CDs/DVDs
Barney Harsent
There’s a moment halfway through Khruangbin’s latest album that succinctly sums up the melting-pot model this band have made their own. It’s “Pelota”, a Spanish-influenced song, based on a Japanese film, played by a Texan three-piece with a Thai name. It’s also very, very good indeed.If Khruangbin is a name new to you, then you’ll need to know that, on their previous three albums (including Hasta el Cielo, 2019’s dub reworking of their second, Con Todo El Mundo), they have dabbled in dub reggae, Middle Eastern psychedelia, 1960s Thai music, funk and soul. For a band who seem to be happy Read more ...
mark.kidel
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a story of impossible love between two young women, takes place in the 18th century, on a wind-swept, wave-battered island off the coast of Brittany. The writer and director Céline Sciamma, who established herself as a unique voice and very capable filmmaker with films like Waterlilies (2008) and Tomboy (2011), explores once again the world of female passion.Marianne (Noémie Merlant) has been commissioned to paint the portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who has just been released from convent life and is destined to be married. She is impetuous, introverted and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Dream Wife started life as an art school project, and while their self-titled debut album was an exhilarating ride that resurrected the ghosts of The Slits, X-Ray Spex and a host of lively riot grrrls, So When You Gonna… is a bit of a disappointment. In fact, with the exception of recent single “Sports!” and the album’s title track, it’s a disc that sees them morph from sparky barbarians into boring conformists.It's the punk-funk opener “Sports!”, with it’s “Fuck sorry / Fuck please” introduction, which sets expectations high with its lively groove, Rakel Mjöll’s squealing vocals and its more Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In the year when we should be reflecting on seventy years of peace in Europe but are too occupied with present day viruses, Brexit, and racism to remember our past, it’s timely that a film about the Allied victors occupying Berlin in 1947 should be given a rerelease. A Foreign Affair missed out on the Oscar for Best Black-and-White Cinematography to The Naked City, but Charles Lang’s aerial shots of a great city turned into a cross-hatched landscape of ruins provide a masterful opening to this neglected Billy Wilder black comedy. Looking down from the plane circling the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Personal grace and crafted precision underpin John Legend’s neo-soul style, leaving pushing boundaries to others, to stake out the romantic ground we still share. Like Smokey Robinson, he has tireless interest and infinite metaphors for love. “Wild” sees him buy a new car just to drop the top to see the stars, while “Slow Cooker” teases out a simmer’s erotic possibilities, as he lets his groan languidly stretch, rolling words around till his creamy falsetto crests, its vocal takeoff typically effortless. Most Smokey-like in artistic mentality is “Actions”, where the very act of writing love Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The debut album from one woman outfit [MONRHEA] shows off the seriously impolite electronica that’s blossoming in East Africa. Electronic sounds from Africa are over-represented in Europe by jolly pop and elegantly faceless house music, but there’s a whole lot more going on. Via uber-producer and Killing Joker Martin “Youth” Glover’s Youth Sounds label, this album gives an exciting taste of the wild gumbo of dancefloor-friendly experimentation that’s on the bubble there.[MONRHEA] – and I’m going to lose the square brackets and caps from hereon – hails from Athi River, a town outside Nairobi Read more ...
Barney Harsent
In the series one finale of metal-detecting sitcom Detectorists, Lance fills in a hole he’s dug after unearthing nothing more than a rusted ring-pull. As the camera pans downwards, we see the riches that were hiding beneath. He was looking in the right place, it’s just that the good stuff lay tantalisingly out of reach.And that’s a little bit like Homegrown, Neil Young’s lost album. Scheduled for a 1974 release, it was shelved by the singer/songwriter, who felt the emotion on display was too close to the bone following his split with actress Carrie Snodgress. Finally, some 46 years later, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s over 30 years since Michael Franti entered the public arena, howling “Television – drug of the nation” backed by harsh, industrial sounds and explosive beats, as frontman for the Beatnigs. He then produced the Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales album with William Burroughs, as part of the visionary hip hop duo the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, before embracing funk, soul and reggae sounds, both as a solo artist and while fronting Spearhead. It is, therefore, something of a shock that the musical influences for his latest album, Work Hard & Be Nice, seem to come from the same place as Read more ...
mark.kidel
Girl-wonder Phoebe Bridgers is one of the brightest stars to come out of the ever-renewing pool of creative talent that bubbles away in Southern California. Her new album, following the release last year of the brillant Better Oblivion Community Center (a collaboration with Conor Oberst), is one of those collections of individually crafted jewels that have instant appeal, and yet grow in richness every time you’re drawn, compulsively, to hear them again.The qualities that distinguish Bridgers have to do with her being totally herself and knowing how to write about it with the gift of poetry. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
When “Murder Most Foul” was dropped into an unsuspecting world under lockdown, the surprise was palpable, given that eight years had passed since Tempest, filled by Sinatra covers and seasonal tours. That it was a 16-minute epic that took Dylan’s writing into new areas (including No1 on Billboard) – and this on the verge of his eightieth year – is also astonishing. Mixing the modes of popular verse with his own telling twists of imagery and narrative, “Murder Most Foul” was a widescreen, mythological retelling of the Kennedy assassination wrapped up in a lengthy ‘king list’ of players, songs Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Norah Jones is writing good songs. The 11 of them which appear on Pick Me Up Off the Floor, the seventh solo studio album by the nine-time Grammy-winner, form a very strong album with a convincing and satisfying shape, a journey from hurt and doubt to contentment. It is probably her best album in ten years. That might seem surprising, given that the origins of the album have been described as “a collection of songs left over from sessions [..] some of which ended up on the singles collection, Begin Again.” But spontaneity has always been a strong suit for the Brooklyn-based singer. Her Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Larkin Poe are an American blues-rock band fronted by the Lovell sisters, Rebecca and Megan, both mainstays of the US Americana scene since their teens, at the start of this century. Best known in Europe for their fired-up gigs and festival appearances, their fifth album starts off accessibly yet the immediate thought is that it’s overly derivative. Once it settles into its stride, however, the listener forgets all that, as the band offer up a plethora of solid songs in various riffin' southern styles.The immediate reference point for this writer is Deap Vally, the female Californian duo who Read more ...