New music
Peter Culshaw
One of the problems with Peter Gabriel’s back catalogue for me, I tell him, as he is reclining in an office at EMI in London, is the sounds - some of them really are very dated. Gabriel would often pioneer a sound like the reverse-gated drum sound - others would imitate, it becomes trendy, over-used, and then hugely unfashionable.“Exactly!” he concurs. The excuse for our chat is that he has a new album out called New Blood, reworkings of some of his most celebrated songs done with an orchestra working with arranger and composer John Metcalfe. “The subtext of your question I take to be that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Björk’s Biophilia is a five-headed organism: the album (itself issued in five different editions), the app, the documentary, the live show and the website. Here in Harpa, Reykjavík’s spanking-new concert hall, Björk is in her home town, delivering the live show, performing the music. She’s playing residencies rather than touring. Instruments have been specially made. A giant spark arcs between two Tesla coils. Four massive pendulums swing.Manchester’s Campfield Market Hall snagged the premiere in June, and now her residency in Reykjavík has begun. Last night – timed to coincide with the Read more ...
ash.smyth
Two years ago, Spiritualized reprised their bestselling (one might say "only major") 1997 album, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, in the curiously titled concert series, Don't Look Back. Since then, their frontman (one might say "only notable band member") Jason "Spaceman" Pierce has been constantly promising new material, along with persistent assurances that the band's (would-be) seventh album will hearken back to the glory days of yester-millennium and also have a more-than-usual inclination toward pop. The oft-postponed release is Read more ...
Russ Coffey
When a band of a certain vintage comes in from the cold suddenly to record a new album you can reasonably expect one of three things: total nonsense, a half-decent throwback or, if you’re very lucky, a proper comeback. Eighties art-metallers Jane’s Addiction have already had one pretty impressive return this millennium. That was 2003’s Stray, their first original release since 1990’s classic Ritual de lo Habitual. The question fans of Lollapalooza music have been asking in the last few months is, can they pull off the same trick again?So far, reactions to the record have been polarised Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Has the great pop diva Beyoncé plagiarised the great modern dance diva Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker? This is the burning question that has today sent disco popsters and fans of austere contemporary dance in a feverish crush to YouTube, comparing Beyoncé’s new "Countdown" vid with De Keersmaeker’s art-house dance Rosas danst Rosas. They’re turning over micro-flashes of Beyoncé, running them back, comparing them with… well, you have plenty of choose from, as De Keersmaeker doesn’t believe in throwing away her ideas in 10 seconds.And without any doubt, as anyone with eyes can see, the resemblances Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s obviously a coincidence. Backbeat, the story of The Beatles’ Hamburg days, their ill-fated bassist and John Lennon's art-school mate Stuart Sutcliffe hits the West End the same week that Martin Scorsese's George Harrison documentary Living in the Material World comes out. Even ignoring comparisons between the two, Backbeat is an incoherent mess.Sutcliffe’s story has become a perennial, not limited to Beatle book shelves. Granada TV’s Midnight Angel covered it in 1990. The BBC’s Stuart Sutcliffe - The Lost Beatle did so in 2005. The film Backbeat came out in 1994. It was directed by Iain Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Remember the big music? Eighties big. Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” big. Simple Minds’ “Waterfront” big. Anthony Gonzalez does. He might say his fifth album as M83 is inspired by The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1995 double set Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, but it’s built on foundations from a decade earlier.Ten years on from the first M83 album, Antibes’s Gonzalez hasn’t travelled quite as far as Messier 83, the galaxy whose name he’s adopted, but he has arrived at a point where intimacy has become distant. His reconfigured shoegazing – which prefigured much of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s almost dark. Frescoes depicting the cycle of life are barely visible. They could be shadows. Waves of sound pulse through the mausoleum of Norwegian artist Emanuel Vigeland. Fiddle player Nils Økland is feeding the 15-second delay with peals that reverberate around the space, folding back into themselves. It’s a spooky, unforgettable introduction to FolkeLarm, Oslo’s annual festival of Nordic folk music.FolkeLarm is a jolt. Not only because of it being a deep-dish serving of Nordic folk music, but also because previous visits to Oslo have found the city under half a metre of snow. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Wayne Shorter's current band do strange things with time - it seems to stretch and bend like in some subatomic experiment featuring rogue neutrinos. Their nifty time signatures would fuse any computer. The nature of the music itself seems outside time, both echoing that modern jazz annus mirabilis 1959 and being futuristic at the same time.Shorter enjoys quoting his old cohort Miles Davis’s more enigmatic comments like, “Do you ever get fed up of making music that sounds like music?” What Shorter and his band do is at any rate not like anyone else’s music – they use a huge palette of colours Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A few years ago – peaking in 2007 - “cosmic disco” was a brief clubland rage. It came mostly from Oslo and consisted of calm, bearded Norwegian dudes creating a fabulous psychedelic stew of groovy house, Italo-disco, and their own ineffable proggy weirdness. Where filter disco, the unkillable dance-pop sub-genre kick-started by Stardust’s “The Music Sounds Better With You”, has mostly been hugely unadventurous, relying on basic retro pilfering, cosmic disco was always marinated in the deep, druggy pulse of the best nightlife. Names such as Lindstrom, Prins Thomas and Todd Terje rightly Read more ...
ash.smyth
In the 19 years of his million-selling gangsta-bragging pimp-shizzling hip-hop-rapping career, the man born Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr has gone to some lengths to inform us that his name is, in fact, Snoop Dogg. He has appeared as himself - or a transparent alter ego - in several films, "starred" in a raft of low-grade at-home-with-Snoop TV shows, referred to himself endlessly during interviews in the third person (and in his own weird third tense), and has about a thousand lyrics, songs and album titles with all or part of his moniker Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It’s been a long-standing source of surprise to me how Nerina Pallot continues to operate a whisker under the radar. From the get-go, 10 years back, she’s had the voice, songs and looks to be a star. Maybe a decade ago was the wrong time for her. But now, with her musical style residing somewhere between Laura Marling and Adele, surely she’s perfect for today’s market. The critics sure think so. In the last few months, column inches have argued that her new album’s the one to really break her into the mainstream. I agree. But when she walked out on stage at the Shepherds Bush Empire I couldn’ Read more ...