CDs/DVDs
Liz Thomson
An all-acoustic album is perhaps a surprising arrival from a musician who started out in electronica and dance music, worked as a DJ, produced for Elbow, has co-written with artists as diverse as Professor Green, Amy Winehouse (“Half Times”) and Banks, and who has collaborated with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra on concert arrangements of six of his songs.Bloom Innocent – Acoustic is Fin Greenall’s 10th outing in 18 years and since Biscuits for Breakfast (2006) he’s been working with bassist Guy Whittaker and drummer Tim Thornton. Both Greenall himself and his band are known as Fink, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Drew Daniel is never short of concepts, invention or mischief. As one half of Matmos, with his life partner M.C. Schmidt, he has made some 10 official albums and many more collaborative ones – all pushing the boundaries of electronic bricolage and sound processing in the pursuit of extremely complex ideas about American history, plastic surgery, philosophy, queer identity and all that kind of stuff. Occasionally, as Soft Pink Truth, he has made more overtly dance records, but even these are heavily loaded with twisted intellect, including as they do an album of anarcho-punk covers and one of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Justice and the truth run on parallel lines in Anatomy of a Murder. If they converge at all, which is debatable, it's not because the moral order demands it, but because the workings of the law allow for that possibility. The outcome of Otto Preminger’s noir-tinged 1959 courtroom drama depends on which of two opposing attorneys has the pragmatism and cunning to prevail: James Stewart’s Paul Biegler, a former district attorney who favours fly-fishing over maintaining his practice in fictitious Iron City in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or George C Scott’s Claude Dancer, a slick operator Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
He's only in his mid-20s, but this is Seattle singer-songwriter Damien Jurado’s 15th album. Veering away from a predictable path, his career is dotted with sonic experimentalism alongside a tendency to try abstract lyrical forms. He also appears on one of the most beautiful songs of this century, Moby’s haunted chorale, “Almost Home”. This time round, however, having disposed, the PR sheet tells us, of most of his possessions, like a zen sage, he gives us a relatively straightforward set.Jurado’s voice is a fragile instrument. He can do that whole vulnerable falsetto thing, but he prefers to Read more ...
David Nice
There are bad times just around the corner for the characters of Babylon Berlin, though 1929 is grim enough. Focusing on the moment to take away the easy option of hindsight for the viewer and making its vast line-up, played by actors of supreme skill and nuance, deeply sympathetic or obnoxious according to the role, this extravaganza is much more about the gritty reality than the glamour of all those dances on the volcano. Not that there aren't glittering, decadent club sequences, but the harsh facts behind them never escape the directors' eyes."Directors", because there are three of them, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Back in April 2018, English fiddler player and member of BBC Radio 2 Folk Award-nominated folk band Pilgrim’s Way embarked on an 18-month busking tour of England. He walked out of his home in Manchester to explore the country, from Berwick to Braintree, from Deal to Darlington, playing and picking up tunes, and writing his Busking England blog (which is now coming out as a book from Scratching Shed). This set of tunes was recorded high up in the Staffordshire peaks at the 19th-century Danebridge Methodist Chapel, with guest players including Norway’s Marit Falt (from female trio Vamm) on Read more ...
peter.quinn
We can all do with a dopamine hit right now, given the current lockdown, and those feel-good hormones kick in the instant you hear Yussef Dayes’ tight backbeat on the opening title track of What Kinda Music. A collaboration between drummer and producer Dayes and fellow south-east London-based producer and singer-songwriter Tom Misch – whose "Disco Yes" was one of Barack Obama’s favourite tracks of 2018 – the album is released today via the iconic Blue Note Records.The duo’s judicious mash-up of electronica, hip hop, jazz and prog – containing echoes of everything from Sweetback to another Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Netflix’s sweet but slightly strange drama Sex Education is already two series into its tale of teenage awkwardness in the face of growing up, with a third planned for when the Covid-19 plague is over. Yet it is only now that the soundtrack is being unleashed on the record-buying public.That said, it doesn’t actually include such classics as Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl” or Generation X’s “Dancing with Myself”, which have both featured among a rich treasure of tunes that must have been new to the show’s target audience. Similarly, the album is distinctly short of modern youth-orientated sounds, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Few singers can channel bitterness, anger and pain as well as Lucinda Williams: she moves with ease from a fierce snarl to a sensual drawl, and from a naked show of vulnerability to a rocker’s raunch. As with Tom Waits, with whom she has sometimes been compared, there is something stylised about her vocal style, almost mannered. And yet, born performer and poet that she is, she channels archetypal emotions in a way that never feels forced.In her new album, a collection of very intense material, in which the personal and political seamlessly mix, she is joined once again by co-producer Roy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Originally aired in BBC2’s “Theatre 625” slot in July 1968, Nigel Kneale’s The Year of the Sex Olympics has gathered a reputation as a groundbreaking piece of TV drama which uncannily anticipated the broadcasting future. Its depiction of a society in which the audience are apathetic zombies pacified by crass, bottom-of-the-barrel “entertainment” might cause pangs of unease as we view such contemporary phenomena as Big Brother or I’m A Celebrity…, while the notion of audiences gaping at glamorous couples enacting competitive TV sex is too Love Island for words.However, while Kneale’s far- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The out-of-control missile on the cover is emblematic. The actual takeoff in question is the flight Brian Christinzio was forced to board in 2015 following his deportation from the UK. What came next is the album title's "shortly after": an enforced return to the US from his adopted hometown, Manchester, was followed by the sudden death of his father, and the concomitant resurfacing of issues with drugs and mental health. Some light came when, through his lineage, Christinzio aka BC Camplight was subsequently able to get an Italian passport and return to Europe.The worst of times, though, Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Early in The Scar (1976), the opening film in Arrow Academy’s Cinema of Conflict limited edition quartet, Stefan Bednarz (Franciszek Pieczka) requests a partial reshoot of what is to be his first interview as the newly appointed director of a large chemical factory, built in his hometown of Olechów. “This is not a feature film … no second takes”, comes the reply, unheard by Bednarz, from the journalist and filmmaker behind the camera. The Scar is, of course, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s very first feature-length film, this ultimately inconsequential scene a telling precursor of what would emerge as Read more ...