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Marina and the Diamonds, Shepherd's Bush Empire | New music | The Arts Desk

The way Marina Diamandis was tweeting last year – samples include “I hate pop” and “I want to disappear into a k-hole of Cheetos and beer” – some were half expecting the girl who used to be pop’s Next Big Thing to give up. Not that her debut album, The Family Jewels, did badly exactly but, after all the hype, anything short of becoming a mini-Gaga was destined to be a disappointment. But Marina’s made of tougher stuff. She’s back, and this time around, she seems to really mean business.

The Welsh prodigy has apparently thrown the kitchen sink at her new album, Electra Heart. With a production team whose CVs include Rihanna and Katy Perry, they've written a concept album that "epitomises and embodies the illusions of American ideologies involved in the corruption of self". Hmm. But still the most important question last night was not what she thought of Obama and stuff, but rather whether she’d retained the joyful eccentricity that made The Family Jewels sound like Kate Bush doing Buggles?

By the looks on the faces of the crowd they were glad to be in her Technicolor world for the night

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theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Stephin Merritt | New music | The Arts Desk

For those unfamiliar with his work, Stephin Merritt is like a modern-day Cole Porter: prolific, highly camp, and with a genius for beautifully crafted witty three-minute songs. He performs with the 6ths, The Gothic Archies, Future Bible Heroes as well under his own name. However it is with The Magnetic Fields that he has achieved greatest recognition. I'm here to discuss their new album, Love at the Bottom of the Sea, out early next month. Fans are hoping that it might match the brilliance of Merritt's magnum opus, 1999’s triple, 69 Love Songs, where he exhausted every permutation of romance gone wrong.

Then, critics bandied around terms like “genius” and “unabashedly beautiful” along with “witty and schizoid” to describe the way Merritt played around with the central theme of popular songwriting. Genders were deliberately blurred with women singing the parts of men and vice versa. On one song, Merritt in his own lugubrious baritone, even managed to rhyme Ferdinand de Saussure with the word “bulldozer”. But what else would you expect from a man with an IQ of around 160 and a chihuahua called Irving Berlin?

Oone thing an interviewer might bank on is a pretty hard time. Merritt has built up a reputation of finding interviews almost impossibly beneath him, often replying with monosyllables or going off on surreal tangents. And, despite the man from the record label claiming he's "chatty" today, when I meet him in his hotel room, nothing in his manner gives me any confidence that today is going to be different.

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Rodrigo Y Gabriela, O2 Academy Brixton | New music | The Arts Desk

Rodrigo y Gabriela’s flamenco gymnastics have gained such a reputation over the past couple of years, it’s been suggested that watching them is like being at a circus. Ever since these two Mexican buskers came over to Europe and started dazzling with their near impossible heavy-metal-on-nylon-strings routine, audiences have been left drop-jawed at their speed and exuberance. In fact from their Facebook wall you might assume the audience were listening to Van Halen in ’78.  But, unless Rod and Gab want to end up as a novelty, they know their current routine can only take them so far. Their solution? A slight change of direction and a bunch of musicians called C.U.B.A.

Area 52, released last month, takes nine songs from the back catalogue and, with the help of the new band, gives them a kind of turbo-salsa make-over. Sometimes it sounds a bit like Santana, elsewhere like Buena Vista on steroids. Unfortunately though, on the actual record at least, often it just seems there’s just too much going on. But on record has never been how El Rod y La Gab have proved themselves. And, band or no band, showing up to a lager-and-sweat venue like Brixton, armed with a couple of classical guitars, takes big cojones.

The crowd went nuts for Rodrigo’s lightning picking but Gab’s hummingbird rhythms got even more applauseAs it turned out the pair had sufficient sound to fill a hall twice the size of the Academy, and enough music to comfortably fit into two evenings. But, aside from going on too long, it was an evening of Latin spirit, spectacle and frequently both combined. Subtle and aesthetically sophisticated it wasn’t. It was music for people who’d happily buy a pack of musician top trumps. And why not?

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CD: Van Halen - A Different Kind of Truth | New music | The Arts Desk

Not many realise it, but Diamond Dave and the Van Halen brothers have actually been back together since 2007. It’s true they only actually managed one tour before Eddie was back in rehab. But, boy, by all accounts, what form they were in. So, now they’ve recorded a new album together, is it worth getting? The bad news is that no amount of wishful thinking can alter that, now in their fifties, these guys no longer really convince with their inimitable, high-octane slacker-rock.

You won’t read that on the internet VH forums, though. There, relief that the band has, at last, produced something better than the God-awful Van Halen III has lead to gushing that this is 1984 part II. But there really isn’t much of interest here, certainly not for the casual fan. To be more precise there are, in fact, two good songs - “You and Your Blues” and “Stay Frosty” - but the latter is so clearly an alternative version of 1977’s “Ice-Cream Man” I’m not sure it counts.

It’s been widely reported that many of the songs on A Different Kind of Truth are reworkings of old demos. The record company won’t say which, but my money’s on the two above and another four that are passable but, ultimately, forgettable: “Tattoo”, “Blood and Fire”, “The Trouble with Never” and “Beats Workin'”. The other seven are often just noisy, and feel like they're going through the motions, without yesteryear's wit. Eddie’s former carefree effortless virtuosity, in particular, seems forced and, in places, more like one of his many imitators.

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CD: Mark Lanegan Band - Blues Funeral | New music | The Arts Desk

Mark Lanegan, ex-junkie and one-time singer with Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age, so fully inhabited his cover of  “The Beast in Me” on last year’s Hangover II soundtrack you could easily have assumed he'd written it. With Blues Funeral, his first full solo outing since 2004, he again uses his grated baritone to express the twilight zones of the soul. The result? A magnificent account of a life lived to within an inch of its limits. 

Bible-black and whisky-soaked this is the work of a man who was born to be living through a depression. And still, there’s a lightness of touch that carries you through almost an hour with more defiance than despair.  Maybe that’s because Lanegan's blacks come in many shades. From stoner-rock (“Gravedigger’s Song”), through electronica (“Ode to Sad Disco”) to the acoustic and baroque (“Deep Black Vanishing Train”), he matches the narrator to his subtle moods.

But if it were just the words there’d be hardly any range at all. Lanegan's apocalyptic voice starts the album “with piranha teeth”, later he feels a lover “in his iron lung” and by the end “eternity’s eyes are weeping.” However, as its title suggests, this album is both about loss and redemption, and the latter is in the music.

via www.theartsdesk.com