CDs/DVDs
mark.kidel
Israel isn’t generally kind to the Jews who have come from somewhere other than eastern Europe and Russia. Music has provided one of the avenues through which this despised and often culturally Arab minority has been able to make itself recognised.El Khat is a band led by an Israeli of Yemeni origin, the astonishingly inventive composer and musician Eyal El Wahab. Their first album, Saadia Jefferson is typical of a new wave of dis-placed music, with a DNA that draws from ancestral roots – in this case the music of Yemen, but with a world-attuned sensibility that references David Bowie, the Read more ...
joe.muggs
For all they've inspired swathes of the most crushingly mundane music of the modern age from Sheeran on down, Coldplay have always been at their best at their most grandiose. That is, when they shake off Chris Martin's I'm-a-normal-bloke schtick and let their romanticism – in melodies, arrangements and fairytale lyrics – fly free. So it sounded promising when it emerged they were releasing a double album full of global influences: maybe they're really going to go for it this time?In the event, at 53 minutes, Everyday Life is actually shorter than some of their single albums. And for Read more ...
Nick Hasted
That voice’s husky confiding wasn’t quite silenced. Working helped Leonard Cohen live a little longer, and old friends and family have gathered to complete these last bequests. “As for the fall it began long ago,” he sings, and more than a quarter of his rare, honed albums have now been released in the miraculous final arc since his financial theft-enforced, septuagenarian comeback in 2008.Cohen’s son Adam continues his co-production from 2016’s seeming swansong You Want It Darker, and with Jennifer Warnes, Sharon Robinson, Javier Mas and Anjani Thomas among the other returning compadres, has Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A lumbering, barrel-chested hulk with a weirdly Ancient Egyptian wedge of hair, the eponymous clay monster of Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s The Golem: How He Came Into the World compensates for his limited intelligence with brute strength and a dogged determination to see every task through, whether he’s doing the shopping for his household or supporting a collapsing palace by its beams. When the Golem bares his teeth, he’s terrifying – though the 1920 German film’s cultural resonance is the eeriest thing about it.Written by Wegener and Henrik Galeen (who also scripted FW Murnau's Read more ...
Owen Richards
Beck stands on the front cover of his new album Hyperspace with a vintage Toyota and Japanese text resplendent above. It’s the perfect scene setter for an album you could easily imagine soundtracking a midnight drive through Tokyo. Or if the lyrics are anything to go by, an intergalactic voyage. Following on from 2017’s excellent Colours, Beck has settled into a reliable late-career groove that mixes deceptively simple songwriting with intricate production. The best example of this is the aptly-named “Chemical”, creating sounds that wash over your synapses like a psychoactive compound. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The contemporary context of the Netherlands’s Iguana Death Cult is clear. Their blues-edged garage rock exists in a continuum encompassing Amyl and The Sniffers, The Chats, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and Oh Sees. Nude Casino is more measured than the first and second bands, less eclectic than the third and fourth but nonetheless is in tune with a pancontinental reductiveness where the bracing live experience – and relentless touring – is seemingly more important than finessing what’s caught on tape.Nude Casino, their second album, is hobbled by a flat, one-size-fits-all production Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lady Antebellum have stayed in the mainstream country world Taylor Swift forded to full pop stardom. Beginning alongside her on Nashville’s aptly named Big Machine label, they’ve kept the genre’s knack for narrative, emotion and residual hints of authenticity alongside imposing chart power. As slide guitar, fiddle and harmonica symbolically curl around big, slick choruses, they aren’t so far from the “big hat” music which made Garth Brooks oddly parallel gangsta-rap as the sound of America at the dawn of the Nineties. Lady Antebellum offer more 21st century, feminised sensitivity, alluding to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Of 2019’s pop culture phenomena, the critical reappraisal of Céline Dion as an international treasure is one of the most delightful. It’s been six years since the Quebecois singer last released an English language album, a period in which she closed out 16 years of Las Vegas residencies, soundtracked both Disney and Deadpool and, most importantly, mourned her husband, René and brother, Daniel. Those losses unsurprisingly colour much of Courage, which across an expansive track listing features plenty of moments of recovery and resilience. And even, tentatively, hints at new happiness.Opening Read more ...
mark.kidel
DJ Shadow, made famous in 1996 With Endtroducing…, an album made entirely of samples, and the originator of a sound that was described as "trip-hop", sometime before it was attached to various Bristol sounds, continues to express his musical curiosity and eclecticism with wide-ranging connoisseurship and passion.His new double album is divided between a series of characteristically diverse instrumentals, and collaborations with rappers and singers. The instrumentals - mini musical essays - vary in style from explorations of electronica and noise and breakbeat-driven grooves to moments Read more ...
graham.rickson
Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction and The Fabulous Baron Munchausen are dizzying romps, whereas his earlier Journey to the Beginning of Time, made in 1955, is disarmingly straightforward – a simple tale of four boys searching for prehistoric life in order to complete a homework assignment. With a minimum of fuss, they board a no-frills wooden boat and row through a cave and down a river, heading further and further back in time. There are a few petty squabbles and a couple of minor examples of what the BBFC used to term “mild peril”. Otherwise, this is joyous, exhilarating fun. Read more ...
howard.male
Last month this Western Saharan singer-songwriter stood on stage at London’s Jazz Café and turned the venue into a hallowed holy space with just her voice and the rhythm she summoned from her tabal drum. Translated from the orginal Arabic, two lines she sung were: "The only one who seeks war, is one who has never known it". These simple yet profound words come from "Cuatro Proverbios", the opening number of this, her third album. However, although Aziza sings a great deal about her poverty, her war-stricken childhood in Algerian refugee camps, and the pain of exile (she currently lives in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There’s plenty going on in Ronnie Wood’s world, with Mike Figgis’ feature documentary, Somebody Up There Likes Me, a mini tour with his band The Wild Five – London, Manchester and Birmingham – and this platter, subtiled "A Live Tribute to Chuck Berry", that was recorded live last year at The Tivoli in Wimborne, Dorset. I know the venue well, dear readers, as the local flea pit of the 1960s and 1970s. Its last screening as a cinema was Led Zep’s The Song Remains the Same in 1977 (there were plenty of grebos in the Wimborne area), before its divine resurrection as a music venue, thanks to the Read more ...