New music
peter.quinn
Just how good is Gregory Porter's Be Good? Put it this way, over the course of a single song Porter can deliver an emotional payload which some jazz wannabes fail to achieve over an entire career. Combining the tropes of jazz and soul in an entirely seamless way, all wrapped up in a fabulously rich baritone, it's an album to relish from start to finish. The oft-made comparisons with the likes of greats such as Nat King Cole and Donny Hathaway appear far from fanciful.As heard on songs such as “Real Good Hands” and “Our Love” - the latter inspired by the imposing edifice of the Tower of London Read more ...
joe.muggs
Justice – pronounce it “Joosteece”, for they are as French as they come – deconstruct the opposition between style and substance. Everything about them is preposterous, from the hipster facial hair via the rock-pig antics in their A Cross The Universe tour “documentary” DVD to the way that almost the entirety of their musical palette is cribbed from their countrymen and close associates Daft Punk. They are masters of the big, empty gesture taken to ridiculous extremes, of blustering noise and gut-punching beats made strangely friendly, of the reduction of both rock and rave music to a Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Immediately before Barry Adamson started his performance, the audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall was treated to a few fragrant verses about arts cinemas and the homeless from Yorkshire poet Geoffrey Allerton. The keen-eyed soon twigged that Allerton was actually a fictional construct, part-Simon Armitage, part-Freddie Trueman, created by comedian Simon Day. A beautifully idiosyncratic prelude to a pretty idiosyncratic headline set.When Barry Adamson stalked on stage, posing at the top of a short staircase on a white Austin Powers shagpile, it would have been easy to mistake him for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Peter Gabriel announced WOMAD’s 2012 festival in Sicily this afternoon. It’s a year of anniversaries for the annual showcase of world music, with 2012 also marking the 30th year for Britain’s big brother festival. On a wintry afternoon, sharply contrasting with Sicily’s climate, Gabriel was joined at London's Italian Cultural Institute by Carlo Presenti, the institute's director, and Roy Paci (pictured below right), Sicily’s cultural polymath and musician whose past collaborators have included Manu Chao and the Netherlands' The Ex.Presenti said this year’s festival, to be held on 5–8 July at Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Not many realise it, but Diamond Dave and the Van Halen brothers have actually been back together since 2007. It’s true they only actually managed one tour before Eddie was back in rehab. But, boy, by all accounts, what form they were in. So, now they’ve recorded a new album together, is it worth getting? The bad news is that no amount of wishful thinking can alter that, now in their fifties, these guys no longer really convince with their inimitable, high-octane slacker-rock.You won’t read that on the internet VH forums, though. There, relief that the band has, at last, produced something Read more ...
peter.quinn
Naturally 7 represent the point where close-harmony singing, beatboxing and spookily accurate instrumental imitation meet. The US septet call it "vocal play" - the voice as instrument - and last night they sent dopamine levels soaring in the Barbican. The group conveys the beat-driven swagger of hip hop, the freewheeling improv of jazz and the trenchant emotion of soul, often within the confines of a single song. Their arrangements, courtesy of MD Roger Thomas, possess such textural imagination and technical finesse that they're able to traverse genres seemingly without artifice.Part of the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Oxford's Message to Bears project – a fluid collective around one Jerome Alexander – is one of music's best-kept secrets. In one and a half albums in 2008-9, Alexander created a new kind of ambient music: floating, rarefied chamber pieces in which classical instruments and folky acoustic guitars are gently embellished with electronic treatments and found sound, capturing the most delicate and fleeting of moods like slivers of time frozen and held up to the light.On this album, many things are added and some are lost. It feels informed by the live shows that Alexander and friends have Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Who knows where the time goes? Even semi-detached folk fans like me know that immortal Sandy Denny song with that title. The passage of time and passing of the seasons were great subjects for her. As some French dude put it: Ou sont les neiges d’antan? This year’s snow was coming down in Siberian clumps but that didn’t stop an enthusiastic crowd turning up for a special event – a live version of a remarkable project; singer-songwriter Thea Gilmore’s setting to music of an album’s worth of Sandy Denny lyrics, found in her notebooks after she died. It’s 30 odd years since Denny's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
With 15 songs in just 35 minutes, Field Music’s fourth album doesn’t neatly conform to the prog rock brush they’re usually stroked with. Releasing Plumb exactly two years after its double-album predecessor (Measure) illustrates how methodically Sunderland’s David and Peter Brewis approach their music. Even so, this is a warm, organic album, easy to love, easy to hum and easy to digest.(Measure) was harder to take in, and not just due to its length - its dry production made for a brittle listening experience. Plumb is friendlier on every level, inviting admission. Opening with twinkling Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Come on, the cheeky title is endearing. So it’s not the Fats Waller lyric that John Lennon would have lifted onto the album cover, but Paul McCartney has often sung of frogs and little lambs, of blackbirds and bluebirds, and even at 69 is still in touch with his inner child. Never more productively than in this homage to the age of the big-band jazz standard he ingested at his father’s feet.It’s not as if this outburst of nostalgia doesn’t belong to a through-line. With the Fabs he ceded the floor to jaunty clarinets and muted trumpets in “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “Honey Pie”, then with Wings Read more ...
graeme.thomson
I last saw Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney’s primitive garage blues duo a little under four years ago, touring their sixth album Attack & Release. Truth be told, I found them slightly heavy going. Big riffs, big drums, back-of-a-beer mat lyrics and not much else. Heard one, heard 'em all. My, but they’ve grown. Or, at least, their audience has. After a decade’s hard graft and eight albums, The Black Keys are suddenly a very big deal indeed. They play three sold-out nights at Alexandra Palace next week, while tickets for a forthcoming show at Madison Square Garden were snapped up within Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Long winters, when most outdoor activities are off the menu, must encourage creativity. Judging by the new releases in from Scandinavia, almost-constant dark and sub sub-zero temperatures would do the music of more temperate regions some good, feeding inspiration. Whether it’s Norwegians with a yen for the spooky, irresistible accordionists and disturbing singer-songwriters from Finland, or do-it-yourself Danes, all and more are here.Amongst the aspects which make Scandinavia’s music striking, especially music from Norway, are songs which don’t initially reveal where they’re going. Twists and Read more ...