New music
Serena Kutchinsky
Dalston was the place on Friday night, as the Sun Ra Arkestra put on a trademark display of Afro-jazz excellence in the intimate surrounds of Café Oto. Jazz pioneer Sun Ra might have been dead since 1993, but his influential big band is very much alive and capable of puffing their way through marathon sets.Formed in the mid-1950s by Sun Ra, aka visionary pianist and composer Herman Poole, the Arkestra is currently led by the famed saxophonist Marshall Allen, 89. Frail-looking but authoritative, Allen worked with Sun Ra from 1958 until the latter's death and is often referred to as “the second Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is an incredibly hard album to work out. One major clue comes, though, with its second track, “Maxim's 1”, the backing for which is a dead ringer for a lost track from Cocteau Twins's 1990 Heaven or Las Vegas album. Not that any of the rest of the album sounds like Cocteau Twins, but it does hit a very similar magic formula. That is, though it ostensibly comes from an “indie” milieu, it has vast sonic ambition closer to the biggest pop/soul/R&B records of its time than to any guitar-wrangling mitherers, but it is also psychedelically alien to the point of indecipherability.Los Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This was a somewhat nostalgic look at the rise of “World Music” as a genre, starting in the Eighties when the term was first used, essentially as a marketing tool. As the ever ebullient Andy Kershaw put it, the problem was where in record stores “you could put a choir of Bulgarian tractor drivers next to some hot shot guitar slinger from Guinea-Bissau". And as another talking head - and there lots of mainly good ones - pointed out, there was an urge for something a bit more real, more connected, more spiritual even, than either the gloss of Eighties mainstream pop or earnest indie-rock was Read more ...
Serena Kutchinsky
When the best thing you can say about a band’s comeback album is that it sounds vaguely like their era-defining punk funk debut, you can either wonder why they bothered or admire their dogged devotion to a single sound. The music world has moved on from the dance rock sound popularised by the Glasgow foursome’s foot-stomping first single "Take Me Out" (a title now more synonymous with TV dating hell), but Franz Ferdinand have not moved with it. A decade of success has seen flashes of experimentation but after a failed attempt at producing a more dancefloor-friendly album (2009’s Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Why are the Malians always punching way above their weight in music? There may be some historical reasons. The French always were more welcoming to the culture of their empire than the Brits (and more used to foreign-language music), while Paris became a great centre of West African music, from where it was disseminated over Europe. It’s also true that some of the most influential gatekeepers here – such as Lucy Duran (who presented this concert and has been to Mali about 50 times) are ardent Mali-philes. But it’s probably as much to do with the richness of the music which seems so deeply Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There have been those who have uncharitably suggested that Crystal World is in fact a sixth Ladytron album rather than the solo debut of the band’s frontwoman, Helen Marnie. It’s an easy, if lazy, conclusion to jump to when said album flirts with many of the same electro-dreampop calling cards and features a bandmate on production credits, but take a trip into Marnie’s world and there is plenty to set it apart.Curiously it’s on the vocals that the differences become most obvious. This is still the same Marnie of the sometimes sultry, sometimes glacial persona she adopts on the best known of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Imagine an aural swoon of a song like a mermaid’s sigh preceding one which introduces Saint-Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals to free-jazz skronk. After that, Laurie Anderson pops along to take on the soft soul of the early Seventies Isley Brothers. An evening with Julia Holter encompasses all of that, yet knits it all together gracefully to make a whole like nothing else. Despite the fleetingly familiar elements, it couldn’t really sound ordinary: her chosen live set up supplements her own keyboard with drums, a violinist, cellist and saxophonist. Hardly a regular band.Holter can’t be Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There is no guarantee of success in any area of rock and pop but those who wish to succeed through sheer graft might look to metal as their main chance. While multiple bands in other genres have fleeting, unpredictable moments in the sun, a decent metal act ticking the right boxes with the fans and initially willing to slog the circuit for 350 nights of every year, especially in the endless wilds of Middle America, can build and build and build. Look at Iron Maiden, possibly the biggest band of their vintage in the world. They do what they do with thundering, enjoyable efficiency, are beloved Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Next Monday Bob Dylan releases Another Self Portrait (1969-1971), the tenth volume of his Bootleg Series which casts new light on one of his most maligned records, 1970's Self Portrait. Two days beforehand a selection of his pastel portraits will go on display at the National Portrait Gallery. (Both events, naturally, will be reviewed on theartsdesk.) At 72, popular music's most mercurial character is still throwing curveballs. For half a century now successive generations have wrestled with Dylan's mutations; mostly we pick and choose and settle for – at best – a partial understanding. His Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Chicago’s Disappears aren’t playing it easy with their fourth album Era. Their name doesn’t appear on the front cover. Nor does the title. The song titles are only on the disc and can’t be referred to while the album is playing. No internet addresses are given. The band seem to be taking their chosen name literally and leaving the music to do the talking.Era was preceded into the shops by Kone, a 12-inch EP which centred on a 15-minute track. Although abstract, it was rooted in what the band had previously perfected: a stiff-backed, guitar-driven squall which underpinned singer Brian Case’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It's a lottery. There are writers who’d see something in the return, after five years away, of this multi-million-selling Scottish four-piece. These writers, however, didn’t step in so Travis have been thrown to the dogs, a non-starter for both of us. Sooooo… there’s a song here called “New Shoes” that I wouldn’t turn off on the radio, a loping, pleasant groove, and another jangly thing called “Boxes”… no, this isn’t working, that last one is just mawkish, reminds me of early Sting. No, no, no, not bloody Travis.At the close of the last century Travis opened the door for Coldplay, Keane and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
R Stevie Moore: Personal AppealIt’s a brave person who whittles down the output of R Stevie Moore to one CD. Since 1969, he’s made at least 175 albums, a significant proportion of which he committed to cassette tape. There are also a similar amount of singles, live albums and collaborative efforts. Handily, the British label Care in the Community has taken up the challenge and, instead of releasing a compilation which darts off all over the place stylistically, has issued a disc which unfolds as a unified album. No mean feat considering that the tracks on Personal Appeal originally Read more ...