Music news

• Sweden Now Has A Sauna Inside A Giant Gold Egg, Everyone

  18-06-2017 18:14
  
  Well that’s not extra at all, is it?
  
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• Run the Jez! The hip-hop duo playing Glastonbury with Corbyn

  18-06-2017 18:00
  
  After cancelling last year, the ‘hero of the hour’ politician will make his Pilton debut introducing Run the Jewels. But Killer Mike and El-P need no introduction to the Labour leaderName: Run the JewelsAge: Formed in 2013 Continue reading...
  
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• Searing Sheeran: hot Glastonbury sunshine predicted

  18-06-2017 16:39
  
  Temperatures of 30C forecast, although things should cool down before headlining singer-songwriter takes to stage on SundayMusic fans could enjoy the hottest ever Glastonbury festival, with temperatures potentially reaching 10C higher than usual, forecasters say.The weather is expected to stay dry in the lead-up to the weekend, with a 20% chance of “isolated showers” on Wednesday and Thursday. Continue reading...
  
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• One Direction Poised To Reunite To Join Stars Recording Charity Single For Grenfell Tower Victims

  18-06-2017 15:56
  
  Liam, Louis, Niall and Harry are all hoping to sing on the song
  
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• Harry Potter Fans Are Still Convinced That Ron And Dumbledore Are The Same Person

  18-06-2017 15:26
  
  This is one HP conspiracy theory that refuses to apparate away
  
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• Frozen in Time: Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, New York, March 1981

  18-06-2017 15:00
  
  The most glamorous couple in pop, photographed in their New York kitchen by Allen TannenbaumComedy oven gloves are often overlooked when one considers the 1970s punk scene of New York, getting lost among the black leather and heroin. We’re in the apartment of Chris Stein and Debbie Harry in 1981, when they were the most glamorous couple in the world, and they’re having what looks like quite a laugh.Debbie Harry was performing with a girl group called the Stilettos in 1974, and nervou
  
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• Kendall Jenner Is Not Going To Apologise For Having A Flawless Butt

  18-06-2017 14:57
  
  The reality star has been flashing the flesh on social media
  
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• Geordie Shore Cast Members Are Sharing The Love On Father's Day

  18-06-2017 14:29
  
  Charlotte, Aaron, Sophie and Marnie among those celebrating their dads
  
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• Pelléas et Mélisande review – fresh light on Debussy's mysterious fairytale

  18-06-2017 14:00
  
  Garsington Opera, Wormsley
  An innovative, striking production that eschews the usual symbolist approach and gets to grips with the story’s rich complexitiesWe tend to think of Debussy’s symbolist tragedy primarily as a hermetic work, examining half-voiced, festering emotions in an aristocratic world remote from the mundane. But are we right to do so? And if not, then what is the external reality that its protagonists so carefully seek to avoid? These are some of the questions posed b
  
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• Laura Mvula: ‘I can’t make music when I’ve got a dirty kitchen’

  18-06-2017 14:00
  
  The singer-songwriter on Mum’s Caribbean cooking, food platters with Prince – and the worst time to have a burgerI grew up in a little terraced house in Selly Park, Birmingham. The rickety old piano was in the dining room. I’d usually practise while the smells of mum’s cooking – ackee and saltfish – drifted in from the kitchen. A piano and dining table are practically one and the same in my mind.One church we attended had Caribbean evenings on Saturdays, where
  
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• Ed Sheeran Says He Doesn't Need To Defend Taylor Swift From Katy Perry

  18-06-2017 13:39
  
  The Thinking Out Loud singer is being very diplomatic right now
  
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• Has Beyonce Finally Given Birth To Her Twins?

