New music
graeme.thomson
Camille O'Sullivan: Changeling, Assembly Rooms *****The Assembly Rooms may have reopened for this year's Fringe following a very swanky refurb, but someone obviously forgot to put sufficient thought into the practicalities of getting people in and out during the festival. The opening night of Camille O’Sullivan’s brief sold-out run started 40 minutes late after a chaotic queuing system apparently devised in tribute to MC Escher left much of the crowd – which, thrillingly, included Les Dennis – more than a little testy.It’s testament to O’Sullivan’s charisma and gifts as a performer that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Nik Kershaw (b 1958) is best known for a run of hits in the mid-Eighties, songs such as “Wouldn’t It Be Good”, “I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down on Me”, “The Riddle” and “Wide Boy”. He achieved international success and played Live Aid in 1985. Raised in Ipswich, he had a background in local bands before his breakthrough came with 1984’s Human Racing album. His look from the era, all mullet, snood and casual suit, has become definitive Eighties imagery.Kershaw spent much of the Nineties working with and writing for others. As well as playing with Elton John, he wrote hits including Chesney Hawkes Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The best music has the power to lift the listener out of whatever else she may be doing, to transport her somewhere else. I listened to Traces, fifth album from doyenne of Scottish folk Karine Polwart, in a cafe in Edinburgh in what for that city is the busiest month of the year. Outside it was raining and the pavements were crowded, but as the record expanded to fill my headphones there was space in my reality for very little else.That being said, Traces is an album that is firmly grounded in reality - whether it's the burning political issues of contemporary Scotland or the singer's own Read more ...
mark.kidel
Antony & the Johnsons’ melancholy songs of love and loss, steeped in a contemporary classical aesthetic, lend themselves to the full orchestral treatment. There is also something theatrical about the singer’s delivery, not so much high opera hysterics as more subtle explorations of the darker ranges of human emotion. Cut the World brings together live orchestral versions of a number of Antony’s best tracks drawn from his four studio albums. The title track alone is a new composition, featuring the artist’s signature sense of poetry, vocals whose quality of almost unbearable vulnerability Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Trojan Presents Freedom Sounds, a Celebration of Jamaican MusicKieron TylerThree-and-a-half minutes in, a heavily reverbed drum suddenly rattles and the track heads off into outer space. Morse-code bass dominates, the hi-hat swishes and odd bits of the full instrumental track waft in and out. Something like a home fire alarm bleeps. “None Shall Escape the Judgement” begins normally enough, a mid-tempo two-step reggae shuffler with a swooning, devotional vocal from Johnny Clarke. But really, it's two songs in one, that second half the creation of sonic auteur King Tubby and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kody Nielsen is possibly best known outside his native New Zealand as the producer of singer-songwriter Bic Runga, but since her star shines very much brighter at home than in Europe, that isn’t necessarily an especially high profile. He has also long been front man of The Mint Chicks, self-proclaimed “trouble gum art punks”, but now they’ve split up he returns with a new outfit, Opossum, and an even newer bag of tricks.Opossum’s sound is rooted in surf music, but only in the loosest sense, borrowing keening harmony vocals and chord structures from the classic Californian sound. Around these Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Diamanda Galas is a woman who once wrote a book called Sh*t of God and whose avant-garde screeching on subjects like AIDS and schizophrenia frequently takes gothic into an area where it could scare bats. Her CV includes stints as a research scientist, prostitute and drug addict. Unsurprisingly, she isn’t normally seen in context. But then there aren’t many line-ups quite like Antony Hegerty’s 2012 Meltdown, where for a month dissident singers rub shoulders with twilight artists. In fact, on a bill also including the likes of Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and Marc Almond, Galas seems amongst peers Read more ...
peter.quinn
This debut album from Leeds-based Roller Trio epitomises the can-do, DIY approach of the younger generation of jazz musicians. With their achievements recognised by a prestigious Peter Whittingham Jazz Award last year, the band - James Mainwairing (tenor sax/fx), Luke Wynter (guitar/fx) and Luke Reddin-Williams (drums) - sent a tape of their first concert to the London-based F-IRE label who subsequently invited the band to release an album on its "F-IRE presents" imprint.With influences ranging from Tim Berne to Queens of the Stone Age to J Dilla, as well as artists much closer to home such Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
FRIDAY 27 JULY Whatever happened to roughing it? Camp Bestival is, famously, more an upmarket middle England fete than a festival in the Hawkwind-play-Stonehenge sense but, still, why would anyone queue two and a half hours for the “Posh Wash” showers? Barring a below-waist hygiene disaster, surely Wet Wipes and water are sufficient for a weekend? Apparently for many, many Camp Bestivalers, like global travellers who insist on starting their day with toast and cornflakes whether they’re in Surrey or Outer Mongolia, showering is a necessity worth wasting a large chunk of the day over. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The autumn 2012 season at the Barbican Centre offers an international history of photography, Juliette Binoche in Strindberg, a train packed with African music, a festival of ecstatic, devotional and psychedelic music, and a film made by London schoolgirls about Bosnia, as well as classical music from the LSO and two new associate ensembles.
Last chance to see summer exhibitions, Bauhaus: Art as Life (until 12 August) and Designing 007 - Fifty years of Bond Style (until 5 September). Rodgers & Hammerstein's musical Carousel comes to the Barbican in August 2012, for just 37 Read more ...
Peter Culshaw and Garth Cartwright
You know, as someone tweeted, that the acid has kicked in when you see Prince Harry wearing a duck’s hat backstage, writes Peter Culshaw. For every newcomer like Harry or Channel 4’s Jon Snow, who raved about it, there were as many others others for whom WOMAD is an essential part of the British “summer” (although this year they were lucky with the weather). Now 30, which makes it an institution, the Peter Gabriel inspired Festival is a pretty well-oiled machine by now.While some of the more famous headliners - Femi Kuti, Khaled, Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club - were predictable, and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Describing the music of Franz Nicolay is a formidable task: it’s almost as easy to imagine the work of some of the bands he has loaned his considerable talents to in the past - most notably during his five years as a member of The Hold Steady - and then imagine the exact opposite. As proficient on accordion, saw and banjo as he is on keyboard or guitar; Nicolay’s music fuses elements of folk and punk with polka, gypsy and klezmer influences to create an articulate, joyful mix that is always entertaining.At least, that’s how I would have described it before my first listen to Do The Struggle, Read more ...