Music news

• Kesha's record label reinstates her Billboard awards performance

  19-05-2016 22:56
  By Piya Sinha-Roy LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Pop star Kesha will sing at the Billboard Music Awards after her record label on Thursday reversed a decision to stop her performance amid concerns she would address her failed legal bid against Sony Corp's Sony Music and producer Dr. Luke. Kemosabe Records, a unit of Sony Music and founded by Dr. Luke, said in a statement that had initially revoked approval for Kesha's performance at Sunday's awards show because it had "learned Kesha was to use the perf
  
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• Boys Noize: Mayday review – retro rave plays into the jaws of the EDM market

  19-05-2016 22:15
  
  (Boysnoize Records)In 2007, Alex Ridha’s debut album as Boys Noize, Oi Oi Oi, encapsulated clubbing’s Ed Banger era of shouty beats and pedantic energy, bridging electro and techno with maximalist mortar and a tearaway spirit. Since then, Ridha hasn’t crossed over to the mainstream in the way that contemporaries such as Hudson Mohawke, Skrillex and Diplo have. But now he’s playing into the jaws of the EDM market. Fourth album Mayday presents 90s rave for the generation of
  
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• Modern Baseball: Holy Ghost review – haunting and heartfelt pop-punk

  19-05-2016 22:00
  
  (Big Scary Monsters) Related: Modern Baseball: meet the band tackling pop-punk’s crude image Pop-punk, with its goofy songs full of knob and poo gags, in which women (girlfriends, mothers, etc) are mostly depicted as sources of irritation, has long been the genre of choice for a certain type of adolescent male. However, Philadelphia’s Modern Baseball head the field of newer bands trying to take it somewhere deeper. With guitarists Jake Ewald and Brendan Lukens splitting vocal duties,
  
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• X-Men: Apocalypse Cast Reveal If Taylor Swift Really Is In The Movie

  19-05-2016 21:07
  
  Plus, the mall scene that got CUT!
  
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• Iggy Pop: Everyone should just drop drugs – video

  19-05-2016 21:02
  
  Rock star Iggy Pop, famous for his records with Iggy and the Stooges, speaks to the press while at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday. Iggy sat with director and friend Jim Jar Jarmusch to talk about the upcoming documentary Gimme Danger about the The Stooges. Gimme Danger is being screened outside competition at the festivalIggy Pop slams modern music: ‘Why don’t I just die now?’
  Continue reading...
  
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• Ziggy Marley: Ziggy Marley review – reggae-pop with a gift for stating the obvious

  19-05-2016 20:15
  
  (Tuff Gong Worldwide)Ziggy Marley’s eponymous sixth solo album picks up where 2014’s Fly Rasta left off: it’s another album of lilting tunes and messages of love and togetherness. Marley’s songs work best when they tilt towards the pop side of the pop-reggae equation, such as when acoustic guitars flutter prettily on Heaven Can’t Take It, featuring his brother Stephen Marley. Apart from Marijuanaman, on which he urges politicians to smoke dope, it’s hard to ar
  
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• Preston/Glasgow/Lowe: Preston Glasgow Lowe review – virtuoso note-rammed fusion

  19-05-2016 20:00
  
  (Whirlwind)An eponymously titled debut album for this virtuosic UK trio, after four years on the road in which guitarist David Preston, six-string electric bassist Kevin Glasgow and drummer Laurie Lowe have developed tightly note-rammed fusion in John McLaughlin and Allan Holdsworth territory, mixed with orchestral electronics and gracefully fluent solo-guitar reflectiveness. Preston is equally adept at hurtling improv, Metheny-like chordal themes and warm balladeering. Glasgow is capable of pun
  
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• Adult Jazz: Earrings Off! review – awkward, exhilarating avant pop

  19-05-2016 20:00
  
  (Tri Angle)Earrings Off! might not be the easiest of listens, but then it’s unlikely anyone looking for an easy listen will be plumping for an artist called Adult Jazz in the first place, let alone one whose music attempts to examine ideas surrounding body image, gender archetypes and liberation from masculinity. At its best, this mini-album aligns the London-via-Leeds quartet’s wildly experimental tendencies with a twisted pop nous that recalls Dirty Projectors, Björk or Strang
  
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• Pantha du Prince: The Triad review – elevating and intricate

