Albums

Grade: A When Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata was published in 1818, pianists were confronted with a mixture of ‘demonic energy and a torrent of dissonances’, as Charles Rosen put it. Only the most freakishly gifted virtuosos could tackle it. The first recording was by Artur Schnabel, whose heroic assault on the finale sent wrong notes scattering in all directions. Today, technique has improved so dramatically that most students can steer Beethoven’s juggernaut without obvious mishaps. Even so, some great masters wait decades before taking the plunge. In this sonata above all, getting the notes in the right order is no guarantee that you have anything to say. Marc-André Hamelin is now

Grade: D+ Ah, the original Linkin Park, except even more spavined. MC5 came outta Detroit in the mid 1960s and their shrieking blues metal ur-punk was afforded unnecessary respect because of their agitprop politics. Sucking up to the Black Panthers and running a bit foul of the law can do wonders for a slightly below-average blues band whose songs had energy and attitude – but nothing else. Here they are, back with their first studio album in 53 years: thanks for the merciful interregnum, if nothing else. When I say ‘they’, I mean the half-decent guitarist Wayne Kramer and, on one or two tracks, their original drummer, Dennis Thompson. Both

A few years ago, I received an early morning phone call from Nick Cave’s former PR, berating me for not crediting his band the Bad Seeds in an album review. She was quite right. As Cave says, with a hint of paternal pride, during this powerhouse Glasgow show: ‘This band can do anything.’ It’s not just that the Bad Seeds’s task ranges from delicately enhancing the most nakedly exposed ballads to unleashing a raging firestorm of noise. It’s that supporting a performer as mercurial as Cave takes oodles of nous and empathy. He’s a wild thing, but they never once lose him. Cave brings to mind that volatile drunk left

The fate of the pop musician – at least the pop musician below the top tier of stardom – has historically been to fall from fashion. At some point in their rise they will be of the moment, the spirit of the age, and then they won’t be. At best, they’ll have a slow but perfectly lucrative fade, as their fanbase dwindles to the zealots. At worst they’ll become a punch line, a raised eyebrow: ‘What were we thinking?’ Every hit, every sold-out show, is just another step closer to irrelevance. ‘There’d be 800 teenagers in a club in Minneapolis, which felt absurd: we’re old enough to be their parents’

Grade: B Country music has become the acceptable route through which American pop stars resuscitate their floundering careers: sales are down, kid – shove a fiddle in the next one. And a pedal steel. And git some of those country dudes to collaborate. Especially Dolly. But also Hank Williams Jnr, if you can. Makes them look hip, makes you look real down home. So it is with the agreeably slobbering rapper Post Malone, born in NYC, raised in LA but here sounding like he jes swung in from some roadhouse barstool outta Shreveport, with bourbon and country blood trickling down over his stupid tattoos. His career has hit a hiatus

The ploy of releasing an album without any advance warning comes into play when an artist feels they are being paid either too much or too little attention. The stealth arrival of Jack White’s new solo album falls firmly into the second category. Putting out music in this way ensures additional media coverage and a certain level of intrigue I didn’t love White’s old band, the White Stripes, back when they were a garage-rock/blues revival phenomenon in the early 2000s. Since their demise in 2011, the world seems to be coming around to this way of thinking. Their most successful albums, Elephant and White Blood Cells, hold little cultural currency

Grade: D+ Happenings were interesting, or irritating, events staged from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s by performers who eschewed the corporate and bourgeois restraints placed on artists and veered into surrealism, parody, violence and, of course, situationism. Think Allan Kaprow and John Cage. In rock music, meanwhile, think the Fugs and the Pink Fairies. Happenings by our country’s most profitable faux-rawk outfit, Leicester’s Kasabian, is by contrast a celebration of everything happenings were most opposed to. It is boring, corporate, imitative, inane and gutless. I would almost rather listen to an album by Dua Lipa. It is 20 years since Kasabian’s first album and they have got

It is always interesting to observe the ways in which pop stars try to negotiate first growing up, and then growing old. From teen scream to respected mainstay to elder states(wo)man is not an easy path to walk without a few stumbles. At certain times, it requires making some blatantly strategic moves. Cabello wants so badly to grow up that she evolves from a past incarnation practically into thin air Few readers will remember that the first solo single George Michael released after dissolving Wham! was called ‘I Want Your Sex’, a forgettable bump-and-grind with a steamy video designed purely to shift audience expectations away from all things teenybopper and

