New music
Kimon Daltas
Comebacks may be all the rage but Elvis Costello just keeps on going. It's the third year running that he has taken his band The Imposters on the Revolver Tour, featuring The Spectacular Spinning Songbook: a giant carnival wheel of songs which audience members are brought on stage to spin and dictate the set list.Not everything is left to chance, however, and the evening began with a rollicking medley of “Welcome to the Working Week”, “No Action”, “Strict Time”, “Accidents Will Happen” and “Next Time Round”. In what was the middle of three consecutive nights at the Albert Hall, you might Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
That KT Tunstall has released probably her most introspective album to date is unsurprising, given that the past year has seen both the end of her marriage and the death of her father. But the trouble with introspective albums is that, without a certain rawness, they’re not always the most engaging listen. Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon contains some of the most beautiful music of the St Andrews songwriter’s career but, like when people tell you their dreams, it isn’t always very interesting.The album’s name reflects its two halves, recorded in separate sessions in the Arizona desert with Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
For certain types (yes, I was that serious-minded teenager) in the late Seventies Rod Stewart made a convenient hate figure – a coke-snorting dinosaur with interchangeable blondes on his arm who, having made some decent records, was now making banal ones like “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” (and that was one of the better ones). Last night, the only moment Rod looked slightly embarrassed was singing that travesty of Disco, at 68. Even Rod now admits discs like 1980’s Foolish Behaviour were “a pile of shit”.But, in a curious twist, having spent the last decade doing covers, Rod seems to be on a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Boards of Canada have it nailed. If we are to believe what we’re told, Scottish brothers Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin are semi-permanently holed up in rustic heathlands south-west of Edinburgh, beavering with mystical intensity at analogue electronica. Every few years they release an enigmatic slice of it that’s pure, classic Warp Records on… Warp Records.They have developed a non-image that somehow intimates whiffs of the occult, particularly of The Wicker Man variety, of spooky 1970s public information films and general uncanny Berberian Sound Studio-style weirdness. Not since the prime Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“He who sings frightens away his ills.” Cerys Matthews has spent a lifetime heeding the wise counsel of Don Quixote. Born at the tailend of the Sixties, she grew up in the Welsh tradition of musical surroundsound before veering right into the heart of Britpop as the wailing amber-topped siren of Catatonia. Four albums and many stadium triumphs later, the painful break-up more than a decade ago was fed through the distorting prism of the tabloids. Since then Matthews has worked on a remarkable reinvention that reaches a new crest in 2013.The life of post-Catatonia Cerys has been built around Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Titling their long-delayed second album The Second Coming meant The Stone Roses had run out of religious metaphors for their 2012 reunion. They already had a song called “I Am the Resurrection”. Still, with super-fan director Shane Meadows on hand to capture their return, actions spoke louder than words. At their homecoming concert in Manchester’s Heaton Park, he caught their singer Ian Brown touching the outstretched hands of the faithful, anointing them with his mystic power.To some, the return of The Stone Roses after their messy demise in 1996 was tantamount to a spiritual rebirth. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Few albums evoke the essence of wind, but landscapes buffeted by the elements are vividly depicted on Phildel’s The Disappearance of the Girl. With frost-coated but warm-centred songs about darkness, sacrifice and the wolf as a dispenser of penitence, this could be gothic. Instead, despite the coffin, funerals and a switchblade, The Disappearance of the Girl is tonally nuanced, more the soundtrack to its subject’s search for equilibrium than a series of single vignettes.What’s actually on The Disappearance of the Girl is in danger of being upstaged by its creator's admittedly compelling back Read more ...
David Benedict
It opened with a standing ovation. And in a place the size of the 02 – the venue put on this earth to make Luton airport feel better – that’s impressive. It was that kind of evening: not so much Streisand in concert as an opportunity for worshippers at Barbra’s shrine to do a whole lot of basking in her genuinely unparalleled glory. Fifty years at the pinnacle of popular music is not to be sneezed at. That she can sing with a 60-piece orchestra and still deliver shiver-inducing money notes at the age of 71 is truly something. It is not, however, everything.Her vocal power and idiosyncrasy, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ian Dury: Lord Upminster / Ian Dury & the Music Students: 4,000 Weeks HolidayAs a single, "Spasticus Autisticus" was never going to be an easy sell. Ian Dury's reaction to the United Nation’s declaration of 1981 as the International Year of the Disabled was caustic and confrontational. Witty too. The BBC decided it was in poor taste and gave it no airplay. Yet it featured in the opening ceremony of last year’s Paralympic Games and the BBC broadcast it. Dury would have appreciated the irony."Spasticus Autisticus" was the first single released by Dury after he had left Stiff Records. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
CSS appeared riding the 2007 “nu rave” music media furore – their catsuit-wearing lead singer, Lovefoxxx, even dated one of scenester leaders The Klaxons for a while. That whole business is ancient history but, unfortunately, a host of great bands associated with the hype – notably The Klaxons and New Young Pony Club – have had a job finding purchase since their initial moment in the sun. The same applies to the Brazilian four-piece Cansei de Ser Sexy, a creative man down since the only male member of the band, Adriano Cintra, left last year. From the evidence of their fourth album, and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Reasons behind the prolonged absence of Queens of the Stone Age are legion, including line-up turbulence, successful side projects and the near-death experience of band linchpin Josh Homme. As if to acknowledge and compensate for the lengthy gap in new material since 2007‘s Era Vulgaris, there’s little that hasn’t been thrown into the ...Like Clockwork mix: power ballads, industrial sleaze, surprising reunions, the sound of broken glass - and Elton John on piano.That contribution - the joyous backdrop, half-buried in the mix, of a song called “Fairweather Friends” that begins like something Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The show which Ute Lemper brought to the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the London Literature Festival - “Pablo Neruda: A Song Cycle of Love Poems” - is brand-new; the six-piece band (with which she has just recorded it, and which will be touring it) was performing it live for the first time. This Neruda project, a series of 12 love poems, is different from Lemper's most recent Charles Bukowski venture, which she succinctly described to Samira Ahmed this week on Women's Hour as "very garage, jazz-influenced, open, theatrical and dirty". As a continuous piece, the Neruda is also a departure Read more ...