & Nail, are on the evidence of last night greatly exaggerated. This is a songwriter who could no more detach his ideology than his right arm, and still play his guitar. He combined new songs and old favourites in equal measure. Many pieces used a pedal steel guitar, adding a delicious rustic wail. Bragg pre-empted criticism of the technical Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Even on first listen, without context or introduction, the music of The Fauns already seems familiar. Their sound is an amalgam of many of the things I have enjoyed in 2013: The History of Apple Pie, all guitar fuzz and sweetness; the shimmer of the newly-reunited Mazzy Star; the soundtrack to an early Sofia Coppola film; and, on “Point Zero”, the buzz of the crowd at an open-air rock show as imagined by somebody who decided to stay at home on a Friday night.Lights is actually the second album from the five-piece who - and no offence to people of the south west - couldn’t sound less like they Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Velvet Underground: White Light/White HeatThe shadow cast over the reissue of The Velvet Underground’s second album White Light/White Heat by Lou Reed’s recent death is a poignant reminder that an awful lot of time has passed since this still-vital inspiration for much of today’s indie rock was first released. As a 45th anniversry edition, this does mark an unusual milestone but as seemingly the last word on the album it’s hard to imagine what could constitute a 50th anniverary edition. The Velvet Underground have been endlessly examined and re-examined. The vaults must now be bare. Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Age can do interesting things to musicians who have once been regular fixtures in the media and who reappear in the public consciousness some years later. Time, it has to be said, has been kind to the two remaining members of Simple Minds’ original line-up. The band’s guitarist, Charlie Burchill, may look like Stan Smith, the star of the cartoon American Dad but he looks good with it. Jim Kerr also seems to be ageing gracefully. In fact, he looks better than he did almost 30 years ago, having dumped the dress-sense that seemed to take pointers from Blackadder the First, with a beret.Support Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Long may it stay a mystery,” said Keith Richards, the first talking head seen in this opening shot of a two-part excursion through blues music. Self-evidently, two hours devoted to this oft-explored subject wasn’t going to leave too many mysteries. Woke Up This Morning did tread new ground though – at least for British television – by recalibrating perceptions of authenticity and motivation.Big Bill Broonzy had made his name in Chicago, where he was seen as a sophisticated and urban performer. For his 1938 New York debut, he allowed himself to be portrayed as fresh from an Arkansas farm. The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Britney has become an icon. Partly this is down to her shiny, unreadable Hollywood exterior, partly down to her classic child star downfall, partly her relentless campness, partly the way she’s become unstoppable, but most of all because her career has been speckled with some fantastic songs – “Toxic”, “Piece of Me”, “Sometimes”, “Oops, I Did It Again”, “If You Seek Amy”. Again and again she has defied her critics’ desire to dismiss her. These are songs that long outlive their crass promotional campaigns and objectifyjng videos. The question is, then, whether, Britney Jean is packed with such Read more ...
Tim Cumming
And so Dylan’s tour of European theatres, opera houses and concert halls ended on Thursday night at the Royal Albert Hall, his first dates here in 46 years. I’ve seen him plenty of times over the past 30 years. This was the best of them. Dylan’s found a way to use his voice again, and his group is so nuanced to its needs, it’s a pure pleasure to hear. Charlie Sexton plays a warm and refined lead, not rock'n'roll at all, and there’s a quiet glow between all the players; it’s as if they’re facing the same way, looking at the same colours.Appropriately, "Things Have Changed" opens it up as the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Oozing like “liquefied sucrose,” whilst offering “a Ritalin-buzzed rictus of happiness” was how theartsdesk described One Direction’s 2012 offering, Take Me Home. That, however, was a year ago, and a year is a long a time in the life of a heavily coiffured twenty-ish year-old pop idol. So, how then, have the intervening months treated the Anglo-Irish quintet? Are procedings now a little more adult or is it simply business as usual for Simon Cowell’s protégés?Surprisingly, things actually have moved forward a fair bit. The tunes may still go a little heavy on the sugar, but it’s no Read more ...
joe.muggs
New Yorker band Gang Gang Dance have been one of the odder acts of the past decade. Presented as a kind of hippie multimedia collective, they were among the earliest non-UK adopters of the sonics of grime and dubstep, which they wove in alongside global music influences, jam band psychedelia and more into an extremely rich and sometimes slightly confusing stew.They have been signed to some of the biggest left field labels (WARP, 4AD), worked with filmmaker Harmony Korine, been “innocently” plagiarised by the ghastly Florence & The Machine, had many moments of brilliance, but seemingly Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“There is a misconception that we have called ourselves the greatest band on earth.” Jack Black, the self-styled “lead singer” of Tenacious D, is all for dispelling a persistent rumour about a band which has, if he’s honest, done practically nothing to make him a famous name in Hollywood. “People have marketed us that way,” he explains. “You won’t find it anywhere in the albums. You won’t find it in any of our songs.”It’s true, you won’t. A semantic confusion may have initially arisen the first time the band ever performed in public, at a place called Al’s Bar in Los Angeles in 1994. The only Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The songs of Jacques Brel and Juliette Gréco are old friends. She has revisited them many times since she began performing with Brel’s former accompanist, the pianist Gérard Jouannest, in 1968. Brel and Jouannest had worked together since 1958. Gréco married Jouannest in 1989. Gréco Chante Brel features him on nine of its 12 tracks. As well as being integral to what it is to be Gallic, the album can be considered a family affair.A new album of new interpretations is no surprise, but what is surprising is that it’s so compelling. Gréco is 86 and her voice is not what it was. But she has not Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
BBC Radiophonic Workshop: BBC Radiophonic Music / The Radiophonic WorkshopThe inescapable 50th anniversary of the television debut of Doctor Who has had the side effect of drawing attention to the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the backroom outfit who created the otherworldly theme, sound effects and atmospheric colour for the series. Of course, Doctor Who was just one BBC production they worked on. The corporation allowed the Workshop to close 15 years ago, in 1998 – a not-so happy anniversary. It had been established in 1958.When the Radiophonic Workshop’s paymasters were Read more ...