New music
Kieron Tyler
Mick Jagger is heading up a band named SuperHeavy. Also in on the project are Joss Stone, AR Rahman (composer of the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack), Dave Stewart (the former Eurythmic) and Damian Marley. It seems outlandish and the product of an overheated PR person’s imagination, but many things in life can be both. Yet, this is real, not an April Fool-type joke.A single, titled “Millionaire”, is supposed to come out in September. The producers are Jagger and Stewart. Rahman has written a song called "Satyameva Jayate”, which Jagger is to sing in Urdu. Presumably, he does speak Urdu. Read more ...
mark.kidel
While Michael Eavis’s fields were colonised by the solstice hordes, transforming a tranquil farmstead into a vibrant (and muddy) drop city, a very different and much smaller crowd assembled in the enchanting grounds of Dartington Hall in south Devon, for the second edition of Home, "a Festival with Acoustic Music at its Heart".Now spread over Friday and Saturday, Home offers a family-friendly, laid-back and warmly intimate alternative to the star-heavy events of the summer season. Small, in this case, is definitely the measure of beauty: the largest stages have an audience of 400 each and Read more ...
matilda.battersby
It has been eight years since Gillian Welch last released an album and her loyal fans – not to mention critics - have been waiting with bated breath. Will she have spent the years honing the delicious Americana and Appalachian-influenced folk that once set her and musical partner David Rawlings apart? Or will she have kept the hit-and-miss drums, the electric guitar and the chirpier outlook of her last album Soul Journey? Thankfully, the answer is the former: The Harrow and the Harvest might well be her best record yet.Welch and Rawlings have pared down their sound to produce a purity of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
New Orleans, that most musical city, is back, back, back, everyone told me. The tourist board said that visitor numbers are over eight million again, back to levels before “The Storm” as they refer to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina here. The hippest new TV series Treme is a gritty epic set in the Big Easy, created by David Simon of The Wire fame, and the city’s music has been riding high in the pop charts by the unlikely means of Bertie Wooster (or Hugh Laurie as he is in real life, also, apparently the best-paid actor on American TV as the grumpy medic in House). And there’s an Read more ...
joe.muggs
Well, there's a nice surprise. Jill Scott was feared lost to music industry machinations, more likely to succeed in her acting career than make a fourth album (she's probably best known now to mainstream British audiences as Mma Ramotswe in The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency TV series). But it seems a four-year musical hiatus and change of label has done her the power of good, as this is the Philadelphia singer and spoken-word artist's best album since her debut Who is Jill Scott?It kicks off in fairly straightforward “nu soul” fashion, with “Blessed”, featuring the kind of I'm-a-strong-woman- Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Beyoncé took a break to recharge her funk batteries after the lacklustre I Am... Sasha Fierce, and there is much riding on this new album. The Amazonian soulstress had 72 songs to choose from, so it is no surprise that 4 is eclectic. What is surprising is that it starts with two pedestrian power ballads. "1 + 1" and "I Care" find Mrs Jay-Z in R'n'B classicist mode, all dull I-will-survive lyrics and dynamic lungs. Next up "I Miss You" is a little better, with its blips and bleeps flying the flag for electronica.Then things get more interesting, thanks to a colourful range of influences and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Mehdi Zannad isn’t a familiar name, but he’s issued a raft of albums as Fugu and has been championed by Stereolab. His profile in Japan is good, and he’s composed soundtracks in his native France. Fugue, the first album released under his own name, is co-produced by Tahiti 80’s Xavier Boyer. "Fugue" translates as "break away" – which he has from the Fugu guise. He’s also broken away from English. Fugue is Zannad's first French-language album. Language, though, is no barrier to basking in this summery pop.Zannad was inspired to sing in French after working on the film La France in 2007. Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Brothers Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill and their cousin Matthew Followill, better known as Kings of Leon, have come a long, long way from their humble Tennessee roots in the last 12 years. In London last night playing to a 65,000-strong crowd in the same week that a documentary charting their rise hits cinemas, the contrast between the life they were born into and the one they have carved out couldn’t be more marked.Opening with the Aha Shake Heartbreak hit "Four Kicks", people screamed and danced about to the roaring of electric guitars and the growling twang of Caleb’s voice. But Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Jon Allen and his support Josh Bray are two sides of a coin. Of the two folk-rockers, the smoother, more polished Allen’s the heads. Bray is rougher, more unknown. But last night they both showed the depth of quality that exists in contemporary commercial roots-influenced music. Allen is touring his second album, Sweet Defeat. Its beautifully crafted songs and refined production have impressed the likes of Jools Holland, and last night he took it to a new level. But Bray, whose debut Whisky and Wool wowed theartsdesk, fought past poor sound to show he’s not far behind.Both Read more ...
susan.whitall
Because Little Willie John died a lonely death in a Washington state prison cell in 1968, much of the baby boom generation grew up only half-knowing who he was. You’d occasionally hear that effervescent but distant voice on the radio, buried by overdubbed strings on the 1960 pop hit “Sleep”. Or maybe you’d hear a snippet of his lovestruck tenor on the torchy 1958 ballad “Talk to Me, Talk to Me”, played as an oldie on the radio. Even by the early Sixties, less than a decade after he hit big as a teenager in 1955 with the R'n'B classic “All Around the World”, Willie’s status as one of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's been a decade since Stevie Nicks's last album of new songs, Trouble in Shangri-La, but In Your Dreams proves that there's creative life in the old girl yet. Fans of the wispy tunestrel will be pleased to hear that she hasn't strayed far from her familiar stomping grounds of melodious folk-rockism and tales of love and yearning, the focus (in fine Seventies style) fixing on the singer's emotional trials and torments. The voice that sang "Rhiannon" remains suitably ghostly, and even with an overlay of mild croakiness, it sounds pretty good for a 63-year-old.The disc is crammed with a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Motown label will forever be identified with its Detroit birthplace, even though it had a Los Angeles office in the Sixties. The shift west was completed in 1972 when founder Berry Gordy Jr moved the whole concern to California. Before that though, in 1971, Gordy had launched subsidiary imprint Mowest to ostensibly showcase Los Angeles acts and as a test run for the California move. This gold-chip compilation shows Mowest is worth remembering. Motown's Mowest Story 1971-1973: Our Lives are Shaped by What we Love is the first comp to dig into this all but lost imprint. It’s terrific.Mowest Read more ...