  18-06-2017 13:11
  
  Reports are suggesting Bey and Jay are new parents
  
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• Liam Gallagher Has Taken A Swipe At Liam Payne

  18-06-2017 12:56
  
  Gallagher doesn't rate Payne's rap skills
  
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• Vicky Pattison Hits Out At Taylor Swift Calling The Chart Topper 'Sly'

  18-06-2017 12:18
  
  Vicky is not a fan of The Swift
  
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• Beyoncé 'gives birth to twins'

  18-06-2017 12:08
  
  Pop superstar and husband Jay Z welcomed twins into the world last week, according to US celebrity news websitesBeyoncé has given birth to twins in Los Angeles, according to reports on several celebrity news websites that cited unidentified sources.The singer, who is 35, and her partner, the rapper and music producer Jay Z, already have a five-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy. Continue reading...
  
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• Lorde: Melodrama review – maximum overwrought

  18-06-2017 10:00
  
  (Virgin EMI)
  The New Zealand singer cranks up the intensity on her second album, balanced by enough moments of weirdness to intrigueMelodrama’s cover art – by New York artist Sam McKinniss – casts Lorde as a colour-dappled bohemian synaesthete. The singer’s second album, however, is emphatically not a cry from a draughty atelier. It has an unenviable act of tonal balance to pull off: yielding glossy ear-crack that will burn its way through Spotify playlists, while retaini
  
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• Visions CD review – Véronique Gens unites wide-ranging arias

  18-06-2017 09:00
  
  Véronique Gens/Munich Radio Orchestra/Niquet(Alpha Classics)For the Romantics, visions could be spiritual or sensual, scary or sublime and this fascinating collection of soprano arias ranges widely. The 19th-century religious fervour of César Franck’s Béatitudes and Jules Massenet’s La Vierge is contrasted with the secular grandeur of Henry Février’s Gismonda from 1919 and Halévy’s fine La Magicienne of 1858. What they all have in common
  
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• Sue McCreeth: Look Back and Love review – an impressive showcase

  18-06-2017 09:00
  
  (Tru-Nu)As a singer-songwriter, Sue McCreeth is highly unusual in two ways. First, she takes as her starting point not a few words or snatch of melody, but a harmonic idea. This comes, perhaps, from having studied with Gary Burton and Joe Mulholland at Berklee, the “jazz university” in Boston. Second, she alters her singing voice quite radically to suit the character of individual songs. As a result, the sheer contrast from one song to another, while very effective, can be a little b
  
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• Steve Earle: So You Wannabe an Outlaw review – winning homage to Willie and Waylon

  18-06-2017 09:00
  
  (Warner)By the time Earle cut his 1986 debut, Guitar Town, country’s “outlaw” movement was in decline, though its architects (Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson et al) had successfully challenged Nashville’s sequined orthodoxy with their rockier sound and rebel spirit. Here, Earle pays homage to the outlaws with a dozen fine originals, from noisy guitar rock-outs like the title track (with a guest spot from Nelson) and the bleak Fixin’ to Die, to gentle loser ballads su
  
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• Royal Blood: How Did We Get So Dark? review – some killer, some filler…

  18-06-2017 09:00
  
  (Warner)The follow-up to Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher’s hugely successful debut doesn’t deviate enormously from their established template. There might now be the odd vocal harmony popping up, but this is still essentially a finely poised struggle between melody and muscular riffing. While it starts thrillingly – the title track and Lights Out as good as anything they’ve ever done and reminiscent of Queens of the Stone Age at their most imperious – they fail to sustai
  
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• Nenov: Piano Concerto; Ballade No 2 CD review – revelatory Bulgarian modernism

  18-06-2017 09:00
  
  Ivo Varbanov (piano), RSNO/Tabakov(Hyperion)Communism did for Bulgarian composer, pianist and architect Dimitar Nenov (1901-1953). From 1944, this educated, well-travelled polymath with a dangerously aristocratic lineage was effectively silenced, his music condemned as “influenced by western modernism” and many of his scores burnt and recordings destroyed. Now his fellow Bulgarian Ivo Varbanov has resurrected his sprawling, unpublished 1936 piano concerto and his 1942 Ballade No 2 fo
  
