New music
Russ Coffey
First there was Hyde Park Calling, then it was Hard Rock Calling and now, re-located in Clapham, it’s just the Calling Festival (presumably the organisers thought Clapham Common Calling carried too many connotations). The venue may have changed but last weekend was, pretty much, business as usual - a couple of stages, watery beer and a two-day smorgasboard of pop and rock. This year, though, all the pop was on day two. Saturday was for real rock.The first day's early-afternoon acts were young guns, who played in the pouring rain to an intense rock-crowd. Midlands- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Saturday commuters sprinting for the 17.33 to Ardrossan find themselves dodging an obstacle course of swing-dancing young couples, soundtracked by a pensionable trad jazz band. A shifting crowd of about 100 pause in their journeys at Glasgow Central station to enjoy Penman’s Jazzmen, skilful Scottish veterans comfortable with each other and the demands of this century-old New Orleans music.Four days into 2014’s Glasgow Jazz Festival, its existence will have been news to many of the Glaswegians entertained by this enterprising street gig. More obviously momentous events are signposted around Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It feels as if the life-on-the-road song has become a rite of passage for those rock bands that manage to clock up enough years together, but after 20 years in the business Texan alt-country rockers Old 97’s probably have more of a claim to it than most. Clocking in at just under six minutes, “Longer Than You’ve Been Alive” is one of the best examples of the genre, regardless of its titular accuracy. It’s a meandering, tongue-in-cheek portrait of the rock star excesses, but also the tedium, that comes with life in a moderately successful touring band. As frontman Rhett Miller reminisces, most Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s presumably just a freak of scheduling that on the night the Rolling Stones threw up the bunting across town, an artist to whom they owe a whole heap of thanks was hosting a party of his own. Bobby Womack was the songsmith who co-supplied the scruffy young covers band with their first number one. “It’s All Over Now” was released by the Stones in July 1964 only a month after The Valentinos’ original version. Not that the song made it onto Womack’s setlist for the first two nights at the Forum. Instead a Sunday congregation was treated to an evening of two contrasting halves, and a pair of Read more ...
Paul McGee
Over the last few years, Riff Raff's rise – from ambitious, driven Houston rap scenester to reality-show opportunist to the alleged inspiration for James Franco's sleazily OTT white rapper in Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers – has been fascinating to observe. He's carefully parlayed low-level internet celebrity into his current, almost Gatsby-esque status as a self-actualised pop-culture avatar-cum-living meme, only the kind that steps out with the likes of Katy Perry. It's an impressive feat, especially when done without the aid of a conventional hit record. With this album, his first for Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
You are or maybe wish you were at Glastonbury this weekend. Not me. I last went six years ago and it’s just too big for me. And you need about four different passes to get backstage should you have a good or a bad reason to get there. Too bureaucratic. However, I was, as ever, more than glad to be at the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, which is more human in scale, sociable and, at times, transcendent. This year was the 20th edition. I have gone as many times as I possibly could.A couple of decades back, one autumnal morning in my flat in North London my fax machine juddered into Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The United States of America: The United States of America – The Columbia RecordingsNothing sounded like The United States of America. The release of their only album in March 1968 must have been greeted with a lot of head scratching. Although at one with the questing spirit of psychedelia, they clearly weren’t brimming with love, peace, gentle vibes and the burgeoning back-to-the-roots movement. Their music incorporated jarring electronics and the deadpan voice of Dorothy Moskowitz, a singer even more dauntingly distant than the Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick.Joseph Byrd was the USA’ Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Few albums can evoke a period quite like David Gray’s White Ladder. The way this unofficial soundtrack to the year 2000 interwove acoustic guitars and drum machines even kicked off a decade-long singer-songwriter renaissance. But Gray's success eventually proved a millstone round his neck and he could never really escape its legacy. Instead, he's started making quietly interesting LPs like Mutineers.This is an album of two distinct halves and it's the second that's clearly the best. It builds to a climax with the gorgeous lead single “Gulls”, a kind of avant-folk number reminiscent Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Taking the electronics-heavy instrumental pieces from David Bowie’s, late seventies albums, Low and “Heroes” and arranging them in a hard-bop jazz style might seem a bit audacious. After all, electronic experimentation was largely the point of this music – primarily as an attempt to escape from the usual expectations of pre-punk seventies’ rock music. Nevertheless, these tunes soon proved to be significant game-changers in modern music themselves, conveying a feeling of alienation through proto-ambient soundscapes which were a huge influence on Aphex Twin, Black Dog and many others of the Read more ...
theartsdesk
We are very happy to present a stream of Chris & Cosey's live set recorded on the 12th June on the Red Bull Music Academy SónarDome stage at the Sónar festival in Barcelona.As the duo explained in their Q&A with theartsdesk, this set represents the drawing to an end of the series of shows that they've done re-imagining their Chris & Cosey songs of the 1980s and 1990s in the tougher electronic style of their more recent Carter Tutti guise - while also providing a look forward to a Carter Tutti Play Chris & Cosey studio album which will be their next release before moving Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The Flaming Lips are one of the most annoying bands on the planet. They're fawned over in a pseudo-spiritual fashion by people who should know better for their arena show stunts which supposedly create a vibe of togetherness and community but really seem every bit as messianically egotistical on the part of band leader Wayne Coyne as any of the antics of, say, Bono or Chris Martin. They are essentially a new generation prog-rock band with all the self-involved and portentous stoner goofing that entails.However... a little frustratingly, they're also capable of making good records, and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It seems a little ambitious to be thinking of those omnipresent end-of-year album best-of lists when it is barely summer, but there’s something about How To Dress Well’s “What Is This Heart?” that puts me in that frame of mind. Not because I can see it topping any such list of my own but rather because I can see this album - this sumptuous, melodic, intricate, claustrophobic third full-length from the electro-R&B project of one Tom Krell - topping everybody else’s. It’s another way in which Krell’s music is similar to that of Frank Ocean, whose similarly falsetto-laden work of laudable Read more ...