New Music Reviews
The Pierces, Shepherd's Bush EmpireWednesday, 24 September 2014
The Pierces were on stage for little more than an hour, singing an enjoyable but quite predictable medley of their last three albums. Their sugar-glazed, glistening sound is filtered through all manner of electronic stabilisation and filtration devices which guarantee harmony and stability through their adrenaline-driven swoops and musical handbrake turns. So in some ways, you’re not getting much new content or musical insight by hearing them live. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Sun RaSunday, 21 September 2014
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Sarah Jane Morris, Union ChapelFriday, 19 September 2014
Recorded in the UK, Johannesburg, Paris and Tel Aviv, Sarah Jane Morris's latest album, Bloody Rain, is undoubtedly a labour of love. Hearing it performed live last night in the Union Chapel, in front of an adoring audience, confirmed that it is also her masterpiece. Read more... |
Joan Baez, Royal Festival HallThursday, 18 September 2014
The next revolution of civil disobedience is unlikely to be a ticketed event, with a sedentary congregation of grey-haired, nostalgic former hippies. And the Royal Festival Hall (even at full capacity) is a mere campfire compared to Joan Baez's public of 30,000 protesters of Washington DC in 1967. But politics, where the drum stick is eschewed for the brush, were still the unspoken substance of her first London performance of four. Read more... |
Foo Fighters, Olympic ParkSunday, 14 September 2014
“There goes my hero,” sang the Foo Fighters at the end of the Invictus Games last night. True to form, the Foo Fighters’ performance was a barrage of energy and goodwill, which closed the games - characterised by much the same - on an all-round high. Read more... |
Mulatu Astatke, Royal Festival HallSunday, 14 September 2014
It was Jim Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers that first really got Mulatu Astatke major Western attention – in same way that Angelo Badalementi’s music for Twin Peaks gave a rich and strange dimension to David Lynch’s TV epic, there was an even greater sense of wonderful disorientation, or as Brian Eno put it “jazz from another planet,” with Astatke’s music. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Game TheorySunday, 14 September 2014
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Blondie, O2 Academy, BirminghamSunday, 14 September 2014
Blondie may have been around the block a few times since they got together in New York in 1974, but they seemingly have no intention of settling into a comfortable existence of just playing the hits to ever-diminishing artistic returns. Their present set-list features large swathes of recent album Ghosts of Download, as well a fair amount of other unlikely surprises in between the tunes that provided a soundtrack to the teenage years of many of their now-greying audience. Read more... |
Elbow, RoundhouseSaturday, 13 September 2014
Punctually, following a tension-building countdown, Elbow entered the blue-lit stage at London’s legendary Roundhouse, beers in hand, and gestured the 1500-strong audience into a mass toast. With his slight stoop, soft Manchester accent and wayward estate-agent appearance Guy Garvey’s frontman persona takes more from familiar folk Daddies like Loudon Wainwright III than from the styled superstars also headlining at the iTunes Festival. Read more... |
Prom 74: Wainwright, Voigt, Britten Sinfonia, DebusFriday, 12 September 2014
Swathes of this year’s final Late Night Prom were so invertebrate, amateurish even, that I was tempted to go home and throw out my Want One and Want Two CDs. I won’t, of course: Canadian American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has written some fabulous songs, and developed a unique vocal style to deliver them. Read more... |
Sun Ra and his Arkestra: In the Orbit of Ra
Game Theory: Blaze of GloryPages
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