  19-05-2016 19:45
  
  (Rough Trade)The German minimalist producer and stickler for a conceptual framework recently explained his ambition to “cut through the digital dust that surrounds us” with his new album, The Triad. Panther du Prince’s aim is to celebrate human interaction, jamming, even, in an age of GarageBand and disconnect. While this first solo album in six years is elevating, and intricate in its elegance and rhythmic propulsions, it remains uncluttered by the chaos of true, visceral emot
  
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• Christy Moore: Lily review – politics, nostalgia and soul

  19-05-2016 19:45
  
  (Sony Music)Ireland’s finest singer-songwriter and interpreter of other people’s songs returns with his first album in three years. Christy Moore’s new set is as varied as his celebrated live performances: unexpected songs are reworked with his intimate, soulful vocals. He starts with a series of easygoing pieces by Irish writers, including the upbeat The Tuam Beat, but the mood changes with the thoughtful, partly self-composed title track, which blends nostalgia and history. T
  
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• Adele is Ivor Novello songwriter of the year

  19-05-2016 19:44
  
  The singer-songwriter scooped the award after being overlooked in the song and album categories for 25Adele has made yet another awards ceremony her own as she was named songwriter of the year at the Ivor Novello awards.It was previously thought the singer, who already swept the Brits earlier in the year with four awards, had been snubbed by the ceremony as she was not among the nominees for song or album of the year – but she once again walked away with the most prestigious award of the n
  
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• Vasil Hadžimanov/David Binney: Alive review – pulsing grooves and fiery sax

  19-05-2016 19:30
  
  (Moonjune)Serbian keyboardist and composer Vasil Hadžimanov is not widely known outside eastern Europe (though he’s a Berklee jazz college graduate), but he has performed with rock artists from his homeland and with Nigel Kennedy, his parents are singing stars from Macedonia and Croatia, and these live recordings from a Serbian tour in 2014, with New York saxist David Binney guesting, might just be his western calling-card. The music bursts with vitality from the pulsing groove and ro
  
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• Richard Ashcroft: These People review – nothing brutal from a mellifluous foghorn

  19-05-2016 19:30
  
  (Cooking Vinyl)Making an album that strikes chords with pretty much the totality of the British populace means you will be forever be defined according to its terms. But for all the raging against things that Richard Ashcroft does in interviews, that doesn’t seem to be something the ex-Verve man minds much. Certainly, he returns explicitly to the sound of Urban Hymns on his fourth solo album: neat, sad strings, unhurried percussion and his mellifluous foghorn of a voice. There are outliers
  
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• Bob Dylan: Fallen Angels review – unfaithful and lovely

  19-05-2016 19:15
  
  (Sony/Columbia)The thought strikes, part-way through Bob Dylan’s second album of standards from the mid-20th century American songbook, that it sounds like nothing so much as the unreleased soundtrack to a later Woody Allen movie. It has the same tastefully muted jazzy arrangements, the same love for the music combined with a slight sense of didacticism (Listen! You WILL love these songs as much as I do), the same oddly absurd disconnection from modernity. The arrangements aren’t fai
  
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• It’s Time To Say ‘NO MORE’ To Domestic Abuse And Sexual Assault

  19-05-2016 19:07
  
  Enough is enough.
  
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• F**k It Friday: Anthony Mackie

  19-05-2016 18:59
  
  Celebrating the power of those two lil' words: "F**K IT"!
  
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• Chloe Moretz Reveals Brooklyn Beckham 'Understands' Her Sex Scenes With Strangers

  19-05-2016 18:46
  
  So that's nice.
  
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• Fetty Wap: ‘I didn’t even get to use no bed – I was lucky to have a carpet’

  19-05-2016 18:39
  
  Just over three years ago the New Jersey rapper was dealing drugs and practically homeless. In 2015, his track Trap Queen was the year’s biggest sleeper hit. So how is this ‘hip-hop Evel Knievel’ coping with the fame?Fetty Wap lost his left eye before his first birthday, the result of congenital glaucoma. Nowadays, the vacant space is bloodshot when he lifts his eyelid, but it usually just looks as if he’s squinting from smoking too much weed.During childhood, however, cl
  
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• Chance The Rapper is the world's first truly independent artist

  19-05-2016 17:21
  
  His fourth mixtape, Coloring Book, makes him the first artist to get an album in the Billboard 200 charts based on streams alone – is he the future of music?Chance the Rapper looks set to become the first artist to get an album in the Billboard 200 charts this week based on streams alone for Coloring Book, his third mixtape in four years (or fourth if you count last year’s Surf with Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment).Streams have counted towards the US chart since the end of
  
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• Perrie Edwards Went To Karaoke And Spent Most Of Her Time Singing Little Mix Songs

  19-05-2016 17:01
  
  Because what else would you do on a night out.
  
