New music
peter.quinn
Truly an ensemble cast, the Wayne Shorter Quartet's playing on Without A Net - marking Shorter's return to Blue Note Records after 43 years - fuses disparate elements into something transcendent and utterly original. From the slow burn of “Myrrh” to the searching, high-velocity romanticism of “Starry Night”, two of six new Shorter compositions featured, the album takes small group music-making to another dimension. The uniquely collegial four-way dialogue has been developed since the quartet - Shorter plus pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade - first assembled Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Aimee Mann must surely be one of the most unstarry of stars. While most of her fans were still in the bar thinking about what they might have as a pre-gig aperitif, she strolled onstage to join support act Ted Leo for a couple of new songs they have written together. No grand diva entrance here, she just strapped on a bass guitar and stood next to the Costello-ish Leo pulling at those strings. Moral? Never ignore the support act, it might feature the person you've paid to see.When Mann returned after the interval there was no costume change, no big fanfare to signal the start of her set, Read more ...
joe.muggs
There are so many people ready to hate pop-rock-dubstep crossover band Modestep, and no wonder. They are good looking young men, taking what they want from whatever styles are around them, without any regard for cool or hipness. They make a massive racket full of screeching and crashing noises blended with cheesy melodies, which seems pretty much aimed at attracting girls and getting boys throwing themselves around like fools. They are, in short, everything old people have always hated about young people's music.If you want to hate them too, it's not difficult: there are some very crap bits Read more ...
howard.male
Bassekou Kouyaté’s ngoni looks like a real bugger to play. Its hollow body is the size and shape of a child’s cricket bat and its rounded fretless neck is thinner than that of a broomstick. It’s a mystery how anyone gets a note out of this ancestor of the banjo's four strings, never mind play the kind of galloping, coruscating solos that this Malian virtuoso gets out of it. It seems fitting to begin by talking about and celebrating the instruments and the blindingly brilliant musicians who play them, rather than the tragically complex mess that the country they come from currently finds Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: 94 Baker Street RevisitedAlthough the label is the only aspect of The Beatles’ Apple venture to endure, there was more to it than half-baked or ephemeral concerns like Apple Electronics, the Apple Boutique and the almost still-born Apple Studio. Although sporadic, Apple Films lasted. The launch of Apple Corps Ltd in early 1968 was preceded in June 1967 by the formation of Apple Publishing, a concern designed to foster songwriting talent and propagate bands which The Fabs thought had potential. 94 Baker Street Revisited - the fifth in a series - compiles 22 tracks from Apple Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
On first play No Selfish Heart, the solo debut from The Phantom Band’s stately baritone Rick Anthony, sounds a world away from the sonic experimentation often played out in the singer’s work elsewhere. Take the time to listen closely, however, and a collection that seems to take its cues from traditional folk songwriting reveals itself to be far more complex: beautiful, menacing and darkly comic.While it’s not uncommon for such solo efforts to be several years in the making, No Selfish Heart has had an even longer genesis than most - with some of this material from Anthony’s ‘Redbeard’ alter- Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Biffy Clyro's sixth album certainly wins in the value for money stakes. Opposites is a double album clocking in at 78 minutes which finds the Kilmarnock trio developing their big, expansive sound and getting to grips, both lyrically and musically, with their arena-bestriding status. It is bold, brash and exciting in places, but it also feels as if it is continuing the process of smoothing over the rough edges which made the band so interesting when they first emerged in the early noughties.It is easy to dismiss Biffy as part of the genus Hotelus Tidyupus – that well-mannered literate Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Fronting her four piece band - pianist Peter Edwards and saxophonist Binker Golding among them - the young jazz/soul singer Zara McFarlane performs a mix of new songs and tunes from her album, Until Tomorrow. Among the former, “Woman in the Olive Groves” is inspired by a midnight taxi ride through southern Italy, passing an African woman by the highway, among the olive groves, trading her sex.This is set beside “Chiaroscuro” – what a word to get your jazz chops around – which gives Golding the chance to demonstrate the effect of light against dark in sound. There's a fine version of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For a decade these two outfits, the Hammer & Tongue poetry collective and the Slipjam:B crew of hip hop MCs, have been taking each other on. They both run their own successful nights but this evening is their yearly face-off. As it reaches its climax, after a series of rounds, the two units are onstage together, MCs stage right, poets stage left, taking turns to front up, laying into each other, riding a thin line between affable digs and bawdy insult.Poet Michael James Parker heads to the front. Flick-haired, 6’ 4” and wearing a blissed grin, his verse goes for the existential nub of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After seven years, Aled Jones is stepping down as presenter of Radio 3's Sunday evening programme, The Choir. During his stint at the helm of the 90-minute show, the ebullient Welshman has showcased choral classics ancient and modern, hosted choirs from Africa, Denmark and Fiji, and fronted a memorable special on Richard Rodney Bennett.Since apparently no single individual could replace Jones (yet), Radio 3 has lined up six special editions of The Choir, each of them presented by a notable name from the choral music sphere. Conductor Suzi Digby (pictured below), who specialises in working Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When Mancunian trio Delphic appeared a couple of years back they said all the right things. They were modest about themselves but fiercely into the music, acknowledged their home city’s heritage but were keen not to use it as a tacky profile raiser, and they also adhered to an appealing and faintly Kraftwerk-ian deadpan visual aesthetic. The music on their debut album, Acolyte, however, while spirited and a blast in concert, had a job creeping out from under the shadow of New Order. It charted, nevertheless, and the band built a sizeable following.This time, in the wake of their song “Good Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The last proper Ulrich Schnauss album – there have been collaborations and pseudonymous outings since – was going to be hard to top. Goodbye, released in 2007, breathtakingly took shoegazing further out than ever before: although gossamer, its sonic depth inexorably pulled you in. Now, with A Long Way to Fall, the Berlin producer and remixer has finally returned, solo, under his own name. He’s moved on, but is as assured as before.Some of the collaborations between then and now took Schnauss into techno and drum & bass, elements of which cross over into A Long Way to Fall. Initially, the Read more ...