New Music Reviews
Garland Jeffreys, Jazz CafeTuesday, 09 October 2012
Garland Jeffreys, a 68-year old singer and songwriter, is not simply New York City’s best-kept secret but American’s music’s most consistently underrated and overlooked talent. Garland is a remarkable talent and his latest album, The King of In Between, is musical dynamite. Oddly, he has remained largely invisible in Britain for the past 40-plus years. Read more...
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Just in From Scandinavia: Nordic Music Round-Up 5Monday, 08 October 2012
A lot has blown in since the last Scandinavian round-up. The most recent releases sifted here include singer-songwriter intimacy, various forms of electropop, several shades of jazz experimenta, joyous dance-pop and some distinctly non-Scandinavian flavours. High points are many. Satisfaction is a certainty. Read more... |
Arena: The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour Revisited, BBC TwoSunday, 07 October 2012
Being told that Magical Mystery Tour was a home movie is bit tiring. Self-evidently, The Beatles’ filmic response to the psychedelic experience was not that. They tried, and failed, to hire Shepperton Studios. Known artists like Ivor Cutler and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band were brought on board. Gavrik Losey, then hot from being an assistant director on Modesty Blaise, worked on it. Masses of extras were employed. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: B B King, Steve Winwood, The Doors, Loving on the FlipsideSunday, 07 October 2012
Kieron Tyler Read more... |
Gallows, The Haunt, BrightonThursday, 04 October 2012
Midway through their set Gallows are expending a mass of energy, attacking their instruments and jerking about like possessed men in a jam-packed venue yet, unless you are one of their devotees, moshing like Bedlam or hanging from the rafters gesticulating, it’s not especially engaging. It should be, with such energy and dynamism on show but their music attempts nothing so much as to fulfill the expectations of those who already like them, possibly in an ever-diminishing manner. Read more... |
Manu Chao's La Ventura, Brixton Come Together FestivalTuesday, 02 October 2012
Manu Chao is “backstage” in a little makeshift tent on the green outside Brixton’s St Matthews Church (that’s the one opposite the Ritzy Cinema) and he’s certainly more at home than in some of the more conventional rock star places I’ve seen him in. Like Glastonbury, where he hated being in the VVIP area of the main stage with Amy Winehouse and Jay Z – all the fences and passes made him think of Palestine and he looked bored and dejected. Read more... |
Transcender Festival 2012, BarbicanMonday, 01 October 2012
The Barbican Centre’s Transcender Festival celebrated its fourth anniversary in 2012 and deserves to be recognised as one of the UK’s most culturally radical and engaging music events. Transcender grew out of the Barbican’s previous festival Ramadan Nights and aims to explore a similarly rich vein of music that is rooted both in Islamic trance music of Asia and the Middle East and Western improvised music that shares a similar sense of free exploration and wonder. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: A.R. Kane, Crime and the City Solution, ABBA, Demis RoussosSunday, 30 September 2012
Joe Muggs Read more... |
The Beach Boys, Royal Albert HallFriday, 28 September 2012
There they are! It's The Beach Boys! They're playing "Wouldn't It Be Nice", halfway through their second set of the evening and it blossoms with harmonic beauty, with pop's finest, most glorious ambition. Sure, in the shadows behind them there are a bunch of session musicians carrying them. Particularly in the first half those guys made damn sure there was such a wall of vocals it would be hard to detect any flaws in the ageing voices (mostly around 70) of the original Beach Boys. Read more... |
Ultravox, Hammersmith ApolloFriday, 28 September 2012
Now I think I've seen it all. After a storming two-hour set Ultravox returned to the stage for a celebratory twin-pronged past-meets-present encore of "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes" and "Contact". At the very end, during a touching, soft-spoken moment, a female fan in an animal mask clambered onstage and appeared to drop a bowl of greeny-yellow gunk, possibly custard, on Midge Ure's head. Read more... |
B B King: Ladies & Gentlemen…Mr B.B. King
A.R. Kane: Complete Singles CollectionPages
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