CDs/DVDs
graham.rickson
What we don’t learn about filmmaker Harry Birrell is as tantalising as what is actually revealed during the course of Matt Pinder’s beguiling 90-minute documentary. We hear that Birrell was born in Paisley to a father he never met, who had been killed in action on the Macedonian Front, and that the young Harry was given a cine camera at the age of 10, the start of a lifelong hobby. We see Birrell’s granddaughter, actress and producer Carina Birrell, peering into storage boxes in a garden shed containing 400 reels of film plus assorted photograph albums and diaries.Birrell moved to London in Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Darkside is not a particularly original name for a band. In the late '80s and early '90s, it was a tag used by escapees from the infighting between Jason Pierce and Sonic Boom in Spacemen 3, as well as being taken on by at least one drum and bass crew in the '90s. However, it is now being given another airing by electronic ambient explorer Nicolas Jaar and multi-instrumental experimentalist Dave Harrington for their psychedelic two-piece.Almost a decade since their debut (and only other album), Darkside have put Covid downtime to good use by producing a mellow and laidback album which gives Read more ...
Liz Thomson
David Crosby hit the headlines a few months back, another artist selling his song catalogue in order to secure his house. These days musicians must stay on the road to earn a living and sell records. It’s a punishing life, even for the young and fit. When you’re pushing 80, especially when you’ve spent years punishing your body, it becomes a real challenge, but it’s the only way to survive.Croz has no plans yet to hit the road again – the tour bus is just too uncomfortable, tendonitis makes playing guitar difficult – and he spent a chunk of lockdown sequestered in his son’s LA garage working Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Wavves’ Nathan Williams found you can go home again. Following a deteriorating decade on a major label, and 2017’s raucous retrenchment You’re Welcome (2017), the punk-pop Californians have returned to their first label, Fat Possum. Williams then wrote Hideaway in his parents’ shed, where Wavves’ first records were taped.The need for safety and care suggested by a 35-year-old retreating to his childhood home plays out in this seventh album, where standing fast against buffeting waves of fear and self-loathing often seems progress enough. Hideaway feels like a breakup album, written when pain Read more ...
joe.muggs
Craig Fortnam’s music – solo or in the bands North Sea Radio Orchestra and Arch Garrison – sounds like a lot of things. It sounds like the 70s prog-folk-jazz interface of Kevin Ayres and Robert Wyatt as its influence feeds on into Kate Bush. When he starts looping things up or letting synthesisers dominate, it hints at early 90s electronica. His plaintive singing and natural surrealism frequently recall the early '00s folktronica songwriting of Mike Lindsay and Sam Genders in Tunng. A lot of the time you can even feel like you’re only a sackbut away from things going entirely medieval. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Spandau Ballet started well, their slick, slightly angular pop-funk adding a certain something to early Eighties new romantic frippery. Later, especially with the success of global schmaltz-smash “True”, they lost what teeth they had, drifting into cod-soul blandness. Kemp’s career since has focused as much on acting as music, but his recent round of gigs playing Syd Barrett to drummer Nick Mason’s early Pink Floyd tribute band, Saucerful of Secrets, was both unexpected and well-received. It was this that made me intrigued to hear Insolo. I wish it hadn’t. It’s one of the worst albums I’ve Read more ...
graham.rickson
A United Artists studio executive was treated to a pre-release screening of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter in 1955. His damning response was, “it’s too arty.” The studio showed little interest in promotion and it was deemed a flop. Laughton, stung by his directorial debut’s muted reception, never directed another film. A sorry tale, but at least the studio didn’t butcher the finished product à la Magnificent Ambersons. Laughton and screenwriter James Agee’s faithful transcription of Davis Grubb’s source novel holds up superbly well as thriller, fairy tale and gothic horror. The Read more ...
mark.kidel
Chet Faker is Melbourne-born musician Nick Murphy’s alter ego, an avatar he has stepped in and out of with gentle grace over more than a decade of finding a voice that's very much his own. Once described in The Guardian as a purveyor of “mellow-electronic-pop”, he is actually something else, closer to the sensuality and slow drag of soul, lilting along to very relaxed beats that have an almost trip-hop feel.“Hotel Surrender” is an apt title for an album that has that otherworldly insouciance found in the well-scrubbed anonymity of a hotel. There is also the soothing quality that comes from Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This writer has often pleaded to move away from vocal homogeny in pop. The current value placed on technical skill and hackneyed vulnerability-signifying has become a bore. It’s limiting that Chris Martin-meets-Ed Sheeran or Beyoncé-meets-Whitney Houston are primary templates. That said, the voice of Aussie singer Toni Watson – AKA Tones and I – is a challenge, a cloyingly cute teen-squeak of an instrument (although capable of taking flight). In the end, though, her music represents her bountiful character, and her voice suits it just fine.Debut album Welcome to the Madhouse will be a test- Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s kind of surprising Jimmy “Jam” Harris and Terry Lewis have never made an album as Jam & Lewis per se before now. The two have conquered the world, more or less: their band The Time was Prince’s regular support act in his breakthrough years, as a star production / songwriting duo they’ve written 41 US Top 10 hits over the years, and they have 27 Grammy nominations and five wins. Their most famous work was with Janet Jackson in her imperial phase, but they’ve provided a golden touch for everyone from Usher and Boys II Men to George Michael and The Human League.But now, at the ages of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It can be hard to separate this century’s male British troubadours, these children of Thom Yorke with their frail quavers, uniformly insisting on sensitivity, but too often sounding like entitled bleats. Maybe, as James Blake has defensively indicated, they simply reveal an epidemic of depression. In a desperate decade, mild yearning, not rage, anyway remains this genre’s default. Coldplay even removed the blood from the tracks of their anodyne breakup album, like spilt wine on the carpet.Dig beneath the morass of maudlin vocals, though, and individual artistry persists. Tom Odell’s pop Read more ...
graham.rickson
The first 10 minutes of West 11 are arresting, with a sweeping crane shot over an ungentrified West London and a zoom in through an attic bedsit window. The credits reveal that the screenplay is by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, from a once-influential novel by Laura Del-Rivo. There’s a catchy, moody score by the great Stanley Black. The titles unfold over location footage that brilliantly establishes a sense of time and place; much of the film looks and feels so authentic.This was the young Michael Winner’s breakthrough feature, released in 1963, and this disc’s bonus interview with film Read more ...