New music
mark.kidel
Janelle Monáe’s much-awaited second album doesn’t disappoint. She navigates the ever-renewing waters of African-American pop invention, drawing on R & B, funk, gospel, rock and dinner jazz, with a sense of fun and a great deal of talent. She is a master of eccentric chic, sophisticated, with a hint of the (tastefully) bizarre.Questions of identity have both haunted and inspired black culture in the USA. Monáe, with her cyborg and extra-terrestrial alter egos, mines a vein of fantasy that the likes of George Clinton and Sun Ra have explored before her: the space-man or woman as avatar of a Read more ...
peter.quinn
Gregory Porter's Blue Note debut provides one of the biggest sugar rushes of auditory pleasure you'll hear this year. Grounded in jazz but heavily seasoned with the blues, gospel and soul, it's a superbly paced album, ranging from the poetic tableaux of ballad “When Love Was King” to the unstoppable, hand clapping moto perpetuo of the title track.There are many other gems amongst the album's 14 tracks, including the singular intimacy of opener “No Love Dying”, the heartfelt plea of “Musical Genocide” and the soulful melodicism of “Movin'”. With a baritone voice that evokes heartbreaking Read more ...
Russ Coffey
There are few duller subjects in popular music than the relationship between Pete Doherty and drugs. I’d like therefore to be able to tell you that I have avoided all such references in this review. The truth is, however, I can’t: from the first slur to the last jangled guitar this still sounds like the work of a man who prefers his consciousness chemically altered. Yet, if Doherty's experimentation is unlikely to ever unlock the doors of perception, on this occasion his mindset is, thankfully, more lightly melancholy than those previous occasions when it was simply depressing and incoherent. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Beach Boys: Made in CaliforniaMade in California is a fantastic thing. Six CDs slot into the inside of the back cover of an LP-sized, full colour hardback book with a padded cover. As an artefact, it’s a triumph. As a career-spanning summary of the best of The Beach Boys’ music it’s flawless. Quibbling about individual tracks which aren’t included is possible, but ultimately pointless. Everything which needs to be heard is here. Made in California is a statement of who The Beach Boys were, are and even – as revealed by some of the originally unreleased tracks – who they could have Read more ...
mark.hudson
You either get Youssou N’Dour, or you don’t. For millions on his home turf, the Senegalese singer is a major cultural figure: the street urchin-turned-superstar who almost became president. For large numbers of Western fellow travellers he’s the sexiest, most charismatic figure to emerge from the whole world music phenomenon. For everyone else, specifically the 99 percent of the Western public who aren’t into world music and didn’t buy 7 Seconds (and even some of those who did), he’s, well, a bit boring: an average-looking, dull interviewee, whose music floats by in a simultaneous blur of Read more ...
joe.muggs
A casual observer might know Atlanta-born CeeLo Green as the rotund soul man who struck commercial gold twice in the last decade, as half of Gnarls Barkley, and then with his own “Fuck You!” in 2010. But the 39-year-old has a long and rich musical life aside from these projects, including most of the 1990s with the rap group Goodie Mob, part of the Dungeon Family collective which also includes the world-conquering Outkast as members and was instrumental in the rise to dominance of the Southern States in the hip hop world.This is Goodie Mob's first album in eight years and their first since Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Pianist, composer, and band leader Django Bates was so inspired by Charlie Parker as a teenager that he used to whistle his tunes on the train. This led not to abuse, but the acquaintance (at Brixton station) of saxophonist Steve Buckley. Returning to the Proms this week for the first time since his 1987 debut with Loose Tubes, Bates paid homage with a set of mainly Parker adaptations, performed by his trio, Beloved, in a new collaboration with the Swedish Norrbotten Big Band.About half of the programme revisited tracks recorded on last year’s album Confirmation. Bates’s distinctive sound, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When Brighton hip-hop boys Jordan Stephens and Harley Alexander-Sule first came on-radar in 2011 with the summer smash “Down With the Trumpets” they appeared to be a good-time flash-in-the-pan, possibly even a nascent boy band. When Fatboy Slim got involved, producing the infectious “Mama Do the Hump”, sneaking his old big beat sound back onto daytime radio, it pricked the interest, but it was in the live arena that Rizzle Kicks proved themselves. They went on the road with a full band, replete with a top-range brass section, and slayed the festival circuit.Co-written and produced by long- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The last album released by Iceland’s múm was Early Birds, an archive trawl from 2012 which unearthed previously unheard material recorded between 1998 and 2000. Before that was 2009’s Sing Along to Songs You Don't Know. Smilewound is a comeback, and a welcome one. It’s also a statement of who múm are and closer in sound to an early album like Finally We Are No One than the – for them – relatively grandiose …Songs You Don't Know.For Smilewound, múm’s core duo Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason are reunited with founder member Gyða Valtýsdóttir. Kylie Minogue also crops up. Despite Read more ...
Tim Cumming
No songwriter casts a deeper shadow than Bob Dylan does, and since the first three volumes of the Bootleg Series came in 1991, his shadow career – now reaching Volume Ten with Another Self Portrait – continues to prove as compelling as the official releases. While the latter are set in stone, the Bootleg Series is more like a basement excavation, digging into the softer darker clays of epochal concerts, wildly alternate versions, and almost willfully lost treasures.With Another Self Portrait, Dylan’s archivists have remoulded clay, looking for a hidden masterpiece. Folks, it’s just not there Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I have little patience with those that link mental anguish with creativity, glamorising the former as if the latter were any consolation. That said, there is comfort to be drawn from songs that spin the blankness of depression into something desolate and beautiful. It’s why I’ve had “Night Still Comes”, the second track from Neko Case’s new album, on repeat for the past week: it slips in, hopeless and otherworldly after a typically strident album opener, and runs on unchecked like the internal monologue of the depressive. “Is it because I’m a girl?” Case muses, rhetorically. “If I puked up Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sly & the Family Stone: Higher!Sly & the Family Stone’s hits “Dance to the Music”, “I Want to Take You Higher” and “Stand!” delivered a sharp wake-up call to the American charts in a period when psychedelia meant new styles of pop were becoming less concise and the mellow vibes of Laurel Canyon were about to begin reducing energy levels. Sly Stone’s gang showed that music could go to fresh places without losing vitality and precision. The case doesn’t need to be made that Sly Stone – born Sylvester Stewart in 1943 – is one of America’s greats, but Higher! makes it anyway with Read more ...