New music
Russ Coffey
The anticipation of Glen Campbell’s valedictory concerts has gone far beyond the goodbye to his music. It’s involved a reflection on his entire life. The sugar-throated cowboy with film-star looks and ballads as epic as daybreak in Arkansas has lived life like a great American novel. One of 12 children of a sharecropper, he went on to play the guitar with The Beach Boys, act with John Wayne, marry four times, and count Ronald Reagan as his friend. But with the onset of Alzheimer’s this is the last time the public will get to see him reflecting on his extraordinary years.Recent interviewers Read more ...
david.cheal
These days Tom Waits lives in the boondocks of California with his wife and co-writer Kathleen Brennan and their three children. A settled life sometimes makes for dull art. Not in his case. At 61 he has just made one of the albums of his life. Seven years have passed since its predecessor, Real Gone, and he seems to have got over his bathroom-beatbox phase (it was thrilling but at times almost unlistenable) and emerged at a place where he still connects with the urge to be a loner, to be a lover, to flee, to join in, to whimper, to rage and to roar, but in a musical idiom that doesn’t sound Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I am a lady of the sea, I’m a lady of the water,” declares French sonic auteur Camille. “Water is life and we forget too much about this.” Her new album, Ilo Veyou, is filled with water. There’s the “Bubble Lady”, the “Wet Boy” and the “Shower” that’s a refuge. Ilo Veyou is also about her voice – wordplay, the rhythms it makes, the farty sounds, the distracted humming, the tender melodies she sings. But it’s about a new phase in life, too: becoming a mother.Asked why she wrote of the shower as a refuge, she says, “It’s warm and watery. We want to stay where we are in a comfortable position. Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Gary Numan and Cliff Richard are clearly kindred spirits. One was born Gary Webb, the other Harry Webb. Both have strangely youthful appearances, though one owes it to tennis while the other looks as if he owes it to the blood of virgins. Both are deeply unfashionable yet have fiercely loyal fan bases. And a quick fact check reveals that Numan's "Cars" replaced Cliff's "We Don't Talk Any More" at Number One 32 years ago last month.And that's where the similarities end. Dead Son Rising is a Frankenstein's monster of an album, made up of old demos with new bits grafted on. The biggest Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Norwegian, Ane Brun’s biggest impact has been in Sweden, where she lives. Since her last studio album, she’s toured and recorded with Peter Gabriel. Her new album again finds her diving off the expected path, throwing herself forcefully onto new musical ground.Her voice is still recognisable. Crystalline, tremulous and keening, it’s meant to bear emotion. But the aptly titled It All Starts With One might as well be a debut album. Always a stellar songwriter, Brun chose to get her material across in a familiar, largely folk-styled way. It could be the Gabriel experience that's pushed Read more ...
joe.muggs
A good measure of the passion felt for an act is how much of their crowd dresses like them. And though Leslie Feist is hardly Lady Gaga in the image stakes, it's gratifying that even in a rush to get to our seats I'm able to count at least five “Feist fringes” on audience members that I pass. It's a subtle tribute to a subtle artist, one who has come to major success without fanfare or grandstanding and attracts a discerning and knowledgeable fanbase.However passionate a crowd is, though, theatre shows have their own set of issues that can stifle even the best performers. Sitting down in rows Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The title Rising Doom hints that the second album from 24-year-old Paris-based Paul Régimbeau may not have much in common with the output of his fellow countryman and electronic dance music producer David Guetta. “Where Them Girls At?” this is not. The French are famed for their cheese but even fans of Roquefort have been known to balk at Guetta’s hideous amalgam of the least likeable club sounds of the last 20 years. Guetta’s is, unfortunately, the blueprint that rising commercial producers must ape, especially now the American market has opened to them. Mondkopf can, then, loosely speaking Read more ...
Thembi Mutch
“When I first came to Zanzibar I was expecting there to be a lot of local music in local cafés and bars on the radio. In reality it was the Spice Girls or "Barbie Girl". It was so disappointing, the state of the local music scene. Everyone was listening to soulless foreign music, American hip hop and gangsta rap, loud and angry and very foreign to the culture. It seemed people just weren’t interested in all the wonderful local music.”Yusuf Mahmoud talks with considered precision. There’s a whir of generators and heavy machinery going on in the background - the new port in Zanzibar is Read more ...
bruce.dessau
After a quarter of a century at the alt-rock coalface Canada's, Cowboy Junkies can hardly be accused of slouching. Sing In My Meadow is part three of a rapid-fire four-album project that began last year with Renmin Park, which was inspired by a trip to China, and continued with a tribute to the late Vic Chestnutt. This time they have paid tribute to themselves, releasing a studio album recorded over four intensive days in which they attempt to emulate the more volcanic elements of their live performances.The Junkies are usually dominated by the sexy, sepulchral vocals of Margo Timmins, but Read more ...
matilda.battersby
If Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds tells us anything it is that Noel got all the songwriting genes in the Gallagher family. Compare its melodies to those by Liam and his Beady Eye chums, and you will sigh in relief at a reminder of why you were an Oasis fan in the first place. But I’m afraid that’s pretty much all it does. It reminds us that Liam’s talent for lilting harmonies is prodigious, but seems to deviate little further from the path trodden (so brilliantly) 15 years ago by Oasis’s best albums (What’s the Story) Morning Glory and Be Here Now.Going it alone has given Noel greater Read more ...
howard.male
When I first saw this Malian singer-songwriter a few months ago at a showcase gig in a grimly carpeted basement bar in Clerkenwell it was hard to imagine a less appropriate space for such a regally beautiful woman to be found in. Yet within a couple of mantra-like songs she had conjured her own ambience, causing the tardy space to become irrelevant, at least until the last notes died away.So I was more than looking forward to having this experience repeated last night at the Jazz Café, but this time with a full band supporting her. For although at the Slaughtered Lamb she had captivated with Read more ...
joe.muggs
An album that encompasses pan-global collaborations, iPad/Phone apps, internet jiggery-pokery, art installations, live multimedia shows and even a tuning system, with the “Ultimate Edition” of the album coming complete with a set of tuning forks to demonstrate this. As ever, Björk Guðmundsdóttir is showing no shortage of ambition. But is it any good?The unimaginative answer is: yes, if you like that sort of thing. Björk sounds so completely unlike anyone else, and so standard criteria don't apply. There is a notably meditative air to many of the tracks, though, as demonstrated on the opening Read more ...