Du Blonde, On tour
With her wigs and her costumes, Beth Jeans Houghton has always been about presenting a persona. All good fun, you may think, but apparently at the cost of the singer’s attachment to her own music – after the folky debut Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose, a second album was abandoned and the artist took a leave of absence. Certainly, Du Blonde reflects a serious change of heart. There’s not much quirk left in the slick, heavy rock to which new album Welcome Back To Milk inclines. Hearing single Black Flag, you may think one disguise had simply been swapped for another – one belonging to Arctic Monkeys, even.
Green Door Store, Brighton, Wed; 100 Club, W1, Thu; Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, Fri; touring to 11 Jun
JR
Brand New, On tour
Emo – a melodic and sensitive post-punk – is a style that grows older, but rarely wiser. Given the speed of the playing and the confessional nature of the songs, there’s often a point when a band decide that they and the genre simply aren’t right for each other any more. It’s almost an emo song in itself. Long Island’s Brand New have struggled, but evolved: their 2006 album The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me almost transcended genre. Still, though 2009’s Daisy was a huge commercial success, lately the band’s future seemed uncertain. Impressively, they’ve now turned things round, with new single Mene. Brief and chaotic: there’s nothing worth crying about there.
JR
Sun Kil Moon, On tour
Rather than a crisis, Mark Kozelek is actually having a mid-life resurgence. After years of quietly subsisting playing lovely, miserable songs to a selective audience, around 2012 he redeveloped his game and instead started writing songs that were simultaneously less and more self-absorbed, almost like waspish reviews of his own life and career. It was clearly a eureka moment, as his work since then has been both prolific, moving and – in new songs such as Cry Me A River Williamsburg Sleeve Tattoo Blues – very funny. Meanwhile, a wider world seems to be paying more attention. This month he appears in Youth, a film with Michael Caine, and there are more magazine articles about him than there have been for years. Live, Kozelek is a mood player, so it’s hard to say precisely what you’re going to get, but his judgment of a room is like a comedian’s – even if the laughs are generally pretty dark.
Colston Hall, Bristol, Sun; Barbican Hall, EC2, Mon; Irish Centre, Leeds, Wed
JR
Dark Matters, Bristol
Techno stalwart Surgeon takes a sidestep from beat-making to perform a new piece with videographer Ali Wade on the first night of this triptych of A/V events. On Friday, folk ensemble Dead Rat Orchestra perform a soundtrack to James Holcombe’s film Tyburnia, about the infamous Tyburn Gallows in London. Closing are industrial duo Umberto & Antoni Maiovvi, whose collaborative album Law Unit has just been released on Spencer Hickman’s reissue label Death Waltz, and who will be performing their John Carpenter-inspired horror soundtracks against a backdrop of footage culled from the cutting-room floor.
JA
Jacky Terrasson Trio, London
At Ronnie Scott’s international piano trio festival last year, the irrepressible pianist Jacky Terrasson swung through Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, the Duke Ellington classic Caravan and plenty more in a flurry of impetuous music-making that testified as much to the star’s sheer pleasure in playing as the 21st-century eclecticism of his tastes. Terrasson, who hit the ground running at the age of 28, when he won the famous Thelonious Monk piano competition, can apply Keith Jarrett’s rousing gospel-improv style to funky music, thunder into McCoy Tyner-style chordwork on rhythmically dramatic versions of standard songs, mix flying traditional swing with splashy free-jazz abstractions, and simmer down to play sumptuous ballads with absorbing sensitivity. Terrasson can be a show-off, but he does it with such delighted vivacity that – as with the great Ahmad Jamal, whom he sometimes resembles – nobody minds a bit.
JF
Mala Punica, London
Choral music of all historical persuasions has become a mainstay of the Spitalfields Music summer festival: this year includes a performance of Handel’s Israel In Egypt (Thu) and Stile Antico’s English renaissance music (Fri). Of course, there’s new music too, when Exaudi and the Hortus Ensemble give the world premiere of Mala Punica by Exaudi director James Weeks. He has constructed his hour-long piece as a cycle of musical canons, taking the biblical Song Of Songs as a starting point. The text’s imagery – a plume of smoke, curling vines, the pomegranates that give the work its title – is transformed into musical ideas, interwoven with three instrumental interludes that suggest a garden at dawn, afternoon and dusk.
Christ Church Spitalfields, E1, Wed
AC
