New music
igor.toronyilalic
It's often more fun on the margins. The pickings are richer. The view is clearer. You can take aim easier. The AV Festival has spent more than eight years here, on the counter-cultural edges, delving into the divisional cracks between art, music and film. This year, with the Cultural Olympiad swallowing up everything for its year-long national pat on the back, independent artistic thinking is at a premium. AV, however, have not only escaped the Olympiad's clutches but have upended the boastful spirit of 2012 with a theme that is about as co-optable for national self-aggrandisement as a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This album caught me completely off guard. The Stranglers work of the late Seventies/early Eighties is classic post-punk pop but their critical and (slight) commercial comeback since 2004’s Norfolk Coast album has been less convincing. Giants, however, is a corker. The band’s oldest member, drummer Jet Black, may now be 73 – and is pictured on the CD wearing an oxygen mask – but this is the sound of a reinvigorated quartet utilising their last-gang-in-town status to create music that’s poignant, tuneful, and unafraid of adventure.Giants startles from the start, opening with instrumental “ Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
The X Factor has been rewriting the Gregorian calendar since its inception in September 2004. It’s now more acceptable (nay, expected) for major label pop acts’ careers to fall like dominos after the first year, while at the other end of the scale we’re sped into an accelerated, broader-spanning nostalgia - a longing sensation triggered mere minutes after the ITV1+1 broadcast. It’s with this in mind that the staging and characterisation of The X Factor Live caused such intrigue.Last year’s finalists were largely paraded before us, styled exactly how we saw them on television and singing songs Read more ...
mark.kidel
Laura Marling has a way, in mid-song, of arching her head back as far as it will go, as if she were opening herself up to the heavens. She’s never been one to let herself go on stage, at least not physically: there are no unnecessary histrionics, just a surrender to the extraordinary force that pours through when she stands and delivers.Bristol's Colston Hall, she told the audience after her opening number, means a great deal to her: this is where her dad brought her at 14 to see her first ever live gig. “Who was playing?” someone shouted from the audience. “Ryan Adams!” she answered. “ Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s a sign of Bruce Springsteen’s contribution to the canon of American rock music that we no longer spend time comparing his music to others. Springsteen’s problem tends to be living up to different versions of himself. It seems like every new album is hailed as a return to somebody’s favourite Springsteen, whether it’s acoustic confessional, balls-out stadium rock or great American storyteller. From what had been trailed of Wrecking Ball I was anticipating the return of the angry man-of-the-people, which is probably my favourite. Wrecking Ball has been billed as Springsteen's response Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I do not envy the Portico Quartet’s stage manager. The Komedia stage is not very big and most of it is covered in wire, effects boxes, electronic gizmos and other units. Amidst this carnage of cables, before the band arrives on stage, stands laptop DJ, Flying White Dots (aka Bryan Whellams), DJ Rob Da Bank’s “favourite bootleg mashup artist” (so Whellams' business card later tells me). He entertains the milling studenty crowd with his alternative versions of Elton John, Simon & Garfunkel, America and others, as well as Angelo Badalamenti’s grinding "The Pink Room" from the Twin Peaks film Read more ...
joe.muggs
Jan St Werner, half of German duo Mouse On Mars, recently held forth on their inspirations, citing the tension between metrical freedom and metronomic funk in the work of Sun Ra and Funkadelic as their key motivator. And while it might seem odd to compare two synth-twiddlers from Cologne and Düsseldorf with the great mavericks of mid-century American Afrofuturism, when you hear their music it makes complete sense.Watch the video for "Polaroyced":St Werner and his partner Andi Toma have been making weird music solidly for two decades now. Often they've seemed like the absolute cliché Read more ...
peter.quinn
Released last month on One Fine Day Records to excellent reviews, last night saw the first of an 11-date UK tour for Gerry Diver's remarkable multimedia work, The Speech Project. Conceived over the past four years by musician, composer and producer Diver, a former member of Irish world music group Sin é and Shane McGowan's The Popes, at its heart The Speech Project features new and archival spoken word recordings of seminal Irish musicians and singers including Shane MacGowan, Christy Moore, Damien Dempsey, Joe Cooley, Danny Meehan, Martin Hayes and Margaret Barry.Specific motifs or phrases Read more ...
joe.muggs
A mea culpa from me: I never gave Sbtrkt's records the attention they deserved. I always thought they were a capitulation, a softening of the radical developments of the post grime and dubstep generation with more traditional musicality and indie affectations to reach out to a more generalist, NME reading audience... and in a way they are – but, I came to realise, that's not a bad thing, and certainly not cynically done.Having listened to last year's self-titled debut album more thoroughly, it became clear that there is a distinct and often deliciously absorbing character to Aaron Jerome's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The ubiquity of the all-conquering Adele has obscured the fact the her trail was blazed by Katie Melua. She was the biggest UK-based female act in 2007, when her album Pictures became a world-wide best seller. Five years on, with the release of her fifth album, you wonder if there’s room left for Melua.'Secret Symphony' has the feeling of comfort zones being reinstatedHer last album, 2010’s The House, was produced by William Orbit rather than Mike Batt, the Wombles mastermind who had steered her career up to that point. Although Guy Chambers cropped up on one track, it was mostly written by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The death of Davy Jones is a surprise. A horrible surprise. Less than a year ago he was on stage at the Royal Albert Hall in the reunited Monkees, full of life, hogging the stage, hamming it up and celebrating the wonderful songs of America’s manufactured answer to The Beatles.He was English of course, born in Manchester, and brought into The Monkees to add some British sparkle. Good-looking, cheeky and mop-topped, he always got the girl. His pop voice and maracca-shaking were the focus for American girls looking for a Beatle type on their home soil.He didn’t get there from nowhere. Before Read more ...
joe.muggs
Tonight on Channel 4, a new music series begins with a fantastic premise. A group of music obsessives drive around the USA in a London black cab, finding interesting musicians and recording them performing and talking in the back of the cab. Sounds a little bit like the 2008 Stephen Fry in America series, doesn't it? Well maybe, except Black Cab Sessions has been broadcast online since 2007.Watch the Black Cab Sessions trailer:And there's the rub. BCS has now featured hundreds of acts in various cabs, from complete unknowns to top ten-bothering popstars, from gangsta rappers to Brian Read more ...