CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Encountering a debut album this good is a rare thrill. Nonetheless, the case isn't made instantly – "Simpatico People”, the opening track of W.H. Lung’s Incidental Music, takes 127 seconds to bed in and the vocal arrives after another minute.During that lengthy intro almost everything which needs to be known is disclosed: this is an assured band, one so confident that clear references to the New Order of “Temptation” are overridden and soon left behind. The testifying vocal is akin to that of first-album Stone Roses and there’s also a suggestion of John Squire’s circular guitar six Read more ...
Asya Draganova
A journey already begun continues in the new album by electronic artist UNKLE, celebrated widely as a founding figure in trip-hop. Following the 2017 release of The Road: Part I, we are now two thirds of the way through what James Lavelle has planned as a trilogy of albums.We probably can’t help but interpret the subtitle Lost Highway as a reference to David Lynch’s 1997 classic movie. What the film and the album seem to have in common is indeed the haunting, captivating, and immersive effect… and the slightly unusual length, as The Road: Part II takes place in two dedicated “acts” of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Guy Clark is among the favourite songwriters of Bob Dylan, a Grammy-winning giant of the so-called outlaw country music movement who lived hard and died of lymphoma in 2016. He made guitars and wrote songs such as the classic “Desperados Waiting for a Train” and “Texas, 1947” which, it has been said, “presents a view of life in post-war West Texas that is as true as Dorothea Lange’s best Dust Bowl portraiture”. Not bad!Clark provided hit records for Ricky Skaggs and Bobby Bare and was a mentor to Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle, who hitchhiked from San Antonio to Nashville in 1974 to meet Read more ...
Guy Oddy
As Nick Cave has edged ever further towards mainstream acceptance with each of his recent Bad Seeds’ albums, so he has created something of a gothic-blues vacuum that is itching to be filled. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by The Underground Youth. Hence, while the band’s previous releases have had something of a tinge of Spacemen 3-like psychedelic drone rock, new disc Montage Images of Lust and Fear changes tack completely and comes on like a tribute to The Birthday Party and the early albums of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.The album opens with the down tempo “Sin”, with Craig Dyer intoning “I’ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Edwyn Collins is in a good mood. Perhaps it’s his 2014 move back to his native Scotland where he now lives and records on the wild north-eastern coast. Perhaps it was finding a sheaf of inspiring old lyrics as he packed up to make the move. Or perhaps it’s just his joy at making music 14 years after two debilitating strokes nearly finished him off. Whatever the reason, his ninth solo album (and fourth since the strokes) is as full of beans as a young collie in springtime.As the frontman of Orange Juice and co-founder of Postcard Records, Collins was a key figure in the genesis of indie music Read more ...
Saskia Baron
For admirers of Henri-Georges Clouzot or Brigitte Bardot, this Criterion restoration of their rarely seen 1960 collaboration is a must have. La Vérité may not be Clouzot’s greatest film, the pace is a little slow and for British viewers uninterested in the French legal system, the courtroom scenes may occasionally drag, but it’s a powerful film nonetheless.Bardot plays coquette Dominique Marceau, bored of life in her provincial home town and her working class family. She persuades her parents to let her live in Paris with her prim older sister Annie (Marie-José Nat) a violin student at Read more ...
Guy Oddy
While Oasis have so far resisted the temptation of the big pay-off that a Gallagher family reunion would ensure, plenty of other Britpoppers have been considerably less coy about getting back together since the heady days of the 1990s. We’ve already had reunions from Blur (albeit temporarily), Suede, Dodgy and even Shed Seven. Now though, it is the turn of Louise Wener’s four-piece, Sleeper.Slipping easily back into their old sound with New Wave guitars and bitter-sweet, spoken-sung vocals, The Modern Age could easily be a reissue from Sleeper’s first time around. However, while the sound is Read more ...
joe.muggs
Everything about this mixtape oozes confidence. It crams 12 tracks plus interludes – all produced by Andre “Shy FX” Williams – into barely more than half an hour. It happily leaves “Roll the Dice”, the single which conquered club and radio and featured Lily Allen, until last. As well as roots reggae, carnival marching bands, lyrically and rhythmically brutal bashment and lashings of the drum'n'bass that Shy FX is best known for, it traverses creepy-crawling avant pop, modernist R&B and moody off-centre hip hop, yet never loses the sense of being a focused party soundtrack. And Read more ...
mark.kidel
1957 was a busy year for a very busy director: Ingmar Bergman made two of his most famous films – The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, several TV dramas, and a number of major stage productions. All the while, he was suffering from painful stomach ulcers, juggling a number of love affairs and breaking through, after a decade of increasingly accomplished and controversial films, as one of the leading film-makers in the world.Jane Magnusson’s documentary uses this annus mirabiliis as a thread for a film that explores the entirety of the Swedish master’s life. All of Bergman’s films are in Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Every so often, an album reminds you that, done properly, the art form is more than just a collection of songs. Barely 35 minutes in length, Lucy Rose’s fourth release No Words Left is a beautifully sequenced work in a time when track listings have come to mean little; its songs, and the spaces between them, something of a late-night reverie. Rose describes the album as emerging from a particularly difficult period in her life, but rarely has a dark night of the soul ultimately sounded so uplifting.This is an album for the loneliest of sleepless nights – ironic, really, for one that opens Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If you're familiar with The Brian Jonestown Massacre, chances are it's from the 2004 Sundance-winning rockumentary, Dig!. The film took a wry look at the Californian band's intense rivalry with The Dandy Warhols. More, though, it was an extended character-study of charismatic, drug-frazzled BJM frontman Anton Newcombe – a man once described as consuming narcotics so ferociously, it was like an anteater eating ants. It was generally assumed Newcombe would soon be sucked into the vortex of his fevered mind. Instead, he got sober and stayed that way. The change is certainly remarkable Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Groove Denied’s keeper is “Ocean of Revenge”, a drifting Syd Barrett-tinged contemplation with a structural circularity and edge setting it apart from the rest of what’s credited as the first solo album from Stephen Malkmus since 2001’s eponymous set. That, though, was an album he wanted co-billed to him and his band The Jicks. His label Matador had other ideas.Plus ça change. The former Pavement man wanted Groove Denied issued in 2017 before the release of last year’s Sparkle Hard, a Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks album as such. The ten tracks out now are solo for real (despite being listed Read more ...