CDs/DVDs
John Bungey
If you want to understand the psychic harm that prolonged lockdown can do to a man, then take a listen to Van Morrison's new 28-song set. Actually, you don't need to listen, the song titles say enough: “Where Have All the Rebels Gone?”; “Stop Bitching, Do Something”; “Deadbeat Saturday Night”; “They Own the Media”; “Why Are You on Facebook?”While Sir Van's vast catalogue is revered for transcendent love songs and joyous R&B, it also includes a sub-genre of complaint songs (“They Sold Me Out” on Magic Time or “School of Hard Knocks” on Keep it Simple, for example). With the singer stuck at Read more ...
graham.rickson
Raw opens with a bang, a distant figure on a remote country road stepping out in front of a car, causing it to crash into a tree. What’s really happened isn’t made clear until we’re well into French director Julia Ducournau’s 2016 feature. Part coming-of-age drama, part grisly horror, the film centres on young Justine (Garance Marillier), a fresher at the remote veterinary college once attended by her parents and where her sister Alexia is already a student.The campus is a bleak, brutalist outpost, and Justine’s first days there are dominated by a series of barbaric initiation ceremonies, the Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s funny how the most high tech music can sound very traditional. In the case of producer / instrumentalist / occasional singer Ziúr, it’s the tradition of her hometown of Berlin that is expressed in her whirrs, clangs and mutated voices. Here – as on her previous records with British labels Planet Mu and Objects Limited and Canada’s Infinite machine, and like most of the roster of her new home, Berlin’s PAN – the sound palette is hyper-detailed: glistening, crackling and booming with the kind of abyssal vastness and obsessional detail that only today’s processing power can generate. But Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Enid Bagnold’s 1955 English play The Chalk Garden, a Broadway hit before it opened in the West End, is usually described as a comedy because of Bagnold’s acerbic dialogue and droll appreciation of intricate employer-servant dynamics. If most of the wit was polished out of the 1964 version, directed by Ronald Neame and scored by Malcolm Arnold in a high-blown romantic style, that only served to emphasize the psychological complexity of the relationships between its three strong women characters. No one could accuse Neame's film of modishness. An Anglo-American melodrama produced by Read more ...
mark.kidel
Sufjan Stevens is not only prolific, multi-talented and wide-ranging in his experimentation, but he never fails to make interesting work. He’s undoubtedly one of the giants of American contemporary music. His originality and creative risk-taking have led to him being one of the most underrated artists of his time. His latest album – over two hours of instrumental composition and made during lockdown – is a daring, profound and fiercely personal requiem to his recently-deceased father.Convocations, hot on the heels of Stevens' s previous album The Ascension (2020) is a lengthy suite of both Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Thank you. I think I’ve told you everything. I do have a couple more tunes, but I’ll hold them back for next time – I don’t want to bore you, it’s better that you leave here serene. A nice chord like this. (plays F major first inversion). A good impression. Voilà. Merci.”These were the matter-of-fact and typically considerate parting words with which Martial Solal left the stage at the end of his solo recital at Salle Gaveau in Paris on 23 January 2019, aged 91. It was only announced after the event that the pianist had decided it would be his very last concert. The evening was recorded Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Let’s get this clear from the off, Marianne Faithfull and Warren Ellis’s new album is not an artistic statement on a par with her classic 1979 album Broken English. Nor I suspect, was that ever the aim. Instead, it’s a vanity project that consists of Marianne reciting a collection of work from the English Romantic poets of the early 19th century while Ellis and a few of his famous mates noodle pleasantly in the background. This isn’t to say that it isn’t a perfectly satisfying listen. It’s just not an artistic landmark and is more likely to soundtrack occasional moments in time rather than to Read more ...
graham.rickson
To Sir, With Love is a very loose adaptation of ER Braithwaite’s autobiographical novel. Reflecting on his experiences as a teacher in London’s East End in the late 1940s, Braithwaite’s commentary (one of two provided here) advises us that “as you read the book, that’s how it was. In the movie, they took huge liberties.” These included director James Clavell updating the action to 1967, and doing away with a subplot featuring an interracial relationship. The bare bones are unchanged, with Sidney Poitier’s Mark Thackeray, a highly educated immigrant from British Guiana, taking on a temporary Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A few hurdles need jumping before grappling with the essence of Teenage Fanclub’s 11th album. Endless Arcade is their first without bassist and founder member Gerard Love. He, alongside Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley, was one of the band’s songwriters. And this is their first with former Gorky's Zygotic Mynci mainstay and solo artist Euros Childs in the line-up on keyboards. Blake and Childs made the Jonny album together in 2011. Childs has recorded a fair amount of other collaborations but joining Teenage Fanclub in 2019 was a different type of commitment. Following this arrival, TFC Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
The website of the National Crime Agency offers the following definition of County Lines: “[it is] where illegal drugs are transported from one area to another, often across police and local authority boundaries (although not exclusively), usually by children or vulnerable people who are coerced into it by gangs. The ‘County Line’ is the mobile phone line used to take the orders of drugs.” This definition does not feature in County Lines (2019), Henry Blake’s first film of feature-length, newly released on Blu-ray and DVD. Nevertheless, it does hold a conceptual relevance for this Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Merseyside rock’s taste for glowing lysergic locales defines The Coral’s tenth LP, Coral Island, a double concept album which makes them the house band in a seedy fairground full of sepia memories and sawdust spirits. Put this Island on the map with the acid-blot evocations of The Beatles’ concept single “Penny Lane”/“Strawberry Fields Forever”, and “Villiers Terrace”, the 1980 address where Echo & the Bunnymen first found the hot glow of youthful imagination and excess.Keyboardist Nick Power’s linking narration is voiced by singer/co-writer James Skelly’s 85-year-old grandfather Ian Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Chances are many will not have heard of Gojira. At best, as a music lover, theirs may be a name seen among the line-up of metal festivals. As ever with metal, perceived as niche but with a vast audience, this is misleading. Gojira are globally successful, quarter of century into their career, with proper hit albums under their belt. They are also that rare thing, a French heavy metal band.Fortitude is their seventh studio album and follows on from their most successful, 2016’s Magma. That album was an excoriating affair, built around the response of brothers Joe and Mario Duplantier, frontman Read more ...