New music
joe.muggs
I am increasingly finding it almost impossible to express just how bored I am by Miley Cyrus. I mean, seriously, are we really in such a fix that this guff is a serious talking point? A second-generation celebrity and former child star seems to be going off the rails a bit? OH REALLY, GOSH, THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE, PLEASE TELL ME MORE. A young female celebrity is flashing her parts? SWEET BABY JESUS ON A BORIS BIKE THIS IS AMAZING. A white pop star is crassly adopting the tropes of black culture? WOW NO WAY, YOU'RE LITERALLY SHITTING ME. An American TV awards show has indulged in tacky Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Jazz singer Jacqui Dankworth’s fifth album Live to Love is, on the face of it, an unlikely forum for appreciation of quantum physics or the heroic plight of Pakistani campaigner Malala Yousafzai. This new release, launched at the 606 Club, contains both, but not because she has morphed into a fearsome amalgam of Tom Lehrer and Billy Bragg. Dankworth unified her eclectic subject matter by demonstrating a multifarious, magnificent facility for empathy.Vocal quality and delivery were excellent. Dankworth radiated an irresistible, sensuous warmth, each word a little boat on her river of honey and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
A baby's brain is polished off by a throbbing welter of maggots. A field of sheep are on fire. A screaming child whose hands have been tied to a kite is flying out over the North Sea. How do you make an opera out of any of this? The answer of course is you don’t. You leave this kind of thing to cinema or the novel. Opera is - contrary to popular belief - extremely bad at spectacle, especially if the aim is to terrify. Horror has never had much of a look-in as a genre in the art form. So it was always going to be a challenge for composer Ben Frost and librettist David Pountney to transfer Iain Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Full English album and live tour is the stage and studio result of an ambitious project from the EFDSS (English Folk Dance and Song Society), drawing together songs from the early 20th-century collections of songhunters including Lucy Broadwood, Percy Grainger, Frank Kidson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Cecil Sharp.The Full English is also a web portal, describing itself as the most comprehensive searchable database of English folk songs, tunes, dances and customs in the world. For fans of traditional songs, the newly-launched Song Collectors Collective site features living source singers Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“How does drum’n’bass fare when taken out from the underground?” asked Joe Muggs on Monday on theartsdesk, reviewing the new Sub Focus album. He went on to refer to “a fizzy youth-friendly strain of the genre” and “rictus grin euphoria”, making further reference to Jaegerbombs and “stadium pop”. It’s all a long way, he concluded, from the “dark, strange, spontaneous creativity” of the scene’s origins. He’s right.Candied bass-pop has busted the charts wide open and, riding these changes, surfing the wave, are Chase & Status. They began as furious junglists on labels such as the reliably Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
At the end of his hour and 20 minute long performance Shlomo gives us an encore, a percussive tune wherein his amazing noise-making abilities are piled on top of each other with a piece of sampling kit called a Loop Station. This multi-layered nugget is propulsive but the seated audience is unsure, as it has been throughout, whether the evening's ambience should be rowdily interactive or quietly appreciative, as if watching a play. Except, that is, for two women who stand up and boogie enthusiastically.Alongside Beardyman, Shlomo is at the vanguard of British beatboxing and his art has lately Read more ...
joe.muggs
When drum'n'bass emerged from hardcore rave's interactions with London's pirate radio culture, 20-odd years ago, it created some of the most radical grassroots music ever to come out of the British Isles. It came in such a white heat explosion of underground, transforming repeatedly and rapidly through different iterations its first few years, that nobody could have predicted that it would reach a commercial high-point two decades on. Yet here we are with the likes of DJ Fresh creating chart toppers, d'n'b's top rank of DJs still touring the world to arena crowds, and a whole range of new Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dino Valente: Dino ValenteDino Valenti’s reaction to his sole solo album being credited to Dino Valente isn’t recorded, but any confusion probably wouldn’t have mattered as he had such high-profile cheerleaders. Before its release in October 1968, Ralph J Gleason, then America’s most important commentator on rock and pop, called Valenti – who died in 1994 – “an underground Bob Dylan”. After its release, Lillian Roxon, New York’s most trenchant observer of musical trends, said he was “a macrobiotics-solar-energy legend”. In Rolling Stone in January 1969, Ben Fong-Torres repeated the " Read more ...
peter.quinn
For lovers of vocal jazz, Georgia Mancio's ReVoice! Festival has become an unmissable part of London's jazz calendar. Now in its fourth year, ReVoice! has previously played host to artists such as Gregory Porter (his first UK booking), Tuck & Patti, Raúl Midón and the Becca Stevens Band. Running over 10 nights from 10-19 October, this year's edition is the longest yet, with all concerts hosted at Soho's Pizza Express Jazz Club.An award-winning vocalist in her own right, Georgia not only curates and presents the festival but also performs the opening set each night. Little surprise, Read more ...
James Williams
Justin Timberlake continues his global charm assault with the second in his 20/20 Experience project. Teaming with long-term collaborator Timbaland, the duo turn the taut funk and chart-busting hits of the first instalment in the series on their head. Where The 20/20 Experience was in turns sensual and muted, The 20/20 Experience 2 of 2 is more in the vein of the more familiar futuristic synth-led sound that created Timbaland’s name in the Nineties, producing for artists such as Aaliyah and Missy Elliot. No one has shaped and directed Timberlake’s sound more than Read more ...
Mary Finnigan
Forty four years ago David Bowie was living in the spare room of the suburban flat I shared with my two young children. He was broke and I was only occasionally employed – so we started a Sunday night folk club in the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street – for fun and so he could pay me some rent.On the first night we transformed the dingy back room of a very average pub into a psychedelic dream machine. I operated a primitive light projector using glass slides and inks that cast multi-coloured abstract blobs and splatters onto bed sheets hung on the walls. We replaced cold fluorescent Read more ...
peter.quinn
It's only the truly great albums that usher you into a sound-world that is entirely sui generis. And so it is with this second chapter of jazz sax player and composer Matana Roberts's Coin Coin project, a vast musical work-in-progress exploring themes of history, memory and ancestry. Divided into 18 separate tracks, but heard as one continuous arc of sound, we enter into the leader's all-encompassing “panoramic sound quilting”, as she calls it, a reference both to her family’s handicraft heritage but also to the collage-like juxtaposition of her materials.Over a bowed pedal note in the Read more ...