New music
Kieron Tyler
Walls reclaim the soft-focus beats and keyboard wash that soundtracks the lounges of continental European hotels. The half-remembered chillout of their second album hazily drifts through a world where Ibiza, shoegazing and Krautrock travel on the same passport.Walls are Alessio Natalizia and Sam Willis. Outside Walls, both have musical day jobs. Natalizia is the mainstay of the fuzzy, shoegazing-leaning Banjo or Freakout. Willis is a producer, and one of the people behind Allez-Allez, a regular dance podcast. Their first contact came in 2009, when Banjo or Freakout got the Allez-Allez remix Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, all women were dressed by Frederick's of Hollywood and all men were a cross between David Lee Roth and Jon Bon Jovi. The Eighties-set Rock of Ages is so outlandish, it might as well be set on another planet. Instead, the all-singing, all-dancing action centres on a bar along LA’s Sunset Boulevard.There’s no doubt that Rock of Ages is absurd, but that hasn’t stopped it being reconfigured for a film that’s in production now. The high-octane cast includes Alec Baldwin, Mary J Blige, Tom Cruise, Paul Giamatti and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Its Broadway run Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The 14th album from Vince Clarke and Andy Bell is supposed to herald a change, or so we are told by their people. Have they gone Goth? Have they discovered dubstep? Like heck. The only thing that has changed appears to be Andy Bell's eerily robotic face. Don't be fooled by the title. There is nothing futuristic about the nine songs here. There isn't even a cameo on backing vocals from Raymond Baxter, the presenter of the BBC series that got to their title first.But before you start demanding a refund, have a listen. Tomorrow's World is classic handbag electro with knobs on. From the yearning Read more ...
ash.smyth
There can't be many excuses for a back-up band at a triple bill, but back it up they did at last night's The Good The Bad album launch at Madame Jojo's. Way up.Hot Fiction deserve a mention for their efforts. A two-man White Stripes (drums and bass) with - both literally and metaphorically - an extra set of balls, they play an old-school, sludged-up tangent somewhere between The Stripes and The Killers, with a few Hendrix-lix and hints of the Bayou thrown in. It's like something you might have seen on black-and-white Top of the Pops, only with better amps, tailor-made for a Guy Ritchie " Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Cocaine Blues” is a song whose murky origins lie at the very roots of blues, folk, country and rock’n’roll, possibly right back to the last days of minstrelsy. When Johnny Cash performs it on his riveting 1968 live album At Folsom Prison, it fairly hums with potency, just about as heartening as popular music gets. When Merle Haggard has a crack at “Cocaine Blues” on his latest album, however, the mood is the polar opposite. The clean easy-going tone conjures a country and western version of Hugh Laurie’s recent sedate, chart-bothering take on the blues.
Then again, Haggard, at 75, has Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By 1977, disco was a cliché to be mocked. But a few years earlier, before its ubiquity, disco was a liberating music uniting minorities on the dance floor. Funk, too, became a cliché, little more than a reductive musical cypher. Two new reissues celebrate these genres when both were still vital, still able to surprise. Disco Gold: Scepter Records & The Birth of Disco is exactly what its title says it is, while Darondo’s Listen to My Song: The Music City Sessions collects A-grade funk that had languished in the vaults until now.Disco wasn’t just the place to dance, but the music, too: a Read more ...
peter.quinn
This Edition Records debut from pianist Andrew McCormack and saxophonist Jason Yarde is a powerful marriage of brilliant musicianship and composition of the first rank. While this is only their second release in the duo format, a follow-up to the 2009 album My Duo, their attention to the smallest detail of phrasing and dynamic has been steadily honed since the days of playing together in seminal groups J-Life and Tomorrow's Warriors, dating back to the 1990s.The new album ranges from the rolling, Jarrettesque vamp of album opener "D-Town" to the duo's elaborate unpacking of "Embraceable You Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Some countries have a particular talent for choral music. Georgia, for example, has wonderful choirs, as does South Africa and, it seems, Bulgaria. Unfortunately, due to the expense of touring, we hardly get to see them. So when Le Mystère de Voix Bulgares, the female choir who embody the strange and powerful music of their homeland, came to town last night, lovers of global choral music were out in force.How they came to be here is a curious tale. The music, while based on folk singing, was actually a Soviet-era idea of creating a national musical language. In 1952 Philip Koutev created the Read more ...
joe.muggs
I never really dug Suede. I could hear great pop songwriting in some of their work, but their rampant adoption of Bowie-as-Ziggy-Stardust sonics and vocal tics seemed to be just as representative of Britpop's necrophiliac tendencies as did Oasis's tired Beatle-isms. So I'm slightly puzzled as to why I'm enjoying this record by their singer as much as I am, given that it is almost as retro – albeit in a different way.The soundscape of Black Rainbows is a return to rock after the orchestral stylings of previous solo records, but it belongs to the mid-1980s. In particular there is a Goth Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Cosmo Jarvis’s welter of ideas is sometimes too much for him. He explodes in multiple directions at once, ebullient, madcap, raucous, goofy, the very antithesis of cool (hence a 1/10 score for this in NME). He simply cannot rein it in, thus beautiful melodic orchestration fights it out with sea shanty stomping, dodgy, heartfelt rapping, rugby club choruses and Jarvis’s inability to be serious for very long. Nothing, however, can disguise the fact that there’s raw talent here, discovering itself.The Devonshire 22-year-old’s second album is demented fun. His first was a blink-and-you-missed-it Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“Are there any freshers in the audience?" asked Emma-Lee Moss halfway through last night’s set. Two voices raised a muted cheer. Whatever else your average 18-year-old might have been doing, cut loose from the apron strings for the first time in the capital city on a Friday night, they were unlikely to be listening to music this polite and well behaved. Or so you’d hope.She may be less widely heralded than Laura Marling, but both women have recently been doing their utmost to transcend the creative straitjacket of middle-class nu-folk girls-with-guitars. This, oddly, has left Moss's music Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
First off Spank Rock, has nailed the second best album title of the year. It’s sweary, bleeds punk attitude and nails a point - rather than the usual focus-grouped opaquely resonant crap bands come up with (best album title of 2011, by the way: Mogwai’s Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will – brilliant!).Secondly Baltimore MC Naem Juwan once again lives up to the hype, not easy to do when Tweet-trending futuroid numpties have been frothing over him non-stop for the five years since his debut album made them cream their jeans. Spank Rock brought a broken computer to the hip hop party in 2006 Read more ...