CDs/DVDs
Tom Birchenough
“Publishable, but worth it?” EM Forster’s hesitations about the value of Maurice, his novel of Edwardian homosexuality – written in 1913-14, it was published only posthumously, in 1971 – were certainly redeemed by James Ivory’s 1987 film of the book. Even if, typically, the only place where it wasn’t really well received was in its home territory, the UK: reactions elsewhere, from the Venice Film Festival where stars James Wilby and Hugh Grant shared the Best Actor award, through to distribution in France, where it apparently played for a year, were far more enthusiastic. But if any doubts Read more ...
joe.muggs
Carly Rae Jepsen is a brilliant pop star. Her music pure and unashamed radio pop, full of the excitement of living and loving, but her status with her audience and relationship with them are a bit more like what you'd expect from a cult indie act. As Canadian Idol runner up through her earnest singer-songwriter debut album she was charming enough.But when the perfect bubblegum of 2012's “Call Me Maybe” exploded as an enormous international hit, she went with it and parlayed the energy of the single into a career. Embracing her wonderfully unhinged fan community, and particularly the LGBT+ Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Cuz I Love You starts with a big, bold, black-and-white soul moment, an album title hauled from the heavens via the lungs of an extraordinary pop star. It’s a stunning rush of feeling from Lizzo, the Minneapolis-based singer and rapper, alone in the spotlight before a brass band kicks in. It’s also, delightfully, the closest her major label debut album gets to letting anybody else dictate her feelings.Sure, the “you” of that opening track could be a third party – someone whom she promises, in a delicious deadpan, to “put on a plane” and “fly out to wherever I am” – but the “you” of the album’ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Life in rural 19th century Estonia looks hard. The ice and the squalor are tough enough, but then you’ve the kratts to contend with. We see one in the eye-popping opening sequence of Rainer Sarnet’s 2017 epic November, an unsettling creature cobbled from bits of wood, random tools and an animal skull. Resembling something thrown together by the Brothers Quay, this one’s on a mission, capturing a terrified cow and taking flight like a steampunk drone. In Estonian folklore, kratts can be given life if you offer three drops of blood to the Devil; the snag being that he now owns your soul.This is Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ed Sheeran, Tom Odell, all those Mr Vulnerability cats; this dude makes them sound like a night out with Slipknot. He is, in fact, a generational divider. Taking the contemporary route to success, wherein smirky, buddy-ish social media is just as important as the music – if not more important – Scottish singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi’s sudden stadium-level success is bewildering to anyone over 25. So, is Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent, wherein every song catalogues his supreme emotionality, a new musical benchmark for the skinless sensitivity of Millennial youth?Perhaps, but, also Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Five years ago, the Swedish tech company Elektron began marketing the first version of the Analog Four, an all-in-one instrument marrying analogue oscillators with a digital sequencer, digital processing and a multi-track capability. That past-present interface had been done before but with its integral keyboard this was, at that point, the most user-friendly piece of kit to do so. K-X-P’s IV is built around compositions created on the Analog Four by the band’s main-man Timo Kaukolampi.Notwithstanding the way of formulating the music, those keeping an eye on the idiosyncratic Finns’ oeuvre Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Gastwerk Saboteurs is the debut album by Imperial Wax, the final line-up of the Fall (the one whose first album together was Imperial Wax Solvent) – but one without the menacing presence of Mark E Smith of course. It’s also a collection of gritty garage rock, rockabilly and indie flavours with plenty of heft – if not quite so much of the snarling cynicism of their former employer. Nevertheless, it suggests that Pete Greenway, Dave Spurr and Keiron Melling had more than a passing influence on the greatness that was Manchester’s finest band of all time and teaming up with ex-Black Pudding Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Whitesnake were always the most absurdly priapic of the successful Eighties heavy rockers. It was therefore with some glee that this writer approached their 13th studio album. In the snowflake age, where offence is taken at the slightest politically incorrect infraction, these hoary oldsters would surely be a ball. They did, after all, once infamously release an album entitled Slide It In. It turns out, however, that for much of the time, overblown musical cliché is the lasting aftertaste.David Coverdale has led Whitesnake for just over 40 years although, of the rest of the band, only drummer Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
To consider the third album from experimental composer Holly Herndon solely as a piece of music is to miss the point. PROTO is part artwork, part research project, on which Herndon teams up with collaborators both human and inhuman to discover whether artificial intelligence can be trained to produce art. The results aren’t always beautiful but that, perhaps, is what makes them human.As track listings go, PROTO’s is perhaps a little too on-the-nose. The 13-track album opens with “Birth”; a minute-long, alien-sounding composition whose jarring sounds and guttural, inhuman vocals seem to pass Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Farrow’s inexplicably neglected 1948 thriller The Big Clock is a difficult work to pigeonhole, combining traces of noir, screwball comedy and suspense. Farrow’s source material was a novel by poet and pulp fiction writer Kenneth Fearing, here adapted by crime author and screenwriter Jonathan Latimer. Visually it’s spectacular, the first establishing shot moving from a dark New York skyline to the interior of the art deco Janoth Building in (almost) one single take, showing us Ray Milland’s George Stroud taking refuge inside the titular timepiece. It’s a flashback, and there’s a first- Read more ...
Asya Draganova
Singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding originally released 12 Little Spells last year as a dozen separate tracks, each with its own video. This new expanded edition is available on physical formats and download, with four new tracks as bonus extras.The Grammy-winning artist wrote the first batch of material while on a writing retreat at a castle in Italy, and the music is an embodiment of harmony and the healing powers of art. Both grown-up and youthful, smooth yet fun, it's an ultimate feelgood experience for those who enjoy a beautifully-crafted fusion of jazz, soul, and R’n’B.Spalding is no Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Before we get to the music, there’s the title of Clinic’s first album in seven years to deal with. It comes from the title of a 1970s Granada TV series, The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, a northern entertainment revue presented by, among others, Bernard Manning. The surviving episodes of the show, with the blue dialed down for a wider audience, offer a veneered view of working men’s clubs that gently steers anything too unsavoury into the wings. As a symbol of Britain’s relationship with its past, it’s damn near perfect. Musically, the post-punk troupe’s return has a Read more ...