CDs/DVDs
mark.kidel
Music increasingly escapes categories: labels are of course useful, but they also fail to evoke the richness of practices which are led by musical experiment and imagination rather than obedience to one of the genres or sub-genres that have proliferated as musicians no longer define themselves as strictly as they used to.The Portuguese composer and pianist Rodrigo Leão could be described as "contemporary classical", but this hardly does justice to the singular path he treads, a genre of its own, instantly recognisable and strongly reminiscent of his work as leader of the group Madredeus. The Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s over ten years now since theartsdesk cited Tinie Tempah’s success as marking the start of a revolution for post grime black British rappers conquering the pop charts on something approaching their own terms. And it’s very nearly as long since we noted the bleak directness of what was then known as “road rap”, underground hip hop well away from the charts in a world of self-distributed mixtapes and YouTube videos, and charting the violence and rivalries of the class A drug trade. That revolution did happen and then some, and in fact it incorporated the grim Read more ...
Ellie Porter
Making sourdough, PE with Joe Wicks, writing a novel… none of that for Derby’s finest purveyors of unapologetically retro rock. Instead, the Struts decided to make the most of lockdown by recording a new album – all piling into producer Jon Levine’s Los Angeles house (having got themselves COVID-tested first) and spending ten days coming up with this, the follow up to their 2014 debut Everybody Wants and 2016's Young&Dangerous.Ten days well spent, it turns out. Strange Days is a great record that does its darndest to put a smile on your face – full of radio-friendly, huge- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The term electro-pop has kind of lost its meaning, The Top 20 has, for many years, been full of music created on computers, from Charli XCX to BTS to Clean Bandit. Yet still, as a genre header, it's often used to refer to music that riffs on the sound of the 1980s synthesizer pioneers. The music of Norwegian singer Annie has tended in this direction but her latest album, only her third in two decades, is even more explicitly in this vein. It is a bright, engaging affair, given emotional heft by her trademark melancholia.Annie appeared amidst the millennial focus on the Norwegian city of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Every cliché about Hollywood is true,” director Bernard Rose remarked in 2018, at the screening Q&A of the restored version of his 1999 Ivansxtc that appears as an extra on this Arrow release – and, post-#MeToo, the film’s satire of that milieu and all its associated excesses feels as savage as ever. Its story of a talent agent felled at the height of his career by rapidly progressing cancer offered a corrosive view of the studio system seen very much from the inside, the trajectory of its protagonist seen by many at the time to have mirrored the burnt-out self-destruction of feted CAA Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s been 22 years since the Dub Pistols surfed into public view on the Big Beat wave with the absolutely rocking “There’s Gonna be a Riot” single. Eight albums later and Barry Ashworth’s collective are back with a cracking new disc of ska, dub and drum’n’bass rhythms, shot through with punk attitude, that are more than enough to get any self-respecting party-goer into the dance floor and working up a sweat. Just when we all need it, Addict has plenty to raise smiles and get feet moving and hips swaying.As with their previous albums, the Dub Pistols have again managed to rope in plenty of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
When Katie Melua arrived on the scene in 2003, a graduate of the BRIT School and a protégé of Mike "Wombling" Batt, I was somewhat underwhelmed. Another one in a long list of tepid female singer-songwriters that were pleasant enough, but… Then I pitched up, without too much enthusiasm, to review her Christmas concert at Westminster Central Hall with the Gori Women’s Choir in December 2018 and was both moved and impressed.Album No 8 is her first outing in four years – In Winter, recorded in Georgia, was her first post-Batt album following a six-album contract. By then, of course, Melua had Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Emma-Lee Moss has a lovely voice. It conveys an ache, a longing, but is sweet too, and well-mannered. Combine this with an aptitude for literate, thought-provoking lyrics and hooky songs, and Emmy the Great is quite the package. It’s a mystery, then, why she has not been critically and commercially elevated to the status of peers such as Laura Marling and KT Tunstall. Her fourth album is a delight, rich in imagery and ideas. It confirms her as an artist always well worth following.That April / 月音 is so enjoyable is a pleasing surprise. Moss’s last album, Second Love, was a misstep into more Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Space for the Earth is Ozric Tentacles’ 21st studio album since coming together at the 1983 Stonehenge Free Festival and their first since 2015’s Technicians of the Sacred. However, while the band still revolves around multi-instrumentalist Ed Wynne, with assistance from Silas Neptune’s synths and Balazs Szende’s percussion, this album also sees a wealth of appearances from a number of former band members like drummers Nick Van Gelder and Paul Hankin, flautist Champigon and ex-Eat Static synth man Joie Hinton. Similarly, these tunes could just as easily have been recorded during the band’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Much of Vitalina Varela takes place in near darkness, the lack of movement in several scenes enough to make you think you’re watching a succession of still images. Pedro Costa’s protagonists may wrestle with a multitude of intractable issues, but the warmth and humanity with which they’re portrayed is humbling. Costa’s starting point was a sequence in his previous film Horse Money, a monologue from a woman recently arrived in Lisbon from Cape Verde to attend the funeral of the husband she has not seen for several years.Here, the titular Vitalina Varela gets to tell her own story at greater Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Those Wainwrights, they never cease to surprise. Get out your soft shoes and prepare to shuffle, for the “six-string diarist” has set his guitar aside and put on his metaphorical tux to croon with a band on more than a dozen timeless classics. Songs (to coin a phrase) that your mother would know.It appears the genesis for I’d Rather Lead a Band was the participants’ shared work on the music for Boardwalk Empire, set in 1920s Atlantic City. The songs – which, says Wainwright, “reflect on my whole life, really” – were chosen by Nighthawks bandleader Vince Giordano, with producers and music Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There are no one-size-fits-all solutions and Lockdown (it has surely earned its capital status) provided its own problems for many of us. For some, however, there was an upside. For people who find themselves powering through when they need to power down, it was a chance to take themselves away from the anxieties, expectations and obligations of the everyday and narrow focus. It was an enforced clarification of our lives - a diktat to breathe.For Andy Bell, Ride guitarist and former member of Oasis and Beady Eye, it was a chance to put the finishing flourishes to a collection of songs that Read more ...