rock
Thomas H. Green
My Baby are one of the most exciting live acts currently in existence. They’re a three-piece consisting of Dutch frontwoman guitarist/bassist Cato van Dijk, her brother, drummer Joost, and New Zealand blues rock guitar virtuoso Daniel Johnston. Together they whip up tight, rollin’ sets that are also supremely danceable, leading the audience into jammed psychedelia that also emanates sex, sweat and wildness, their own shamanic performance personas – especially Caro van Dijk’s mesmeric stage presence - only amping up the heat. Their latest release finally lives up to their concerts.My Baby’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Recent years have seen a boom in music documentaries. They are, after all, relatively cheap to make and have a readymade audience. Their narratives are usually similar, and so it is with The Man From Mo’Wax: fame and glory, followed by a fall from grace, followed by self-reflection, absolution and a glimmer of fresh success. What many of them also offer is a sense of wild passion, of the raw, unfettered power of music. This film has little of that. It’s a tale of too-cool-for-school hipsters (at least, that’s how we’d term them now), with the too-cool-for-school-est of them all, Mo’Wax boss Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Dead Can Dance were one of the signature sounds of the ethereal, alternative Eighties, 4AD stablemates with Cocteau Twins and art-Goth contemporaries like Daniella Dax, reaching their commercial peak in the Nineties before disbanding in 1998. In 2012, Mayan end-date or no, they reunited in the studio for the well-received Anastasis (‘Resurrection’) on PIAS Recordings, exploring a wide world of indigenous sounds combined with electronics, and the Australian-British duo’s signature baritone and mezzo-soprano voices. Brendan Perry’s is a deep, sonorous instrument carrying all before it, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Wow, can it really be 10 years since Mumford & Sons blazed their trail across the musical world with Sigh No More? The release of Delta, the band’s fourth album, marks the start of a 60-date world tour, which will keep them on the road – first in the UK and Ireland – until mid-May.Recorded in London and produced by Paul Epworth (Adele, Coldplay, Florence and The Machine), it’s generously filled (around an hour of music) and immediately engaging, even if the material is preoccupied with “the four Ds: death, divorce, drugs and depression,” as keyboardist Ben Lovett told Rolling Stone. One Read more ...
Liz Thomson
What to make of The Simon & Garfunkel Story, which began a week-long residency at London’s Vaudeville Theatre last night and which tours in the new year? A success “from Sydney to Seattle” apparently, with Elaine Paige having called it “amazing” and various regional newspapers offering superlatives. The programme proclaims it (with idiosyncratic use of upper case), "The World's biggest and most successful Simon & Garfunkel Theatre Show". Is there competition?The singing is pretty classy, Sam O’Hanlon as Simon and Charles Blyth as Garfunkel producing evocative close harmony, though Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Enough hyping! This month, without further ado, let’s head straight to the reviews…VINYL OF THE MONTHLOR Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (Lo Records)With Public Service Broadcasting’s The Race for Space making a noise only three years ago (and First Man doing the rounds at the cinema), who’d have thunk there was an appetite for more moon landing-based electronica. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t, but Belfast DJ-producer LOR has gone for it anyway, with a deliciously warm and quirky two sides of technotronic goodness. A lunar orbit rendezvous is the process by which astronauts travel from their Read more ...
joe.muggs
“I don't peak early / I don't peak at all,” goes the wryly self-aware line in the opening song here, “Take me to the Movies”. Thirty-five years since he started releasing records, Mascis isn't interested in peaking, progress or much else beyond delivering the same he always has.Weary, anhedonic introversion delivered in a cracked Neil Young moan, and primal blues rock guitar soloing, are packed into perfect pop structures with pithy or heartstring-tugging couplets that twinkle like a razor sharp intelligence shining out from behind heavy lidded eyes. The differences between Dinosaur albums Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although John & Beverley Martyn and Mott The Hoople were both signed to Island, the connection went further than being with the same label. When Guy Stevens conceived the band he named Mott The Hoople, the producer saw them as uniting the essence of Bob Dylan with that of The Rolling Stones. On their eponymous first album, issued in 1969, Ian Hunter’s vocals are so like Dylan it edges into the preposterous. That same year John & Beverley Martyn made Stormbringer! in Woodstock. Two of its tracks featured The Band’s Levon Helm on drums. Dylan was a couple of steps away.Despite the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There are many layers of allusion that come with Marianne Faithfull’s powerful new album. The title is drawn from Keats, his formula for great poetry as opposed to instructive morality, and it’s towards a poetry of experience rather than the fixed wheel of morality that Faithfull bends her muse, just as she has always done.The album’s inside artwork features pictures of, among others, William Burroughs and a young Faithfull with a young Bob Dylan before his manual typewriter – totems of negative capability in storm-force creative conditions – and the album itself also features some musical Read more ...
Tim Cumming
You get plenty of Dylan for your buck these days, with the Mondo Scripto exhibition currently at the Halcyon Gallery in London, and a totemic and arrestingly beautiful set of Jerry Schatzberg's photographs of mid-Sixties Dylan in all his fuzzy glory just published by ACC Art Books. And now, following on from last winter's gospel-era entry into the Bootleg Series, Trouble No More, comes another generous hawl from the tape archives.At first sight, the prospect of a single album’s worth of sessions spread across six discs and 87 tracks – even if it is Blood on the Tracks – is a daunting one, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
One of the major abiding musical memories of the late 1990s for many wasn’t so much five Mancunians ripping off Beatles’ songs, but Keith Flint of The Prodigy, growling “I’m a Firestarter/Twisted Firestarter” while all kinds of electronic battery was let loose. The Essex Crew may no longer be the media folk devils of “Firestarter” and “Smack My Bitch Up” but they still pack a mighty punch and No Tourists, their first album since 2015’s The Day Is My Enemy and their seventh in all, is ample proof that Liam, Keith and Maxim have no intentions of sitting on their laurels anytime yet.Rocking a Read more ...
theartsdesk
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why. Baxter Dury, Etienne de Crécy and Delilah Holliday - B.E.D. ★★★★★ A small but perfectly sleazy work of sweary, cynical brillianceBob Dylan - More Blood, More Tracks ★★★★★ The fourteenth volume in the Bootleg Series is a keeperBrad Mehldau Trio - Seymour Reads the Constitution! ★★★★★ Prolific improvising pianist creates the apotheosis of the piano trioThe Breeders - All Nerve ★★★★★ Kim and Kelly Deal - plus Read more ...