CDs/DVDs
Harry Thorfinn-George
Certified Lover Boy is not a mixtape, a playlist or a collection of loosies, but an Album. With a capital A. This is a distinction Drake makes when it’s time to get serious, when he wants us to sit up and listen intently. Unfortunately, Drake Albums often get bogged down in this seriousness. Both 2016’s Views and 2018’s Scorpion were slogs to get through. The spark of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late and cohesion of Nothing Was the Same felt missed. Yet CLB sees Drake loosen up the collar on his big-boy Album shirt. He leans into his sleazier tendencies whilst grappling with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Following the death last year from COVID-19 of keyboard player Dave Greenfield, it appears the The Stranglers’ five decade journey may finally be drawing to a close. They bucked all odds by maintaining a path after singer Hugh Cornwall left in 1990, and the last two decades, especially, have seen them hold steady, both as a live draw and with critically respected albums. Dark Matters, their eighteenth, is a decently wrought, sometimes elegiac conclusion to a career that’s taken them from pre-punk to post-everything.Eight of the 11 songs were recorded before Greenfield’s death but the single “ Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
From the first moment the military drums start pounding and the epic brass begins to build, you know you’re listening to the start of something exceptional. Something groundbreaking, important – a masterpiece. Opening track “Sometimes I Might Be Introvert” demonstrates the confidence and skill of Little Simz – now 27 – and represents a huge step forward from her highly praised album, GREY Area.It’s personal but not sentimental, angry but not full of hate, joyful and despairing all at the same time. Her delivery has developed – lightning-speed spitting is her forté – but here she shows Read more ...
joe.muggs
Iron Maiden are in very many senses as English, as camp and as ridiculous as Christmas pantomime, even down to the “HE’S BEHIND YOU!” looming of their vast onstage zombie mascot Eddie. Which is not to say there’s nothing to them: far from it. Just like pantomime, their durability shows how much they speak to something deep and archetypal in their audience’s spirit. In some senses it’s that Englishness that underpins it – on this, their seventeenth album, as much as ever. For all the finesse and flamboyance of their playing, there is the spirit of an old Englishman painting model tanks in his Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In an interview with Zane Lowe about her new album, Halsey said that the producers wanted to “make some really weird choices”. This was, you suspect, the intention: you don’t bring Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails onboard to produce the follow-up to your mainstream pop breakthrough without being open to something pretty weird. Described by the singer (who uses she/they pronouns interchangeably) as “a concept album about the joys and horrors of pregnancy and childbirth” and combining cinematic production with pure pop riffs, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is the boldest Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The cinema fan in your life is going to thank you for this one. The BFI’s new two-disc Blu-ray version of Jean Renoir’s 1951 The River, filmed in India, is absolutely packed with extras: no fewer than six other offerings, including a 90-minute "documentary film-fiction hybrid" by Roberto Rossellini, an hour-long documentary, and even some early 20th century footage from India.There are interviews and essays, including an important and beautifully written one by Satyajit Ray, whose own film-making career was kickstarted by his involvement in the filming of The River. All this fascinating Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s a decade since we sadly lost the talents of Gerry Rafferty to liver failure in 2011, at the age of 63, but this Friday sees the posthumous release of his 11th album, Rest in Blue.It comprises new Rafferty songs, some beautiful traditional numbers – “Wild Mountain Thyme” and “Dirty Old Town” among them – and an affecting cover of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “It’s Just the Motion”, a song he produced in the studio with the couple before Richard Thompson pulled the plug on those sessions. There’s also a fairly ebullient 1990s re-recording of the Stealer’s Wheel classic, “Stuck in the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Bill Duke’s 1992 thriller Deep Cover receives the Criterion restoration treatment, and certainly the neon noir lighting looks luscious and fresh. It’s a shame the screenplay, the directing, and most of the acting hasn’t stood the test of time. The narrative is more than a little moralistic and obvious right from the start, opening with a flashback to a young boy witnessing his addict father die attempting a liquor store robbery as Christmas looms. The boy grows up to be a troubled Cleveland cop, Russell Stevens (played very well by Laurence Fishburne), who gets recruited by an ambitious Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
To coin a cliché, the fourth album from London pop-dance success story Rudimental is a game of two halves. The first is off-putting and dull but halfway through, the band seem to wake up. There are 16 songs on the album. The eighth, “Handle My Own”, is the first one to make the ears prick up, and from track 11 on we’re in continuous business.A decade ago, the coming together of an unknown EDM trio, Rudimental, and a super-hot producer looking for a project, Amir Amor (who soon joined them), resulted in the chart-topping “Feel the Love”, featuring John Newman. The group encapsulated a moment Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Rather than being retrospective, I’ve Been Trying To Tell You is about retrospection. The distinction is crucial as Saint Etienne’s follow-up to 2017’s Home Counties arrives 30 years on – to the month – from their debut, 1991’s Foxbase Alpha. Their 10th album is concerned with what contemplation induces. The period examined is 1997 to 2001: from the Labour Party’s UK election victory to the fall of New York’s Twin Towers. However, what could be historiography is indirect, oblique. Mood is what matters.Some pointers imply the specifics at play. “Pond House” refers to somewhere in particular Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Toyah, always a one-off, has been a surprise star of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Her YouTube Sunday Lunches, kitchen-filmed cover versions with her husband, King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, have been celebratory shared moments, jaunty, unlikely, silly, revelling unashamedly in pop music (and, bawdily, in her own physical attributes!). Toyah is enjoyably eccentric, even when her music does not appeal, thus I really wanted to like this album, a celebration of her indefatigable spirit, but it failed to win me over.Co-written and produced by regular collaborator Simon Darlow, and with contributions from Read more ...
Guy Oddy
There’s now been a fair amount of music produced in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic and most of it has contained at least a suggestion of hope for the future. The Bug’s new album? Not so much.Fire – the third record in a triptych that began with London Zoo in 2008 and continued with 2014’s Angels and Devils – is probably the most menacing and ferocious album that Kevin Martin has ever produced. Bringing in a posse of long-time collaborators like Flowdan, Manga and award-winning poet Roger Robinson as well as new faces such as Logan, Nazamba and FFSYTHO, he has ramped up the ante and pushed Read more ...