New music
Thomas H. Green
It’s rather gratifying that, in an area dominated by Americans (with the exception of the Moshi Monsters phenomenon) Bin Weevils is a very British success story. The pop-eyed cartoon insects first came into existence a decade ago as animations for Nickelodeon UK but in 2010 their creators split with the parent company and developed an online social world for children that’s proved massively popular, branching into magazines, trading cards and toys. Around half Britain’s under-10s have interacted with Bin Weevils - 20 million have registered and two million remain active users.This, of course Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The city of Katowice in Upper Silesia, Poland, was once an epic industrial hub on the western edge of the Soviet bloc. It was a gigantic centre for coal and steel that was awesome in scale. Those days are long gone yet it seems fitting that one of the city’s now disused coal mines plays host, from August 22-25, 2013, to Tauron Nowa Muzyka, a leading European festival of electronic music.Here, inside spaces that were once warehouses and carpentries, with many of the giant piston mechanisms still intact, hundreds gather once a year to party to sounds that seem to have been beamed in from the Read more ...
Matt Parker
In both a personal and literary sense, Grant Hart has been to hell and back. While the 52-year-old Minnesotan is still best known as the drummer and songwriting contributor behind legendary US punk band Hüsker Dü, his fourth solo album, The Argument, is a bold adaptation of John Milton's Paradise Lost that could finally see him recognised as an artist in his own right. And it's about time.For better or worse, Hart has spent three decades being cast as the yin to Hüsker Dü frontman Bob Mould's yang. In contrast to Mould's direct, hardcore-influenced compositions, it was Hart that brought Read more ...
joe.muggs
“Formulaic” is all too frequently used pejoratively in reviews – but from minuets to minimalism, Bo Diddley to drum'n'bass, finding a formula that works and sticking to it has produced some of the finest music in human history. Liverpool-born producer E.m.m.a. might not yet be in the history-changing category, but she's certainly found a simple and distinctive recipe and her explorations of its possibilities are currently extremely fruitful.In essence, E.m.m.a. takes the rugged grooves of UK pirate radio, and adds an extra layer of melody and harmony which connects them back into the much Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Michael Hurley: Armchair Boogie / Hi Fi Snock UptownWith songs about werewolves, penguins, the English upper classes, trains, the police and more werewolves, these albums from surrealist folk maverick Michael Hurley are charming and occasionally disconcerting. His ramshackle delivery seems a little offhand but it brings an intimacy that can’t fail to worm its way in. Armchair Boogie (credited to Michael Hurley & Pals) was originally issued in 1971; Hi Fi Snock Uptown in 1972. Both originally came out Raccoon, the label run The Youngbloods.Armchair Boogie was the belated follow-up to Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Nashville’s singer, songwriter, luthier and hard liver Guy Clark delivered one of the best country albums of the Noughties, 2009’s Somedays the Song Writes You. Sporting the likes of "Hemingway’s Whiskey", "The Guitar" and "Maybe I Can Paint Over That", it ranked with the best he’s done. Four years later, the world must be a darker place for Clark following the death of his wife Suzanne. Nor is he well enough to tour. We’ll not get the chance to see him in the UK again. And that, considering the strength of these new songs, is enough to make you weep.The album is cowritten with a variety of Read more ...
Thembi Mutch
The capital of Mozambique pulls no punches. Parked at the old airport among sheaves of wild grass are old MiG fighter planes, as sculpturally beautiful as the massive monument made from decommissioned weapons a few hundred metres away. The new airport, a multi-million pound effort completed last year with significant Chinese help, has Dom Perignon champagne for $230 a bottle. That’s twice the national annual wage. Sculptures made from decommissioned weaponry are known as war art. Mozambique’s most famous son is the war artist Gonzalo Mabunda, a sculptor in his thirties who has exhibited Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
As someone detached from pop music (more a world, classical, jazz kind of guy) I conducted an unscientific experiment during the past few months to try and discover what the really big tunes out there were. Travelling in Paris, Mumbai, Morocco and elsewhere, I found songs that have gone global in a massive way. I kept hearing them everywhere – in clubs, by the hotel pool, in bars and taxis, blaring out of shops. The process was made easier by Shazam, the app which allows you to identify a piece of music by pointing your phone at the source (better, admittedly, for Daft Punk than for Read more ...
peter.quinn
Squeaking toy pigs. Tea pots. Bicycle pumps. Yes, the dynamic Brazilian composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal was back in town, making a rare appearance at Ronnie Scott's. Described by Miles Davis as “the most impressive musician in the world” - he first gained international recognition by playing on Miles's 1971 album Live-Evil - Pascoal's riotous polystylism incorporates jazz, rock and Brazilian music (MPB, bossa nova, chorinho, forro) to create what he calls musica universal or 'universal music'. However you label it, it's one of the most joyous noises in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s bemusing that Gogol Bordello are not a mainstream success story. Shouldn’t they be a new Green Day or a 21st century Pogues? When Rick Rubin signed them to his American Recordings for their last album, 2010’s Trans-Continental Hustle, which he also produced, they were surely going to supernova? No such luck. Despite the album being a riotously accessible corker, the New York gypsy punks’ usual moniker in passing media mention is still “global festival favourites”.Their sixth album was recorded in El Paso, Texas, and, like their last one, continues to throw Hispanic flourishes into their Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Last night the “freaky” Devendra Banhart didn’t make an appearance. No songs were performed cross-legged, nor were there any wig-outs. For the majority of the evening the 32-year-old American-Venezuelan hippy was, by his standards, practically understated. In keeping with his new album, Mala, he chose to emphasise songwriting over personality. For those of us who were beginning to lose faith in him, it all came as something of a relief.At the beginning of Banhart’s psychedelic-folk career, the tall singer’s exotic approach led many to consider him a wunderkind. His imagination was wild and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The default word for these films, made by the band Saint Etienne with their collaborator and former guitarist Paul Kelly, is "poignant". As elegiac visual poems which capture the always-evolving environment of London, they certainly are expressive. They are also often described as nostalgic, as they cast a lens across businesses and buildings, proprietors and townscapes that are now gone. The mood they evoke is one of longueur: a figurative sigh. Fine as far as it goes, but that’s passive wallowing. What they generate from my viewpoint in north London is a tremendous anger, one born from a Read more ...