CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
Amon Tobin has released plenty of music under quite a number of pseudonyms over his 25-year career. Using his given name and aliases like Cujo and Two Fingers he has taken on trip hop, break beat, drum and bass, as well as film and videogame soundtracks. Now though, he’s added yet another identity to the list in Stone Giants for some woozy, psychedelic electronica that purportedly sets out to explore themes of love.While this stated aim isn’t particularly apparent, especially on tracks like the stoned “Stinson Beach” or the off-kilter “The Girl with the Great Ideas (That I Steal)”, West Coast Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
When Marie-Theres Härtel plays the viola, she is an astonishing force of nature. If great string-playing should combine the heavenly and the daemonic, the civilised and the raw, hers certainly does.She has a deep family folk heritage from the Steiermark in Austria (“yodelling was my mother tongue”, she says) but also spent quite a few years among the cohort of elite string players at the Vienna Conservatoire, trudging the streets around the Singerstrasse like Mozart (another viola player), and learning the magical Viennese art of how to function as an inner voice at the heart of any Read more ...
joe.muggs
Emma-Jean Thackray is not lacking in audaciousness. This is, after all, a white woman from Leeds barely into her thirties, raised on bassline house and indie rock, making music whose most obvious comparisons are with some of the most revered (in the most literal sense) black musicians in modern history: Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, J Dilla and more. And what’s more, she suggests this album will “simulate a life-changing psychedelic experience, an hour where we see behind the curtain to a hidden dimension”, packs it full of full-bore, third-eye-open omnitheistic Read more ...
peter.quinn
Album number three from Ivor Novello-winning singer-songwriter Laura Mvula sees her paying singularly personal homage to the music of the 1980s. Change, Chic, Michael Jackson and more are all called to mind at various points, with “Church Girl” seemingly nodding to the US songwriting and production team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, with its textural palate of drum machine (a Roland TR-808, perhaps?), hand claps and shiny synths, plus a final fade to the unadorned beauty of the human voice, a stylistic trait which Mvula uses to exquisite effect here and elsewhere on the album.Whether it’s the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra’s “Some Velvet Morning” is a clichéd indie-rock odd couple touchstone, and after an initial duet on Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” during the latter’s chaotic 2015 Barbican swansong, Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny Beth tried on Lee and Nancy’s threads the next year. Utopian Ashes followed, mutually developing music they recorded with most of Primal Scream and Beth’s main foil outside Savages, Johnny Hostile. What makes this more than pastiche or side-project is the songs, which cut deeply and coherently into adult relationships as they simmer and immolate. It’s an Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It takes a brave musician who thinks that he or she can do a better job than the combined talents of Russian electronica trailblazer Eduard Artemyev and Johann Sebastian Bach. However, Kevin Martin, also known as The Bug and a prime mover for such sonic experimentalists as King Midas Sound, Zonal and Techno Animal, is clearly not someone who lacks either artistic ambition or confidence. For his latest project, Kevin has taken on the task of rescoring Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 celluloid sci-fi opus, Solaris.It’s fair to say that Martin has produced an eerie and dreamlike alternative soundtrack Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Dance like its ’76”, Jack Savoretti (born 1983) sings on “Too Much History”, one of many upbeat synth-driven tracks on his new album Europiana. 1976: a sweltering summer when the charts included “Happy to Be On an Island in the Sun”, a slice of Europop by Demis Roussos, who would shortly become the unseen star of Abigail’s Party.This is Savoretti’s seventh album, conceived in sunny Oxfordshire last year with the singer-songwriter whipping up Mediterranean-style lunches served with lashings of rosé to get the band in the groove in the gaps between lockdowns. It was, he has said, very much Read more ...
John Bungey
With his band King Crimson laid up, the only chance to check out Robert Fripp's guitar prowess lately has been in the Robert & Toyah's Sunday Lunch videos that husband and wife post on YouTube. Their popular weekly assaults on classic rock hits are a game mix of the heroic and the cringeworthy. Toyah Willcox is someone to whom the label “shy and retiring” has never knowingly been attached.Anyway, here's a reminder of what Fripp can do in more serious moments, with his guitar hooked up to a container-load of digital gizmos, including a 76-second delay unit, as he creates his orchestra-like Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
While recognisably a John Grant album, Boy From Michigan brings on board something new and unprecedented – an outside producer. Welcome, Cate Le Bon. Among her previous production credits are Deerhoof and Tim Presley, whom she’s collaborated with on an album. As these and her own releases attest, she’s not going to steer anyone towards the mainstream.For Grant’s fifth solo set, the follow-up to 2018’s Love Is Magic, Le Bon appears to have helped give Grant his most integrated sound in years, bringing a balance which last surfaced on much of 2013’s second solo album Pale Green Ghosts. Although Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Rounding out a decade of personal success – beginning with his Cannes Jury Prize-winning The Puppetmaster (1993), followed by a best director award for Good Men, Good Women (1995) – the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien travelled to the Japanese harbour city of Hirado as part of his research for Flowers of Shanghai (1998). An unexpected work, the film emerged out of the ashes of a failed project to shoot a biopic of Zheng Chenggong, otherwise known as Koxinga, a Chinese Ming loyalist who fought against the emergent Qing Dynasty. Set at the close Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Hailing from Benin and based in Paris since she was 23, Angélique Kidjo can sing in five languages, has collaborated with an A-list festival line-up of global stars ranging from Alicia Keys and Philip Glass to Herbie Hancock and Peter Gabriel, and had her first albums released by Island, after being spotted by label head Chris Blackwell. Each of them was studded with guest artists, including Branford Marsalis and Gilberto Gil, and featuring covers such as Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child”.She has won Grammys, travelled widely as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and set up a foundation to empower Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The first release that brought folk-pop duo Kings of Convenience to prominence outside of their native Norway was their Live in a Room EP, released in 2000. Recorded, as the title suggests, with a minimum of fuss, the cuts include pre-song count-ins, real-life room reverb and the occasional shriek of a string as a barre chord hurriedly settled into its seat. These moments defined the recordings almost as much as the notes themselves - acoustic music with an electric atmosphere.More than 20 years later, Eirik Glambek Bøe and Erlend Øye have returned with Peace or Love, their first album since Read more ...