CDs/DVDs
Tim Cumming
Mathieu Boogaerts has been recording since the mid 1990s, emerging from the nouvelle chanson scene in Paris, a chansonnier who’s performed at the likes of Cafe Oto over here, while establishing himself as a star turn on the Tôt ou Tard label in France, mixing Afro-pop and reggae as well as indie electronica and folk into his chanson. He’s previously based himself in Paris, Brussels and Nairobi, and now, London, where he’s spent the past five years living in the hinterland between Clapham and Brixton. Out of that sterling cultural exchange experience comes his first English-language album, Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s odd to hear a band benefit from becoming more conventional. But where Glasgow’s Mogwai used to fiercely stake out a very distinctive musical space of their own, here they’re letting their influences flood into their songs – and note the word “songs” there – yet managing to retain all the sonic power they ever had, and adding extra emotional impact to boot. It’s been a gradual process: from the late Nineties records that scraped along a grindingly slow and sinister instrumental rock groove occasionally welling up into barrages of noise, they’ve gradually elaborated. Melodies, vocals Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Can one use the term autofiction about a film? If so, Mogul Mowgli would be a perfect example. Riz Ahmed, the actor who came to fame with Four Lions, has in recent years appeared in a Star Wars spin-off and a Marvel film; he also raps as Riz MC with the transatlantic duo Swet Shop Boys. No stranger to racial stereotyping and the existential questions that beset successful second-generation Asians, Ahmed has now written and produced a formidable portrait of a British-Pakistani performer struggling with his identity when he returns to Wembley after two years Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Stuttgart-born auteur and film theoretician Paul Leni, whose illusionistic production designs and direction of Waxworks (1924) helped define German Expressionist cinema, was 44 and approaching master status when he died of sepsis on 2 September 1929. Following its limited Christmas Day 1928 release, Leni’s final film The Last Warning, which was his fourth for Carl Laemmle’s Universal, had been released in January as both a silent and as a part-talkie, but it never won the critical acclaim of his seminal Hollywood horror classics The Cat and the Canary (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928 Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Nottingham’s perpetually disappointed romantics, Tindersticks would seem to have spent 2020’s almost never-ending Covid lockdown creating their 21st album (including film soundtracks), Distractions. However, just as the pandemic has been for the rest of us, its recording sounds like it was something of a socially distanced affair. Gone is the lush orchestrally infused backing of brass, strings and such that often made Stuart Staples’ mob come over like the musical offspring of Barry Adamson and Tom Waits. Instead, a more minimalist style has been adopted that occasionally seems to utilise Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s difficult to know where to start with Sia’s Music. The album is billed as a collection of songs “from and inspired by” the film of the same name – so not a soundtrack, except for when it is. It tracks range from candy coated to overly earnest; liberated to sexless; pop fun to cinematic; oblique storytelling to big-name co-writes – and yet, as delivered in the Australian singer’s distinctive, powerful voice, have a tendency to blur into one.The album starts strongly with “Together”. Co-written with star producer Jack Antonoff, it’s a huge pop number that taps into both artists’ Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Four albums in and The Pretty Reckless singer, Taylor Momsen, still feels the need to explain herself to her doubters. In a recent interview, the former actress reiterated that quitting the TV show Gossip Girl, a decade ago, was her best decision ever; music has always been her real passion, she said, and now it's become her saviour. Momsen's recent emotional struggles are laid bare on Death By Rock And Roll. The album's tracks are shot through with tragedy and grief. Two deaths, in particular, underpin the LP: Firstly, the suicide of friend-of-the-band Chris Cornell. Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Slowthai’s debut Nothing Great About Britain was both strikingly intimate and anarchic. He rapped about his childhood and British inequality over grime beats that sounded as if they were falling apart around him. Here "abrasive" and "insightful" coexisted within the same songs effortlessly.On TYRON, slowthai divides these two attributes, splitting the album into a raucous first half and a sombre second. The caps lock is used to hammer home this overarching theme of dualism.The first half delivers the mosh pit energy that slowthai does so well. The dizzying instrumentals are excellent. On “45 Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto) is Italian filmmaker Elio Petri’s dark 1970s satire on state corruption. The narrative follows an unnamed, psychologically-distressed police chief who, after secretly committing a brutal crime, inserts himself into the ensuing investigation. He does so – he tells us – not to assure his innocence, but to verify his own conviction: that he is a citizen above suspicion.Performing the role of that titular cittadino is Gian Maria Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s odd that there’s still no name for the wave of genre-agnostic British bands of the '00s. Not manic enough to be nu rave, way too interesting for the retro-guitar nu rock revolution / landfill indie tsunami, the likes of Hot Chip, Metronomy, Friendly Fires, Simian and the super-louche Wild Beasts between them mapped out a new area of psychedelic pop. And into this in 2009 came the Scottish / Northern Irish / English band Django Django, a perfect fit into this unnamed movement with their winsome melodies and ability to fold everything from psyche-folk to acid house to rockabilly into their Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In the autumn of 1975, Martin Scorsese was finishing Taxi Driver, Bob Dylan began his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, and Orson Welles’ F for Fake premiered in New York. Welles’ manipulation of found documentary footage of art forger Elmyr de Hory into a viewer-hoodwinking shaggy dog story has far more to do with Scorsese’s film of Dylan’s tour than, say, The Last Waltz.Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story is a film of crude forgeries and exhilarating truths, fake interviews and vérité theatre, smoke and mirrors. Tipping the wink with its subtitle, and the opening, titular trick from Georges Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“I could have been a doctor or a lawyer, playing golf with my rich friends at the club” bemoans Paul Leary on the title track of his first solo album in 30 years. That, however, would have deprived the rest of us of the warped genius of the Butthole Surfers: those insane, heavy psychedelicists who seem to have somehow been relegated to a mere footnote in the history of Grunge, and of whom Leary was guitarist and occasional singer.Born Stupid may not have the Black Sabbath-esque riffing, disturbing samples and punk rock heft of the Buttholes, but listeners who are familiar with their off- Read more ...