Reviews
Raphael Saadiq, Shepherd's Bush Empire, London (Rated 4/ 5 )
Raphael Saadiq and his band have just come out to play their encore and we should all be grateful that they are back on stage – not just because their performance has been brilliant, but because there would have been a stampede had they failed to return.
Inside Reviews
Best Coast, Academy 2, Manchester
Cat's Eyes, Scala, London
Sunday, 1 May 2011
A Los Angeles surf-pop trio take the best of sugary Sixties songs and put them through their own wall of sound
Album: Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues (Bella Union)
Sunday, 1 May 2011
Robin Pecknold became so difficult to be around during the making of Helplessness Blues, he now admits, that his girlfriend Olivia left him. Then, when she heard how beautiful the end results were, she came back.
Album: The Bookhouse Boys, Tales To Be Told (Black)
Sunday, 1 May 2011
The second album by The Bookhouse Boys – the nonet named after a shady cabal in Twin Peaks – is a romantic and dramatic entity, which sounds at times like Divine Comedy pitched into the middle of the Crimean War.
Album: Will Butterworth Trio, Hereafter (Music Chamber)
Sunday, 1 May 2011
Pianist Butterworth is a right-hand man with a cerebral Bill Evans meets Lennie Tristano style that in the context of the sometimes brash piano-trio sector proves winning.
Album: Beastie Boys, Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 (Capital)
Sunday, 1 May 2011
The eighth studio album from the Beastie Boys comes after a long lay-off made even longer by Adam "MCA" Yauch's treatment for cancer.
Album: Eliza Carthy, Neptune (Hem-Hem)
Sunday, 1 May 2011
She's on the cover, smirking in front of an old map: a naughty sea god(dess) in a Cruikshank cartoon. Which somehow suits the discursive post-folk rompery of the music: highly arranged, wordy as an Elvis Costello song with larks taking the place of bitterness.
Album: Leisure Society, Into the Murky Water (Full Time Hobby)
Sunday, 1 May 2011
Strange they should mention "murky" because the music within is as clear as Perrier.
Album: Bill Wells & Aidan Moffatt, Everything's Getting Older (Chemikal Underground)
Sunday, 1 May 2011
Like Jacques Brel if only he'd been born in Falkirk, this drink-sodden song-cycle of an ageing roué's developing self-disgust is nasty, brutish but absolutely compelling.
Album: Tune-Yards, Whokill (4AD)
Sunday, 1 May 2011
New England's Merril Garbus has taken the anarchic homemade charm of her debut and made it more 3D.
Album: Paul Carracka, Different Hat (Absolute/Carrack-UK) (Rated 4/ 5 )
Friday, 29 April 2011
A Different Hat is that rarity, an album featuring the singer live in the studio with a full orchestra, in the manner once commonplace for an earlier era of crooners.
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