CDs/DVDs
joe.muggs
One has to wonder if Hannah Peel ever had a phase, like so many kids, of listening to music under the bedcovers. She certainly has a facility for making things that come to live in the dark, both in her own music and on her late night Radio 3 broadcasts. This was maybe most obviously the case on her 2017 Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia album – a record that was themed as a journey of the imagination, a trip into the head of an elderly stargazer dreaming of interstellar travel. But it applies every bit as much on this record too.Fir Wave is Peel’s eighth? – ninth? tenth? – album: to be Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tune-Yards have been much-feted for bringing an original sound to pop. Quite rightly so. Over the last decade the Californian duo, led by singing percussionist Merrill Garbus, have fired out four albums (and a film soundtrack) that amalgamated global roots flavours, electronic freakery, prog rock weirdness, and post-punk attack, all the while remaining lively and engaging rather than pretentious and po. Their last two albums, by no means straight dance music, showed an increasing affection for clubland sensibilities. Their new one, however, is closer in tone to their angular, earliest work. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Over 50 years into her career, Suzi Quatro could be forgiven for taking a break. And yet, last spring, staring down almost one hundred cancelled shows, her first instinct was not to put her feet up but to team up with her son Richard Tuckey on a new collection of songs as a follow-up to their recent collaboration on 2019’s No Control. With songs referencing imprisonment, darkness and solitude, it’s fair to say Quatro had the pandemic on her mind while pulling together 18th album The Devil in Me - but, unsurprisingly, her take on the isolation blues wears a hard rock sheen.The album bursts out Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Praise gets heaped on the already well known. And that often leaves others in the shadows. I’m not saying that Abdullah Ibrahim doesn’t deserve the accolades – notably, “our Mozart” from Nelson Mandela – but there have been other genius level South African pianists: one was Moses Molelekwa who died at just 27. The other is the very great Bheki Mseleku (1955-2008).Mseleku’s album Timelessness, recorded with a host of American jazz super-heavyweights in 1993, has been widely hailed as a masterpiece. And this newly-released solo piano album Beyond the Stars (Tapestry Works), recorded in Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The late Weimar-era film Mädchen in Uniform (1931) was visionary – a delicate Queer love story set in a repressive girls’ boarding school that denounced the Prussian militarist creed as dehumanising. Like The Blue Angel (1930), another German early talkie classic in which sexual energy confronts authoritarianism, Leontine Sagan’s film contained intimations of Nazism. Foreshadowing the Hitler Youth, the schoolboys who unwittingly steer their complacently bourgeois master toward sexual humiliation and death in The Blue Angel have less corruptible counterparts in the daughters of poor Read more ...
Asya Draganova
My first (conscious) encounter with the music of American jazz saxophone legend Pharoah Sanders was 1970’s “Let Us Go into the House of the Lord”, a nearly 18-minute piece which, right until the end, sounds like it’s only just forming through an explosion of light and layers of sound. Promises has a similar effect – an ever-unfolding spiritual journey, marked by repetition, build-ups and climaxes.Indeed, what brings together Sanders and the lead musical figure in this collaboration – Sam Shepherd, or Floating Points – is their shared dedication to exploring the spiritual qualities of music Read more ...
graham.rickson
That a film has a cult following doesn’t mean it’s a masterpiece, and 1985’s Restless Natives is sweet but ephemeral, a Scottish crime caper that can’t hold a candle to Bill Forsyth’s sparky debut, That Sinking Feeling. Both are set in a period when Scotland’s industrial base was being dismantled, and you could place both films in the same part of the cultural Venn diagram which contains the TV programmes Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and Boys From the Blackstuff, the latter’s Bernard Hill having a role here as one protagonist’s father.Directed by Michael Hoffman using a script which had won first Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Track two on Dream Of Independence, the new album from Sweden’s Frida Hyvönen, is titled “A Funeral in Banbridge”. An account of attending a funeral in, indeed, Banbridge, County Down, Northern Ireland, it’s bright, melodically jaunty, piano-driven and moves along at a fair clip.But there’s a disconcerting disparity between the buoyant arrangement and the lyrics. The direct, almost deadpan, voice sings a rolling melody. “A funeral in Banbridge/ I took the train here/ From London/ Through Wales/ Beautiful day/ I had a salad, I had a drink,” it begins. The song is a diary entry recounting Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lana Del Rey has turned pop’s volume down, returning hushed intimacy to the music’s heart. Her collaborator Jack Antonoff was also heavily involved in Taylor Swift’s Folklore reinvention, but Del Rey’s idea of Americana remains very different. Its emotional thread is again pulled tight by mid-20th century, glamorous iconography, and fame and love met with equal, glassy passion.Del Rey has found a new way to be post-modern, decades after the condition became too total to be mentioned. She is authentically artificial, honestly romantic, a self-conscious construct lit with her voice’s sensual Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Indie rock has taken a commercial back seat, even if the music press still hasn’t quite caught up. Sure, there have been hit-makers, and bands that sell out stadiums, but overall, indie’s tide is very slowly retreating. Like any genre, it will always be about, like westerns in Hollywood, a classic formula, but the take-up of technologies far beyond the electric guitar renders it a retro curio. Like metal, it offers invigorating rejigs, rendered fresh by each new generation revelling in the classic singer/guitar/bass/drums chemistry. Black Honey from Brighton are just such a case, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ted Barnes is an outsider by design. Not in the sense of being wilfully awkward or outré – the music on his first solo album in almost 13 years years is gentle, harmonically rich, extremely accessible – but in that he has sidestepped standard career paths, and seems to be all the better for it. As guitarist for Beth Orton for a decade and member of the band Clayhill, he certainly had more than a glimpse of what music industry life entailed, hard touring included, but he chose to get off the treadmill and focus on composing for films, music libraries and acrobatics shows. And his music is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in Paris in the summer: Charade was the last word in old Hollywood’s glamorous cool. It was almost the last word for Grant, feeling if not looking his age. Its tricksy, trapdoor plot, with a baffled Hepburn hunted for a MacGuffin of $250,000 in wartime bullion she doesn’t know she owns, was also a 1963 encore for Grant’s Fifties Hitchcock thrillers (sans Hitchcock), combining To Catch a Thief’s breezy French locations with North by Northwest’s innocent on the run. Released just after JFK’s assassination (requiring the word’s overdubbing with “elimination”, since Read more ...