Grade: A- Here’s an oddly structured album of Mozart’s symphonies 35, 40 and 36 from the world’s most fashionable young Finnish conductor – and, no, it isn’t Klaus Makela, the 28-year-old maestro of the Oslo Philharmonic and Orchestre de Paris who’s taking over in Amsterdam and Chicago. It’s Tarmo Peltokoski, 24, who hasn’t yet had to cope with iffy reviews hinting that he’s been overpromoted. Peltokoski is cute, clever and scarily self-assured. He’s already music director of the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra and is about to hold the same position in Toulouse. He’s principal guest conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic and also the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, the Mercedes-Benz of chamber

Grade: A If you enjoy the sensation of having warm, jangly syrup poured directly into your ear, then this is probably the summer album for you. You might think that syrup cannot, by definition, be jangly. But imagine treacle with popping candy in it – poured into your ear in a kindly manner by a smiling young man. This Long Island sibling duo have been honing their pastiche for eight years or so and here reference almost every power-pop band that ever existed, from the Byrds via the dB’s to Teenage Fanclub, but also taking in the winsome pop which dominated our charts before the Beatles came along (but post

Many years ago, I wrote a book about Willie Nelson. At its conclusion, I reached for an elegiac, valedictory tone. In 2006, when The Outlaw was published, Nelson was already 73, and it seemed plausible to suggest that one of the great American lives might be winding down. I pictured Nelson rolling off the road and into the sunset, his work on Earth more or less complete. Nelson embodies both sides of an increasingly divided nation; hippie and redneck, patriot and agitator Well, scratch that ending. Having recently turned 91, Nelson is still going strong. The touring has slowed down a tad – we haven’t seen him in Britain for

Grade: B- In 2022 the South Korean pianist Yunchan Lim became, at 18, the youngest winner of the Van Cliburn competition, displaying a virtuosity that stunned the judges. You could see conductor Marin Alsop’s astonishment as he bounded through the finale of Rach 3, combining accuracy and swirling fantasy at daredevil speed. It’s been viewed nearly 15 million times on YouTube. In truth, though, he’d have had to screw up badly not to win, because he’d already dispatched Liszt’s fiendish Transcendental Études with perfect articulation and mercurial wit; in places he out-dazzled even the current master of this repertoire, Daniil Trifonov. Decca snapped him up and here’s his first studio

Grade: A- The irresistibly catchy – if you are not quite right in the head – ‘Touch The Leather’ was probably my favourite single of the previous decade, aided by a video which was simultaneously marvellously seedy, threatening and infantile. ‘Left-wing skin on the right-wing leather – touch the leather leather…’ Well it did it for me, and so I set great stock by these scrofulous squat-dwelling skaggies from Brixton, until with every subsequent dim-witted release the notion began to embed itself that they weren’t, actually, very good. ‘Touch The Leather’ was maybe just one of those glorious singular flukes you find in pop music by performers who aren’t really

How to explain the supercharged star power of Taylor Swift? An undeniably gifted artist, Swift’s albums 1989, Folklore and Evermore, in particular, are excellent. She has written a battery of terrific pop songs. She is a generous and skilled performer. To suggest she is overrated is not an insult, therefore, but simply a comment on the absurd critical mass of her popularity, in which every lyric, scrap of artwork, cultural reference and personal tit-bit is weighted with a monumental significance which, it is becoming apparent, does her work few favours. Anybody listening to Swift’s new album without prior knowledge of the layers of gossipy context surrounding it might well wonder

Grade: A Rejoice! A glorious symphonic cycle by a British composer has been issued as a set for the first time. George Lloyd (1913-98) was treated with lofty condescension by the musical establishment because his twelve symphonies contain barely a single dissonance. They’re sprinkled with jaunty tunes that have the feel of an Ealing Comedy – heresy! Also, it didn’t help that for decades Lloyd made his living as a mushroom farmer in the West Country. But he was no amateur: he could write perfect fugues as a teenager and by his early twenties had a fine opera under his belt. Then in 1942, the ship on which he was

Grade: A+ Carter is a useful surname to have if you’re making a country album. So it is with Beyoncé: she married into the name when she got hitched to Jay-Z, but he is from New York, not Poor Valley, VA. Helps if you’re from Texas too – just to convince folks that this bit of genre-hopping is rooted in authenticity. It isn’t – but who cares? This is a clever, beautiful and sonically witty album. Country music’s conventions draw out of Beyoncé perhaps the most sublime melodies she has written, or part-written. There are cameos from Dolly Parton, half-forgotten black sharecropper’s daughter Linda Martell, Willie Nelson and the ghost