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• Exclusive! Watch Lawson's Andy Prepare To Propose To His GF Joey McDowall In Their Brand New Music Vid

  19-05-2016 17:00
  
  Watch a behind the scenes clip from their new music vid 'Where My Love Goes' here!
  
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• Chris Martin: Coldplay singer, philanthropist … and comedian?

  19-05-2016 16:43
  
  The global superstar might be playing Glastonbury this year but his penchant for making comedic cameos of varying success has been overlooked – until nowColdplay’s Chris Martin has been called many things throughout his career: a bedwetter, a geography teacher, a “woeful fucking waste of a snail’s time” ... but a comedic maverick? Never. Until now, that is. The Devonshire frontman has long been a supporter of comedy. A close friend of Simon Pegg and Ricky Gervais, h
  
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• Bella Hadid Flashes All of The Flesh In A Jaw-Dropping Red Dress As She Hits Cannes Red Carpet

  19-05-2016 16:38
  
  Oh heeeeeey.
  
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• How To Do Perfect Pastel Rainbow Hair

  19-05-2016 16:36
  
  Because why wouldn't you want to look like a magical unicorn?
  
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• S’Express on ecstasy, acid house and why drag is the new punk

  19-05-2016 16:06
  
  The 1988 single Theme from S’Express took Mark Moore from DJing at London’s gay clubs to No 1 and Top of the Pops. He talks about the power of disco – and why Sid Vicious gave him an old pair of trousersAs this year’s gripe-fest around the 40th anniversary of punk demonstrates, nothing winds up the grizzled warriors of 1976 like a public recognition of their achievements. Look at the resentment directed at Punk London, in which “some of the coolest cultural organisa
  
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• Various artists: Day of the Dead review – keeps the freak flag flying

  19-05-2016 16:00
  
  A five-CD, 59-track compilation of alt-rock Grateful Dead covers – curated by the National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner – reveals the band’s timeless songcraftEverything about Day of the Dead suggests that it long ago ceased being a fundraising exercise for the Aids charity Red Hot and turned into a painstaking labour of love. You can tell by its packaging, which is beautiful, and by the sleevenotes that gushingly attest to how obsessed its curators – the National&rsqu
  
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• Jonny Quinn: Music industry needs tax breaks to help budding artists

  19-05-2016 14:46
  
  Snow Patrol's Jonny Quinn has called on the Government to provide tax breaks to help young artists break into the music industry.
  
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• 8 Things You Never Knew About Peru

  19-05-2016 14:41
  
  From pants to potatoes, double QQs and many llamas, here's everything you never knew about Peru...
  
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• Bryce Dessner of The National: 'The Grateful Dead are part of folklore'

  19-05-2016 14:00
  
  The indie giants have made a five-disc covers compilation in honour of the Dead. Here their guitarist talks about their impact, how Sonic Youth were their natural successors and why they’re so much more than a ‘jam band’You wouldn’t think it, but less than a year after their “final” gig the Grateful Dead is ready for a re-introduction. Even when the band was active, they were known in the culture as a hippie band, a band to do drugs to, a band that jammed fore
  
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• 14 Problems All Short Girls Will Relate To

  19-05-2016 13:52
  
  1. Spotting the cutest top on the highest rail you can NEVER EVER reach
  
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• Watching Porn In The UK Might Be About To Get A Whole Lot Harder

  19-05-2016 13:34
  
  NO PUN INTENDED.
  
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• Vanessa Hudgens Has Officially Had Her Say On High School Musical 4

  19-05-2016 13:23
  
  Is this the start of something new?
  
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• Lauren Conrad Claims She Was 'Locked In A Basement' During The Speidi Wedding

  19-05-2016 13:14
  
  She really is going to want to forget this.
  
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• Guess Which British YouTuber Just Landed A Spot On Celebrity MasterChef

  19-05-2016 13:14
  
  Hope he's got his buttery biscuit base in order.
  
