New music
graham.rickson
The trick is to transform something relatively easy into something dazzling and bewilderingly complex. Seeing the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain is like watching eight masters of close-up magic. You’re not quite sure where to look, unable to believe quite what you’re hearing. These are boom times for the four-string ukulele. You can pick up a functional instrument for a tenner and learn three chords in five minutes, meaning that a huge repertoire of Western pop songs is yours for the taking. Simply strumming isn’t particularly difficult. But what the Ukulele Orchestra do is pluck Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a masterpiece – but it could easily have been a bloody mess. The team-up of Mark Pritchard and Steve Spacek is the kind of thing that brings genre purists and scene snobs out in hives: Somerset-born, Australian-resident Pritchard having delved into everything from sensuous ambient jazz to bouncing booty bass, hardcore rave to exotica over his two-decade career, while vocalist and co-producer Steve Spacek formed the highly individualist and criminally under-appreciated techno soul band Spacek at the start of the 2000s. Together they have brought Read more ...
bruce.dessau
One can safely say that there is never a dull moment with Peter Doherty. His life is such a soap opera it is often easy to overlook the fact that, even if you don’t buy the tortured-poet schtick, he is clearly a gifted songwriter. It is such a shame he cannot knuckle down and stick to his day job and bash out some more classics. This week he set out on a solo UK tour, not coinciding with a new album, but nicely coinciding with the promotion of his beloved Queens Park Rangers to the Premier League, which probably explained his cheerful if occasionally subdued mood in Shepherds Bush last night. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It's been a while since I've spent time with Asian Dub Foundation. In the mid-Nineties, when they first appeared, they were one of the most exciting acts around and I enthused about them in print at every opportunity. They were born of an east-London community music project, mashing up the then-new sounds of drum and bass with agitprop showmanship and anti-racist politics. The result was a visceral live act that fitted as well beside the rising Brit-Asian wave (Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney, Badmarsh & Shri, etc) as with punky post-Levellers roots rock.However, I never felt ADF captured Read more ...
bruce.dessau
I missed out on Miles Kane's earlier work with The Rascals, but was quickly seduced by his partnership with Arctic Monkey Alex Turner as The Last Shadow Puppets, whose cinematic grandeur struck the right balance between contemporary pop, wistful nostalgia and terrific haircuts. This leg-up has given Kane's new album a high profile, and while it certainly has its moments, the 25-year-old from the Wirral wears his influences a little too obviously here.If an alien with a heavy schedule downloaded Colour of the Trap they could get a pretty neat round-up of rock history in one sitting. Bolanesque Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Of course, Hanson are a joke. Literally. On the internet you’ll find them as a subsection of "blonde jokes". And looking back on 12-year-old Zac’s ridiculous hair on “MMMBop”, it’s easy to see why. But they are no longer blond, nor are they kids anymore. In fact, between them, they’ve got eight kids of their own. And so the question is, is now the time to take the clean-cut brothers from Tulsa, Oklahoma seriously?And the answer is, sort of. Sure, Shout it Out is unlikely to make anyone’s album-of-the-year list, but where they get it right there’s something so joyous about the trio’s Motown- Read more ...
howard.male
As someone brought up on the concise innocent perfection of the pop single, I have to confess I’m a bit of a hard sell when it comes to sprawling instrumentals. They feel like unfinished songs to me; empty landscapes that need figures in them to create context, narrative, or just a focal point to give meaning to the whole. But there have been a few primarily instrumental acts over the years that have convinced me, and the multicultural five-piece Syriana have now joined their ranks.But having said that, it was something of a disappointment that it was only a five-piece that took to the stage Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Luppi had already issued The Italian Story album in 2004, a tribute by the LA-dwelling Italian orchestral arranger and composer to his influences. The Grey Album surfaced the same year. Luppi and Burton soon gravitated towards each other. Both were fascinated by composers like Ennio Morricone, Alessandro Alessandroni, Piero Piccionni, Armando Travajoli and Piero Umiliani and I Marc 4, the studio quartet that played on countless soundtracks including those of Morricone’s. They also loved Alessandroni’s eight-piece vocal outfit I Cantori Moderni, and the wordless vocals of their member Edda Read more ...
graeme.thomson
One of Britain’s most esteemed and influential folk artists, Martin Carthy (b 1941) celebrates his 70th birthday on 21 May. The occasion is being marked by the release of a two-disc career overview, Martin Carthy Essential, and next weekend's celebratory concert at the Southbank Centre, London. Much as he obviously appreciates the gesture, there's an unmistakable sense that this self-effacing man would be just as happy spending the night crammed into a howff, eyeballing his audience from a distance of no more than 10 paces. “A concert like this is the jam on the bread and butter,” he says. “ Read more ...
howard.male
When Western musicians add their bit to traditional African music it can be disastrous: a programmed beat awkwardly forcing sinuous, sensual music to conform to its rigidity, or some dreadful rock vocalist doing a Bono all over some exquisite interplay of mbira and talking drums. But here we have a London collective working with a bunch of musicians from Nairobi, and refreshingly their presence doesn’t for one moment seem unnatural or intrusive.The first indication of a London sensibility at work on this debut album appears on the opening track “Gone thum mana gi nyadhi” in the form of the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Earlier this week, in my review of Shelby Lynne, I suggested that the record industry’s one-way ticket on a fast train to oblivion is, at least, proving to be the mother of invention. Everyone has to work a little harder and smarter for our attention, a point which David Ford’s latest tour, which ends tonight in a sold-out show in Birmingham, makes emphatically: part book reading, part solo concert, part intimate natter, part request show, it might have seemed desperate if it hadn’t been so engaging.Ford has just published his first book, I Choose This: How to Nearly Make it in the Music Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's no doubt about it, Hayden Thorpe has the most manly falsetto in modern music. It's not the wheedling whine of the post-Radiohead generation of indie sadsacks, nor the haunted and haunting quaver of an Anthony Hegarty, nor yet the introspective musing of a James Blake. Rather it's a completely assured and controlled instrument, comparable only to the intense wail of the late Billy McKenzie (The Associates). And it's just one of the entirely distinctive features of the sound of Wild Beasts – a band who seemingly operate unbound by scene or genre dictates and are, ironically, all the Read more ...