Tuesday Ten: The UK’s Up-and-Comers
In celebration of all the great music the UK has given us, we’ve put together some of our staff’s favorite up-and-coming UK artists in this week’s Tuesday Ten.
In celebration of all the great music the UK has given us, we’ve put together some of our staff’s favorite up-and-coming UK artists in this week’s Tuesday Ten.
The Grinch might be stealing Christmas from music retailers, but thanks to Josh Groban and Oprah, there’s still some singing in Whoville. For the sales week kicked off by Super Tuesday–the release date before Thanksgiving when record labels typically schedule their big guns–the figures were abnormally bad, with only one Top 10 bow and a seven-week-old album topping the charts. Still, that album, Groban’s Noël, can thank last week’s performance on The Oprah Winfrey Show for driving it past Alicia Keys and into the number one spot. Noël crowned the Billboard 200 by selling 405,000 copies for the week ended… Read more »
Now that their month-long U.S. tour is but a recent memory, animated supergroup Gorillaz are fading into the funny pages for a while, but the individual members will remain active. Vocalist Damon Albarn is releasing an album of West African music and focusing his attention on his longtime outfit Blur, producer Dan the Automator is working on a solo disc as well as producing records by Zack de la Rocha and Peeping Tom, and the remaining Gorillaz will be busying themselves with various other projects. But that doesn’t mean Gorillaz will remain locked up for an extended period of time.… Read more »
There is no part of a Femi Kuti show that doesn’t thrill or educate. It’s a whirlwind of African percussion, and American funk and soul married in a most danceable state by a colorfully dressed ensemble, with Kuti overseeing the maelstrom with either a saxophone or a set of dictum-weighted lyrics. His act, drawing heavily on material from his second album for MCA,”Fight to Win,” continues to set the bar for the term “first-rate” with new music that is loaded with colors softer than the ones found on his debut, “Shoki Shoki,” or in the Afrobeat music of his late… Read more »