CDs/DVDs
Katie Colombus
Sam Smith’s third album is kind of perfect for a miserable autumn amidst a global pandemic. It’s reflective, it’s morose and it attempts disco-fun but can’t quite muster the energy to get its heels on.Love Goes was supposed to be released six months ago and called To Die For, but given how the world went to hell in a handbasket around that time and we all became largely obsessed with death, they (Smith came out as non-binary last year and uses the pronouns they/them), decided to put the album on hold (as we did, life) and re-name it in a more sensitive manner.The album is morose, but Read more ...
Nick Hasted
You can’t ever go all the way home again, and for years Dizzee Rascal didn’t want to. His Mercury-winning debut Boy In Da Corner (2003) electrified with the shock of the new, its eccentric, genre-mashing sound topping juddering jungle bass with a voice which seemed barely to have broken, and jaggedly emotional raps describing dull, violence-haunted days in Bow, East London. When I interviewed him then, aged 18, he saw straight through the keeping-it-real shackles awaiting him. “The ones who go, ‘I’m not leaving the ghetto’, really it’s because they know they’re never going to get a chance to Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Post-rock singer-songwriter Emma Ruth Rundle and high-volume, sludge metal-heads Thou are not obvious musical collaborators, but with May Our Chambers Be Full, they really have come up trumps with an album that may not encourage many to take to the dancefloor but will certainly grab the attention of their disparate groups of fans and a fair few others too. Dramatic but melodic tunes that are relatively mellow and laidback one minute and then screaming and visceral the next, are wrapped in an atmospheric and often disorientating production, with Emma Ruth singing in an almost folkie style over Read more ...
India Lewis
If you’re after a relaxing Sunday watch, Fyzal Boulifa’s Lynn + Lucy is not the one. It begins as a story of old friends in a small town and ends as a complex and uncomfortable tragedy. The banality of the everyday is stripped away throughout the film to reveal the resentments and tensions that underlie even the quietist of communities. The town itself (Harlow New Town) becomes a character in its own right, and is celebrated in a 1956 documentary in one of the extras on this BFI release. Lynn + Lucy is a very powerful film, told well, but the moralistic overtones can sometimes feel a bit much Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Elvis Costello’s was the last major concert before lockdown. At Hammersmith, I remember the feeling, a last hurrah as we stared into the abyss and the inescapable thought that we must have been experiencing something akin to what our parents and grandparents felt in early 1939. Like them we cannot have understood the perils that lay ahead, or the losses.Fearful of the risks faced by his team and his audience, Costello abandoned the tour with a few dates still to go and headed home to Vancouver where in lockdown he worked on tracks he’d already set down in sessions in Helsinki, Paris (where he Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The cast list for Song Machine…, the seventh album from virtual virtuosos Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, is the size of some festival line-ups: Beck, Fatoumata Diawara, Imagination’s Leee John, Peter Hook, Robert Smith, Slaves, Slowthai, St Vincent, Joan As Police Woman, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Skepta and long-time collaborator Tony Allen are just some of the artists featured here and, while impressive, the roll call poses a question. Namely, how do you pull all those disparate voices together and end up with something that sounds coherent, composed and, well, whole?The answer Read more ...
mark.kidel
As he cruises into the autumn of his life, 71 year-old Bruce Springsteen, The Boss, as he's generally known, revisits territory that will sound very familiar to his fans. Perhaps that's what's needed, at this time when those core American values he's sung about with enduring passion seem threatened as never before.There are new songs – like the title track “Letter to You”- that sound quintessential, as if nothing had changed: the trademark twangy guitars, rolling Hammond B Organ and churchy rock’n’roll piano, the romance of Bruce’s sweet desperado voice, wrapped up in a wall of sound that Read more ...
Liz Thomson
What a pick-me-up this album is. Released as the days darken, literally and metaphorically, it’s a real joy – a transport of delight to dappled squares in Paris or Lisbon, or a street party in Rio. Sunset in the Blue is billed as “an orchestral celebration of Melody Gardot’s jazz roots” but the abiding sound that remains in the mind’s ear after the album’s finished is that of a jazz guitar, played with a bossa nova rhythm.This is Gardot’s fifth album in twelve years, a mix of standards and originals in which her voice is close-miked and properly out front in the mix. Peggy Lee, Eartha Kitt Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s not hard to understand why so many people in the UK really don’t like political pop and rock music. For one, you only have to look at the clowns who ply their trade in the world of politics, but also so much music that tries to tackle the subject is painfully dull and worthy. The Special AKA’s “Free Nelson Mandela” was an obvious exception, but it is very much in a minority.This does not seem to be the case in West Africa though and artists such as Fela Kuti, his son Femi and even Tinariwen have turned out plenty of this kind of fare without ever sounding dour or boring. Songhoy Blues Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Shot across a period of five years, David Lynch’s creepy debut feature Eraserhead (1977) follows the story of Henry Spencer, played by Jack Nance, an employee at a print factory in a quiet, unnamed town. Henry arrives home one evening to a missed telephone call from a woman named Mary (Charlotte Stewart), inviting him to dinner at her parents’ house. Once he arrives, Mary’s mother breaks the news that her daughter has given birth to a baby, and Henry is the father.“They’re still not sure it is a baby!” If the premise sounds innocuous enough, Mary’s tortured reply sets the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The big news is that this is Faithless’s first album without longterm frontman Maxi Jazz. Instead, remaining members Rollo and Sister Bliss work with a cross section of vocal talent. A multi-million selling, festival-headlining act, Faithless are one of Britain’s surviving 1990s dance music juggernauts. 25 years into a career that seemed to have wound down, the absence of such a key presence could mark the final fizzle-out. Instead, All Blessed is a creative resurgence. They sound like a band reinvigorated.Cards on the table, for this writer Faithless’s initial Nineties gold run of hits was a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Released in 1956, J. Lee Thompson’s Yield to the Night is remembered by many for what it isn’t, namely a fictional retelling of the events leading to Ruth Ellis’s execution in 1955. Mike Newell’s Dance with a Stranger told that story in 1985 with Miranda Richardson in the lead role. Thompson’s star, Diana Dors, stated that the film "wasn’t about Ruth Ellis at all. Everybody thinks it was but the script was written two years before she committed the murder.” The screenplay was co-written by Thompson’s wife Joan Henry, a former debutante who had spent eight months in Holloway Prison for fraud. Read more ...