New music
howard.male
Back in June of this year, the international successful Malian blues band gave what felt at the time like a curiously muted performance at the World Cup Kick-off Celebration Concert in Johannesburg. But perhaps it was the effect of having their laidback hypnotic grooves juxtaposed to the in-your-face emoting and hip-gyrating of the likes of Shakira and Alicia Keys that seemed to somewhat mystify the stadium audience. Because this is a band that seem to have little interest in doing any more than just playing their music, and humbly hoping that people will climb aboard without them having to Read more ...
howard.male
I must confess that when I first heard about Staff Benda Bilili - a Congolese band partly made up of paraplegics – I felt a little uneasy. The last thing that one wants as a (hopefully) trusted critic is to feel compromised by an obligation to give a positive review, or feel guilty about lessening their chances of bettering their circumstances with a bad review. Yes, the vanity and solipsism of your reviewer has no bounds! But this visual and musical treat of a film wastes no time in informing us that there is no room for pity in the story of this resilient collective of musicians who, rather Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“This song is for my kids – and all their Mommas.” Even at 74, Kris Kristofferson exudes the quietly satisfied air of experience of a man who has spent at least half his life drinking, shagging, smoking and strumming to his heart’s content, and now has a whole lot of good times (and plenty of bad) to draw from at will.A former military man, sports champion and Rhodes scholar, his talent for raising hell was always balanced by his more literate side, and the musician who provided the obvious visual inspiration for the recent Jeff Bridges vehicle Crazy Heart long ago eased into elder statesman Read more ...
paul.mcgee
During the 1980s, a major artistic response to the Conservative government came in the form of a sustained surge in music that was, on some level at least, politically engaged. Not necessarily in the classic agitprop manner either. For every band of Red Wedge-compliant rabblerousers, there'd be another act insisting that "the personal is political", as they made domestic power struggles or everyday banalities their preferred songwriting topic. With a Tory government once more, pursuing an aggressive programme that possesses uncomfortable echoes of the Thatcher era, emerging Liverpool Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Patagonia’s Welshness was a nagging issue for Gruff Rhys, mainman of Welsh psycho-nauts Super Furry Animals. His distant cousin, the folk singer René Griffiths, was born in the desert-filled southern reaches of Argentina, but visited Wales and appeared there on TV in the mid seventies. Remembering those appearances, Rhys decided to visit Patagonia to search for Griffiths amongst the region’s little-known Welsh-speaking community. Given a Rhys-hosted outing at the BFI yesterday, the resulting film Separado! was billed as being followed by a live set with Brazilian Furry Freak Brother-lookalike Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Patagonia’s Welshness was a nagging issue for Gruff Rhys, mainman of Welsh psych-nauts Super Furry Animals. His distant cousin, the folk singer René Griffiths, was born in the desert-filled southern reaches of Argentina, but visited Wales and appeared there on TV in the mid-Seventies. Remembering those appearances, Rhys decided to visit Patagonia to search for Griffiths amongst the region’s Welsh-speaking community. Given a Rhys-hosted outing at the BFI, the resulting film Separado! was billed as being followed by a live set with Brazilian Furry Freak Brother-lookalike Tony da Gatorra.Da Read more ...
theartsdesk
CD of the MonthTom Jones, Praise & Blame (Universal/Island) by Adam Sweeting Reinvention is all very well, and indeed indispensable for any career that aims to last longer than a series of X Factor, but you can have enough of seeing Tom Jones hamming it up with Robbie Williams or Cerys Matthews or Stereophonics. Jones seems to have reached the same conclusion. On his last outing, 2008’s 24 Hours, he circled back towards his traditional strengths, revisiting some of the musical styles he became associated with in the Sixties and Seventies but with the aid of a submerged iceberg of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“You see! This is America! All races, genders and everything else blending together to make something beautiful!” This a quote from an American fan living in the Middle East currently on Pink Martini’s website. Thomas Lauderdale, the musical director of the band was involved in politics, about to run for Mayor in Portland, Oregon when he put Pink Martini together. When their first international hit came along in 2004, at the height of "the anti-American craze", as the singer Caetano Veloso put it, the band were an export from America that liberals could love.Pink Martini were multi-cultural Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's very hard to ever know what to expect from Alan Moore, the Mage of Northampton. The author of era-defining comics like Watchmen, V For Vendetta and From Hell has long maintained that art and magic are one and the same, and since the mid-1990s his works have often tended to be long and complex explications of various occult principles, which while eye-opening can often lose readers in all their baroque unfoldings. However, his 1996 novel Voices of the Fire, showed his writing could work powerfully untethered from the panels of comics, so I was cautiously optimistic for his new prose-art- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Last year’s Vid og Vid (an Icelandic colloquialism for "every now and then"), Ólöf Arnalds’ debut album, attracted some high-profile fans. Fellow Icelander Björk raised the flag on America’s National Public Radio, as did Jonathan Richman who requested that she open the shows during his San Francisco residency last week. Björk has contributed vocals to "Surrender", a cut from Arnalds’ forthcoming album Innundor Skinni (Within the Skin). Another track, one of three in English on Innundor Skinni, is titled "Jonathan" – although there’s no lyrical reference to Richman, it’s an obvious tip of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The arrival of Gainsbourg: Vie Héroique in British cinemas this week – under its Anglo-Saxon title Gainsbourg – assumes that distributors think there’s an audience. Even so, Gainsbourg hardly has the appeal of a Johnny Cash biopic. Or even an Ike Turner biopic. The release continues a process that began in the early 1990s, when a slow, posthumous rise to recognition of Serge Gainsbourg began outside the Francophone world, au delà de l’Hexagon. France might be a non-stop train ride from London, but this particular Gallic cultural icon has taken a while to make a mark over here.Which means that Read more ...
peter.quinn
“A E Housman said he could recognise poetry because it made his throat tighten and his eyes water. I can recognise jazz because it makes me tap my foot, grunt affirmative exhortations, or even get up and caper round the room.” For those curious to discover the kind of music that made poet Philip Larkin leap around shouting “Yeah, man”, help is at hand. As part of this year's Larkin25 celebrations to mark the 25th anniversary of his death, Proper Records is releasing Larkin’s Jazz, a four-disc conspectus that collects together many of his favourite jazz recordings.Larkin became a jazz addict Read more ...