CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
Certain artists’ success lies in a direct ability to pastiche the past into something new and bumptious. Oasis, The Scissor Sisters and The Vaccines all had this in spades and, at their best, created music whose pizzazz and punch eventually rendered their retro allusions irrelevant. The musical back-references are still there but the albums in question long ago outgrew what was so obvious on first listening. The second album from bigger-in-America Derby rockers The Struts falls joyfully into such territory with a couldn’t-give-a-damn insouciance.The Struts look the part, adopting a dandy-ish Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In our era of TV so-called talent shows and cynically manufactured stars, how wonderful it is that many of the truly talented musicians who for decades have written the soundtracks of so many lives are releasing late-career albums that can stop you in your tracks. This year has been particularly rich – Joan Baez, Paul Simon, Judy Collins/Stephen Stills – and now David Crosby, with his fourth album in as many years.Here If You Listen finds Croz working once again with Michelle Willis, Becca Stevens and Michael League, all of whom put their individual prints on Lighthouse (2016). The album was Read more ...
Jo Southerd
Eight long years, Robyn fans have been waiting. Crazed tweets screamed #releasehoneydammit into the ether for weeks as the Swedish songwriter teased her new music.Comeback single and certified summer earworm “Missing You” was the first song Robyn wrote for the album, but there was a time when she didn’t know if she’d ever make another record. What began as a breakup song soon took on feelings of bereavement after Christian Falk, her friend, collaborator and La Bagatelle Magique bandmate, died, after a short period of illness.So Robyn isolated herself in the studio for a year, making lo-fi Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ex Mykah is a multi-instrumentalist and producer on the LA music scene who’s worked with the names such as Mark Ronson and Miike Snow. His own debut album sounds very far from either of those. Instead it comes from the warped, alt-hip hop end of the pop spectrum, while also recalling that brief Noughties blog flourish “chillwave” (the likes of Neon Indian and Washed Out). This is music dipped deep in a woozy, druggy feel, but which also never wanders far from an actual tune.Ex Mykah is Colombian-Cuban-American Bryan Senti who deeply resents the direction his country has taken and the PR Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Jamil Dehlavi is a filmmaker whose work straddles two worlds. His native Pakistan is certainly the key element in the two early films on this BFI dual-format release – it follows on from the director’s August South Bank retrospective, the first there for a director from that country – but it is as if, for a variety of reasons, he always had a foot in a cinematic context that went beyond it.His film education and training came in New York, and the spirit of experimental cinema of the time infuses his 1975 Towers of Silence, though its visual elements are anchored in Karachi’s shoreline and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It would seem that Micah P Hinson is a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He also gives the impression of a man who could make Willie Nelson seem like a spring chicken, with his deep, rasping singing voice, even if he is yet to exit his thirties. Twinned with his rootsy and mournful tunes, however, Micah’s presence is a fine accompaniment in the early hours, on an album whose quality doesn’t once betray that it was recorded in a single 24 hour stretch.When I Shoot at You with Arrows, I Will Shoot to Destroy You is not only one of the finest album titles so far in 2018, it is Read more ...
mark.kidel
When, as an artist, you live under the power of a quasi-dictatorship, you choose to stay rather than go into exile, and you want to avoid being thrown into prison, one of the best strategies for opposition is poetry. Turkish rock diva Gaye Su Akyol hasn’t chosen the confrontational path of Pussy Riot, but works instead a rich vein of musical surrealism that questions the power of Erdoğan in a language that the leader and his entourage wouldn’t understand.The rich and operatic mix on this, her second album with Glitterbeat and co-authored by her partner and co-producer the guitarist Ali Güçlü Read more ...
joe.muggs
“Caustic motherfucker”. There it is, right up in the first few lines of Baxter Dury's spoken narration over the sleazy, spanky electro beats of Etienne de Crecy. There it is: a statement of intent, a phrase to relish in the mouth, that show's he's going to make full use of the English language. Of course, it's a descendent of his dad's “arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks” – Baxter has never hidden his musical and lyrical lineage – but it's also entirely his own, coming from a place that delights in the physicality of those consonants, and in the mechanics of storytelling and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Psychopathologies come and go but they always tell us about the historical time period in which they’re produced.” So says the journalist and academic Chris Hedges in Lauren Greenfield’s documentary Generation Wealth. The idea the film plays with is that a psychopathology which currently dominates to a morbid degree is our obsession with being rich and, as much, with the public signifiers of wealth. Its hour and 40 minutes length is never dull, offering up regular revelatory tidbits, but rather than a driving sense of focus and purpose, Greenfield chooses to wander her chosen terrain in a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Think of Karen "MØ" Andersen and you may well picture one of her smash hit videos. "Lean On", for instance, where the singer gyrates to a Bollywood/ house mashup. Or "Kamikaze" set in post-apocalyptic Ukraine. Yet, for all the Zeitgeist-y imagery what really made those songs so popular was really just simple youthful exuberance. "Forever Neverland" sounds like it should offer much of the same. Instead, it feels curiously grown-up.MØ, it would seem, has moved in from her recent incarnation as the singer of Diplo pop songs. Diplo - the producer responsible for both "Lean On" and "Kamikaze" - Read more ...
Guy Oddy
There is no doubt that the hippies of the late Sixties and early Seventies gifted the world a horde of beautiful music before they finally slipped into a dope cloud of tedious self-satisfaction. Despite what some might claim, it’s hard to view Yoko Ono’s songs as part of this treasure trove and easy to suspect that she would now be viewed as a footnote in the history of the avant garde art world, if not for her place in the Beatles’ mythology.Half a century after Yoko’s emergence into the spotlight comes Warzone, an album of re-recorded tracks drawn from 1985’s Starpeace (which contributes Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“There’s a lot of weirdness I didn’t want explained,” Paul Schrader reveals at one point in a new director’s commentary to his 1990 film. He certainly succeeded on that score: with its script by Harold Pinter (adapting Ian McEwan’s elliptical 1981 novel), you sense that explanation – in any standard sense, at least – was indeed never going to be much of an issue in The Comfort of Strangers.If the novelist had offered little dialogue in his investigation of the irreconcilability of the sexes, and the playwright riffed on his favourite theme, that “language is a tool we use not to communicate Read more ...