Fuzz, Manchester, Leeds & Salisbury
While Jack White has taken garage rock to Hollywood, Ty Segall is taking it back underground. A prolific writer, the 27-year-old is also up for collaboration – of late, he’s been interested in stoner rock, most recently forming a new group with members of the Melvins, but also returning to Fuzz with his regular lead guitarist Charles Mootheart. Their first album was a work of modern Californian stonerism, with heavy riffs transported elsewhere by exploratory space jams. For the follow-up, they’ve reverted to the British template, taking the music back to basics and essentially playing a version of Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality. As a plan, it’s hard to fault.
Gorilla, Manchester, Tue; Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, Thu; End Of The Road, Salisbury, Fri
JR
Sufjan Stevens, On tour
A dreamer of concepts (you will recall his “50 states” project, in which he aimed to write an album for each of the 50 US territories), Sufjan Stevens can sometimes let his mind distract from the heart of his music. As adept as he is at working with an orchestra, or electronica, or rocking out with the National, what’s most appealing about his current album Carrie & Lowell (the names of his mother and stepfather) is the way he uses these talents in the service of some mightily touching songs, whose melodic directness recall the best work of Elliott Smith. Moving, but with their introversion mitigated by wit (one song recalls his childhood swimming teacher calling him “Subaru”; another the line “You checked your texts while I masturbated…”), it displays the strength at the heart of the best delicate music, and is a great return to form.
JR
Paul Smith, On tour
Over his ten years as the frontman of Maxïmo Park, Paul Smith has brought a humanity to the band’s driving and sharp-cornered indie-rock. So successful are they, evidently, that they can even handle that most starry kind of venture – the solo side-project. Five years on from his debut Margins, Smith’s current solo album Contradictions isn’t altogether likely to threaten the mothership. A collection of more relaxed and traditional indie-rock, the album forgoes much of Smith’s more characterful delivery. Still, that change may perhaps in itself be as good as a rest.
JR
Action Beat Annual Festival, Milton Keynes
Today sees a morass of clanging guitars and too many drummers, as self-styled “noise band from Bletchley” Action Beat hold court for their annual one-dayer. A thick soup of post-punk guitar and grinding chords, they are a fluid proposition, usually taking to the stage with around four guitarists and a few drummers, give or take a couple of members. Side-project Bad Body also make an appearance, and those complementing this sonic pile-up include terrific naive garage trio Trash Kit, Americans, Lake Of Snakes, Spoilers, the Suns and Mons Meg, who churns out crumbling electronics in a not-quite-holding-it-together kind of way.
JA
Elliot Galvin Trio, On tour
Close behind the emergence of Laura Jurd as a British jazz star came her fellow Trinity Laban student and piano partner Elliot Galvin, who proved to be an artist of comparable technique, and a navigator of new routes of his own. Galvin took the familiar piano-trio jazz format and turned it inside out, but has never disengaged from jazz’s classic keyboard traditions – like his famous UK senior Django Bates, he balances edginess with a playfulness that reaches beyond the jazz loop. Galvin’s trio won the European Young Artists’ Jazz Award, Burghausen 2014, and this tour reworks the music he wrote last year for the multimedia installation, Dreamland, at Margate’s Turner Contemporary – a mix of mysteriously modulating blues, rhythm-pattern conundrums, stride-piano, avant-swing, hip-hop and a lot more.
The Lescar, Sheffield, Wed; Cafe Costes, Birmingham, Thu; The Verdict, Brighton, Fri
JF
Kullervo, London
The Proms’ 150th birthday tribute to Sibelius has already included a complete cycle of the seven symphonies, as well as a performance of his final tone poem, Tapiola. It ends where Sibelius’s orchestral journey began, with the biggest of his early works, Kullervo, which Sakari Oramo (pictured) will conduct for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with Johanna Rusanen-Kartano and Waltteri Torikka as the soprano and baritone soloists. Kullervo was the beginning of Sibelius’s lifelong fascination with the Kalevala, the most important work of Finnish mythology. His depiction of the book’s tragic title character – his story involves child abuse, rape, incest and finally suicide, in five linked tone poems – is sometimes almost as choral and operatic as it is symphonic, and the work’s central duet for Kullervo and his sister-lover provides a tantalising glimpse of the operas that Sibelius might have composed, had he not followed the orchestral path.
AC
