CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
Michael Gira, Swans’ band leader and last remaining original member, has a reputation for being an intense and difficult individual who doesn’t compromise easily. This is illustrated by the band having been home to some 35 different musicians since its 1982 beginnings in a desolate and dangerous New York City. However, as one-time drummer Bill Rieflin has said: “Michael is a singular creator and that puts him in a world where there are few members.” He is also clearly much respected by many of his former band mates, as many of them turn up as talking heads in Marco Porsia’s documentary of one Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It's the self-portrait on the cover that gives the first hint that something's changed with Marilyn Manson. The eyes are blank, his face weary. No longer does the singer look like the Antichrist Superstar. He seems more like a middle-aged rocker in the midst of an identity crisis.He says as much, too, on the title track. During the bridge section, Manson rasps "Am I a man or a show, or moment ?" What really strikes you, though, is not the existential questioning. It's the change of musical style.The song's gently strummed chords usher in a strangely plaintive baritone. On the verse, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Kantemir Balagov’s second feature announces the arrival of a major new talent in arthouse cinema. Made by the Russian director when he was just 27, and premiered at Cannes last year, where it won in the “Un Certain Regard” strand, Beanpole approaches its bleak aftermath-of-war story with all the practised subtlety of an established auteur while delivering an emotional impact that is empathetic and shocking in equal measure.Set in 1945 in Leningrad, months after the end of the Great Patriotic War at a time when any elation of victory has given way to an understanding that the future will be Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Toots Hibbert may have invented the term “reggae” with his 1968 hit “Do the Reggay” but he has never felt boxed in by the genre. During his almost 60-year singing career, he may have recorded some of the greatest ska and reggae tunes of all time, from “Monkey Man” to “Pressure Drop” and “54-46, That’s My Number”, but has also dipped his toe into soul music and even tried his hand at a version of John Denver’s “Country Roads”. Got to be Tough is similarly a fine musical stew that takes from all quarters, never sags and is heavily flavoured with socially conscious lyrics throughout.Things kick Read more ...
mark.kidel
Ammar 808, named after the 1980s Roland drum machine TR-808 is the vehicle for Tunisian producer Sofyann Ben Youssef. He has been exploring, notably in Maghreb United (2018), a rich vein of resonance between the music of North Africa and electronic technology.This time around, the territory is Asian rather than African: Ben Youssef, who'd spent months studying Carnatic music in South India in his early twenties, has returned to Chennai and collaborated with some of the most open-minded musicians of this vibrant city as well as with some more traditional ones. Fusion can misfire, but in this Read more ...
Barney Harsent
If Doves have a “thing”, it’s that they do “big” with impeccable intimacy. Over ten years and four albums, they consistently displayed exactly the sort of connection that bands like Coldplay and Keane pretend to have. Huge, sweeping scores and broad emotional swells that feel like an old friend putting their arm around you and telling you you're not on your own.More than a decade since Kingdom of Rust, their farewell (of sorts), Doves are back, and not a moment too soon. Given the year so far, we could all do with a cuddle, sonic or otherwise.The seeds of The Universal Want were sown in a no- Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Seattle-born Allison Neale’s alto saxophone sound is instantly appealing. Her playing has the light wispy, airy quality from the "cool", "West Coast" school of Paul Desmond. One day last year, she spent just six hours (10am-5pm minus an hour for lunch, I gather) with three other top-flight jazz musicians at Angel Studios in Islington – shortly before it closed, in fact. The result, Quietly There (Ubuntu Music) is a completely delightful album.Neale’s totally assured sense of how to convey melodies finds the perfect complement in New York guitarist Peter Bernstein. And if there are echoes Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s always a timeslip moment, revisiting films first seen in your teens, but never more so than when watching this beautifully restored print of Walkabout. Nicolas Roeg filmed and directed this fever dream of a movie in 1970, after co-directing Performance with Donald Cammell. Very loosely inspired by an Australian novel, Roeg enlisted playwright Edward Bond to write a script that diverged fundamentally from the original plot and barely amounted to 65 pages but it won Roeg the necessary funding. He set off with his wife, young sons, a teenage Jenny Agutter and a small crew to film this near Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Suzanne Vega sprang to fame 35 years ago, her eponymous debut one of the last albums we bought in vinyl before the advent of that new-fangled format of aluminium aspic. From it came “Marlene on the Wall”, the video an MTV hit. “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner”, from Solitude Standing, Vega’s second outing, cemented her reputation: drawn from real life, each were unusual chart successes – the first told from the point of view of an abused child, the second a cappella. Vega was the first woman to headline at Glastonbury. Vaclav Havel was a fan and she was a presidential pick for a concert celebrating Read more ...
joe.muggs
A new and very strange kind of pop music has bubbled up over the past half-decade plus. It’s internationalist, rooted in both underground electronics and the most populist styles, bound up with playful but sometimes terrifying ultra high definition psychedelic aesthetics, and dominated by female and non-binary musicians. It’s given a platform to some of the most vivid and fascinating characters in music today, from Beijing’s 33EMYBW to Margate’s BABii, Washington DC’s Swan Meat to Montevideo’s Lila Tirando a Violeta, and most prominently Glaswegian SOPHIE and Caracas-via-Barcelona Arca. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s been a decade, more or less, since The Rolling Stones opened up their From the Vaults series with The Brussels Affair, AKA Bedspring Symphony, taken from the 1973 European tour following the release of Goats Head Soup. It’s one of the most thrilling live sets any band ever released. And this at a period when it is hard to ascertain exactly how many times Keith Richards was arrested, crashed his car, set his place on fire, or had his blood changed. But together on stage, they blew the roof off and the doors out, embodying the very definition of rock n roll music at a time when the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Declan McKenna covers many bases. He’s a good looking, teen-friendly pop star who first made waves aged only 15, but he’s also a politically engaged lyricist with aspirations in the region of Bowie and Dylan. His best songs, then, combine chewy, lyrical bite with adventurous, sonically smart 21st century pop. Just last year he released the single “British Bombs” which raged admirably against its subject matter, but his new album, his second, is out of balance, its songs and themes overwhelmed by ear-frazzling over-the-top production.The lyrics offer an opaque vision of a world collapsing in Read more ...