CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
A pizzicato violin opens Song Over Støv. Gradually, other instruments arrive: bowed violin, a fluttering flute, pattering percussion, an ominous double bass. They merge. The climax is furious, intensely rhythmic. Suddenly, it is over.“Straumen frobi” – which translates from Norwegian as The Current Passing By – sets the scene for five more equally dynamic, just-as feverish tracks. Each is as much about the structured interplay of instruments as it is impact. At times – especially during “I natt” (Tonight) and “Trø” (Step) – proceedings evoke the folk music/rock hybrid characterised by Sweden’ Read more ...
Graham Fuller
On the spoken word LP Loose Talk, Amelia Barratt reflects on her or other women’s experiences, real or imagined, over tunes drawn from Bryan Ferry’s demos, some from early in his career. To hear his instantly recognisable sound applied to a female sensibility, especially that expressed with such confiding intimacy by the painter, writer, and performance artist Barratt, makes for a unique and satisfyingly unsettling listen. Barratt enunciates her miniaturist monologues understatedly but not insouciantly. If her white, middle-class English diction seldom betrays emotion, her observations Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Will Smith’s new album, Based on a True Story, is a prime example of why some comebacks should remain hypothetical. After two decades away from music, one might expect a seasoned, self-aware return – something with the wisdom of age and the energy of experience. Instead, we get a collection of tracks that feel like they were brainstormed during an awkward dad-joke marathon.The album kicks off with Smith addressing that Oscars moment, but instead of offering insight or clever lyricism, he dances around it like he’s dodging responsibility at a family barbecue. The track plays like a Read more ...
joe.muggs
I can’t stop reading and re-reading the review copy I got of a new book, out next week. Liam Inscoe-Jones’s Songs in the Key of MP3: the New Icons of the Internet Age is one of those books where you’ll find yourself shocked that it didn’t exist before: it’s a mapping out of the modern musical and subcultural landscape on terms defined by the millennial artists who’ve come to define it. That is to say, it elegantly cuts loose from establishment critical discourse that has all too often tried to assess artists and subcultures on the criteria of the late 20th century – Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s been 14 years since Alison Krauss and Union Station released an album – 2011’s Paper Aeroplane. The world’s shed a few skins since then, and little resembles the way it was. The ten songs on their new album, Arcadia, recorded in studios across Nashville, are tied up in that cat’s cradle of time, of the past and how it is remembered.“The stories of the past are told in this music,” Krauss has written. “It’s that whole idea of ‘in the good old days when times were bad.’ There's so much bravery and valour and loyalty and dreaming, of family and themes of human existence that were told in a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tobe Hooper changed cinema with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) for pennies in rancid Southern heat, but came closest to a mainstream Hollywood career a decade later, following the hit Spielberg collaboration Poltergeist (1982) with his biggest budget from hack mavericks Cannon Films. He characteristically determined to “make it as wild as I can”.Based on British Beat writer Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires, Lifeforce (1985) is indeed one of its decade’s most unhinged, far out films. Infamous and too easily dismissed for 18-year-old French ballerina Mathilda May’s mostly nude queen Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On the cover of her eponymous debut album, the Bolton-raised Toria Wooff reclines on a church pew located in Stanley Palace, a 16th-century mansion in her adopted city of Chester. In her hand, a Celtic Cross. Such imagery implies that what will be heard on the grooves within the sleeve might cleave to forms of gothic-inclined British folk. This, though, is not the case.It’s clear from the album’s second track that Wooff is aware of dark Texas country singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. “Lefty's Motel Room” is an open nod to his totemic composition "Pancho and Lefty.” As Wooff’s song picks up Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Selena Gomez is the enormously successful Disney child star who grew up to be a Hollywood actor and global pop sensation. As notably, she’s the third most followed person on Instagram, the most popular woman, with 421 million followers. Benny Blanco is the golden boy American producer-songwriter whose many, many hits run the gamut from Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” to Ed Sheeran’s “Happier” to Kesha’s “Tik Tok”. The pair got engaged last December.This, then, is a monster album. It’s also better than its icky title and tacky celeb status suggest. I admit I came to I Said I Love You First Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For fans of The Horrors, the headline here is that, 20 years into the career, for their sixth album, the band have lost two of their founding members. Original keyboard player Tom Furse has gone, as has drummer “Coffin” Joe Spurgeon, to be replaced, respectively, by Amelia Kidd of Scottish synthy post-punkers The Ninth Wave and Jordan Cook of alt-indie Welsh outfit Telegram. Happily, these changes have not scuppered their overall dynamic. Indeed, the five-piece is now imbued with an encompassing darkness that harks back to their beginnings.This is not to say the The Horrors have reanimated Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There was a telling remark in Wynton Marsalis’s recent interview with Katty Kay for the BBC show “Influential”. Talking about how jazz functions in real time as a democracy, he said: “Our music requires you to be in balance with other people”, contrasting it with unnamed but all-too-obvious examples in the US of the rise of cultures based on principles diametrically opposed to that, i.e. the search for victory and 'greatness' through bullying and subjugation.As I listened to Just, the new ECM album from the quartet of octogenarian drum icon Billy Hart, I became rapidly convinced that this Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Going by the sounds of her new album, it wouldn’t unreasonable to assume that Greentea Peng enjoys sucking on a spliff every once in a while. Tell Dem It’s Sunny is certainly Gold Seal gear with a distinctly smoky atmosphere, that’s for sure.Dubby trip hip and woozy neo-soul are the order of the day with lyrics that are sometimes political, sometimes spiritual and sometimes absurd but which always flow with the loops and basslines that she’s dreamed up with collaborators from Earbuds to Samo and Wu-Lu, to name only a few. However, even at its most heavy and forthright, as on the Dälek-like “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Sitting on a sofa, cigarettes and beer, ten years disappear…agreeing to agree, just to get along.” By going into the difficulties of resuscitating the past, the lyrics of “Ten Years,” the fourth song on The Loft’s first album, neatly sum-up the band’s current situation. The final line gives the 10-track set its title: “Everything changes, everything stays the same.”Everything Changes, Everything Stays The Same is, indeed, the first album by The Loft, a band integral to the early days of Creation Records which fell apart on stage in June 1985. Forty years ago. A long time. Before that rupture Read more ...