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• Readers recommend playlist: songs about power

  19-05-2016 13:00
  
  The full force of the universe is felt through music this week as a below-the-line regular selects a playlist from last week’s suggestions
  Below is this week’s playlist – the theme interpreted and tunes picked by a reader from the comments on last week’s blog. Thanks for your suggestions. Read more about the weekly format of the Readers recommend series at the end of the piece.When introducing the topic, I referenced a Dylan Thomas poem, The Force That Through the Green F
  
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• Gene Simmons: ‘I still fly up to the top of the rafters and spit fire’

  19-05-2016 13:00
  
  Descending to the stage on a flying-saucer is a dangerous business, says the Keane-loving Kiss frontmanHi Gene!Hello! I am Gene Simmons. Continue reading...
  
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• 8 Pen Spinning Hacks To Get You Through Exam Season

  19-05-2016 12:34
  
  The perfect cure for exam boredom
  
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• Cara Delevingne ‘Howled Like A Wolf’ & Ran Naked Through Some Woods To Prepare For Her Suicide Squad Movie Role

  19-05-2016 12:00
  
  Of course.
  
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• Nathan Sykes SLAMS George Shelley's Union J Replacement - "Try To Find Someone Better"

  19-05-2016 11:57
  
  Harsh.
  
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• Will Butler's live track playlist: Sam Cooke, Prince, Violent Femmes and more

  19-05-2016 11:56
  
  In support of his new live album, the Arcade Fire member picks a selection of songs performed in front of a live audience, including hypnotic Motown, Prince’s epoch and his grandfather on steel guitarThis is my grandfather playing steel guitar with his big band, taken from a live radio broadcast in 1940. Where to start? How about with the strikingly beautiful vocoder (technically talk-box, but whatever) performance. But also that one emotional brass moment that swells a third of the way in
  
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• Someone Is Claiming Tyga Leaked His And Kylie Jenner’s Sex Tape Online, Except No One Has Seen It

  19-05-2016 11:53
  
  OK, hun.
  
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• MTV Review: Ariana Grande's 'Dangerous Woman' Is Her Best Record Yet & Here's Why

  19-05-2016 11:45
  
  It's SO good...
  
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• Harry Styles Has Been Working On His Solo Material For Years And It's Going To Shock The World

  19-05-2016 11:22
  
  We're really not ready.
  
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• OMG Geordie Shore's Charlotte Crosby Tells Us Why She Can't Keep Her Hands To Herself…

  19-05-2016 10:49
  
  Listen to Char's playlist in full now on MTV TRAX!
  
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• Demi Lovato explains THAT Taylor Swift Tweet: Don’t Brand Yourself A Feminist If You Don’t Do The Work

  19-05-2016 10:03
  
  She's standing by her words.
  
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• Rage Against the Machine, Chuck D and B-Real form supergroup

  19-05-2016 09:48
  
  All members of Rage except Zack de La Rocha are involved in new group Prophets of Rage, which comes armed with a familiar hashtag – #TakeThePowerBack Related: Rage Against the Machine bassist: I apologise for Limp Bizkit Roll up, for the latest assembly of slightly fading music stars taking the stage together under the guise of it being a “supergroup”. Public Enemy’s Chuck D, Cypress Hill’s B-Real and Rage Against the Machine – minus singer Zack de la Rocha &n
  
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• Irish music is enjoying a global resurgence, says Johnny McDaid

  19-05-2016 09:08
  
  The Snow Patrol singer talks about working with Ed Sheeran and his charity work.
  
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• Celine Dion says she is 'at peace' after losing her husband and brother to cancer

  19-05-2016 07:33
  
  The Canadian singer has given her first interviews since her husband Rene Angelil and brother Daniel both died from cancer in January.
  
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• Two more people file claims to Prince's estate

  19-05-2016 02:57
  Two more individuals claiming to be relatives of the late pop star Prince came forward on Wednesday to seek a piece of the musician's estate. Lawyers for Brianna Nelson, 31, identified as a niece of Prince, and an 11-year-old girl identified as his grandniece and her initials "V.N." in court documents, filed papers in Minnesota probate court asserting they are among his heirs. Both claim to be surviving descendants of Prince - born Prince Rogers Nelson - as daughter and granddaughter to his late
  
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• Luisotti to step down as SF Opera music director in 2018

  19-05-2016 01:08
  SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Nicola Luisotti says he will end his term as music director of the San Francisco Opera when his contract expires at the end of the 2017-18 season.
  
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