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• Lise Davidsen: ‘There’s a high expectation every time I go out and sing’

  18-06-2017 09:00
  
  The young Norwegian soprano on her Glyndebourne debut, her musical heroes, and how the voice has a way of finding its own levelNorwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, 30, shot to fame two years ago when she won several top awards, including the world’s biggest, Plácido Domingo’s Operalia. Domingo praised her “phenomenal, dramatic” vocal qualities. She studied in Copenhagen and Bergen and is about to make her debut at Glyndebourne, singing the title role in Richard Strauss
  
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• Lisa Knapp review – folk delivered with lust and menace

  18-06-2017 09:00
  
  Wyeside Arts Centre, Builth Wells
  The south London singer doesn’t brush aside her genre’s rougher, sweatier momentsWhen folk music matriarch Shirley Collins returned to touring this spring after 35 years, she took a young woman with her, a new keeper of her flame. This was Lisa Knapp, ex-raver and East Croydon-dweller who’s been called the folk Björk, and who, in the artwork for her new album of traditional May songs, ‘Till April Is Dead: A Garland of May, wears a ri
  
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• Fleet Foxes: Crack-Up review – immersive, shifting creations

  18-06-2017 09:00
  
  (Nonesuch)The third Fleet Foxes album arrives after a six-year hiatus and lands beard-first into the debate on the role of the artist in 2017: to reflect the complex real-world landscape or to make an oblique and beautiful piece of art? Robin Pecknold and his fellow Foxes have opted more for the second option for the follow-up to Hopelessness Blues. As Pecknold tells it, Crack-Up does not lack engagement with the outside world: Cassius is about the violent deaths of young black men, as well as M
  
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• Big Boi: Boomiverse review – brand new, he’s retro…

  18-06-2017 09:00
  
  (Epic)Two decades after establishing Atlanta’s reputation as a hub for hip-hop’s most out-there talents as half of Outkast, Big Boi’s invention and eclecticism are now, curiously, signifiers of nostalgia on his third solo album. Virtual Japanese pop star Hatsune Miku’s cut-up voice on Kill Jill evokes Timbaland’s turn-of-the-century penchant for Asian samples; warm, rolling bass throughout is reminiscent of prime UGK. A sprinkling of electro bleeps throws Boomiverse
  
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• Ride: Weather Diaries review – it flickers, but doesn’t quite catch fire

  18-06-2017 08:59
  
  (Wichita)Ride’s previous four albums only occasionally captured the gleeful savagery of their live sound and this comeback collection is no different. Weather Diaries brings electronic touches into play, but the production is too chaste and respectful throughout. The reunited quartet’s strength is their vast-sounding intimacy, a compelling combination of fragility and noise. When they glide into one of their remarkable instrumental passages, particularly on Lannoy Point, Charm Assaul
  
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• Beth Ditto: Fake Sugar review – southern punk swagger

  18-06-2017 08:59
  
  (Virgin)After 17 years of firebrand queer feminist punk, former Gossip singer Ditto embraces her southern origins on her solo debut. Though dreaming of Muscle Shoals with an Elvis sneer, the likes of the Dusty-in-Arksansas In and Out, which deals with the realities of marriage, and the swaggering funky soul of Fire are, of course, still punk sharp at heart. A couple of songs hang too much on their belting choruses, but moments such as the disco-Stones shuffle of Oo La La and the unabashed, dream
  
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• Jack Colwell review – a journey of transformation from joy to rage to magic

  18-06-2017 05:33
  
  Golden Age, SydneyColwell’s performance is equally compelling and mesmerising, which sometimes makes for challenging listeningJack Colwell’s debut album Swandream, inspired by the opera Swan Lake, is an “exploration of transformation”, a phrase Colwell loves.
  “I love the ballet, I love swans, I love it all,” Colwell laughs as he talks about the album to his audience, crammed into the tiny Golden Age bar in Surry Hills on the last night of the Vivid festival. C
  
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