CDs/DVDs
Owen Richards
Oh Sees have been perennial festival favourites for over 15 years now, releasing 21 albums under seven different band names. The change of name usually indicates a new direction, with previous records ranging from alt Americana (OCS) to lo-fi garage (Thee Oh Sees). 2016’s Orc christened the band’s latest moniker Oh Sees, and after a brief diversion last year, they’re back with more explorations into post-rock riffs and rhythms.Smote Reverser’s cover immediately draws to mind the melodramatic imagery of metal: a Lovecraftian leviathan tears down on a burning futuristic city. Indeed, the lyrics Read more ...
Guy Oddy
When Kentish hardcore punk two-piece, Slaves emerged with their debut album, Are You Satisfied?, they caused quite a stir with lairy tunes of austerity Britain like “The Hunter”, “Sockets” and the magnificent “Hey”. Since the heady days of 2015, however, they seem to have been somewhat stuck in the musical doldrums, in need of something to reinvigorate their sound. 2016’s follow-up album, Take Control, had great tunes like “Rich Man” and “Consume Or Be Consumed” but proved to be a set to cherry pick rather than cherish. And so, it continues to be with Acts Of Fear And Love.Isaac Holman’s Ian Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Turning over the sleeve of With Animals reveals a full-frame picture of a Tascam Midistudio 688. First marketed in 1990, it was an eight-track home studio which aimed to bridge the gap between analogue and digital. Midi signals could be fed into it. As could digital recordings. What was input was captured as an analogue recording on a cassette tape. White Town's "Your Woman" became the best-known track recorded on this hybrid, envelope-pushing tech.Foregrounding this gear is a statement of intent. Not just to say that retro mind-sets are at work, but also that a particular ambiance is being Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dance music duo Gorgon City exist within a fickle market. It’s all very well to mooch about on a Saturday night in Woking to house music merging into pop, R&B-tinted, smooth, garage-flecked, touched with just a whiff of Ibiza’s hedonic promise, but does anyone know who makes it or actively care enough to pursue them? Gorgon City fired out a run of Top 20 singles in 2014, but haven’t had such attention for the songs thus far released from their second album. It is, however, no worse - and may even be slightly better - than its predecessor.In any case, their market changed years ago. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête had been planned as a slice of wartime escapism, a distraction from the privations of war. The film was also a chance for Cocteau to give his male lead Jean Marais a less overtly sexy role than his fans were used to, though there’s still a lot of smouldering going on, some of it literal. Many would argue that this is the greatest cinematic fairytale, and it looks stunning in this high definition restoration (its first appearance in HD in the UK). Everything works here; Cocteau’s unfussy, poetic screenplay brilliantly served by Christian Bérard’s designs and Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s been a decade since we last heard from Tom Baxter when he released his second album Skybound, which itself was four years after his debut Feather & Stone. That album included “Almost There”, a song somewhat implausibly covered by Shirley Bassey; Baxter accompanied her when she sang it at the Roundhouse’s Electric Proms.As the title suggests, it’s been a somewhat tricky 10 years for this very English singer-songwriter, one of four children of Jeff and Julie Gleave whom folkies with long memories may remember from the 1960s and ‘70s folk circuit. So with Rufus Wainwright and Tom Waits Read more ...
caspar.gomez
There are two schools of thought on the Scissor Sisters. One was that they were vapid, over-cheery retro-pop of the worst order. The other is that they were an extension of New York’s ever-mischievous underground in all its underground LGBT+ disco glory. While they certainly leaned occasionally towards the former, I very much valued them as the latter. The first solo album from frontman Jake Shears provides the same quandary and its relentless Labrador bounciness won’t be for everyone.Shears took time out when the Scissor Sisters went on hiatus in 2012 after their fourth album. Recently his Read more ...
mark.kidel
So much of Japan can be lost in translation, and yet the West is fascinated by a culture that articulates the possibilities of belief and being in such a different mode than our own. Paul Schrader’s now classic 1985 film on the writer and actor Yukio Mishima explores this universe through the lens of a remarkable life – a man who was as much drawn to the philosophies of Nietzsche and D’Annunzio as he was to the art, literature and customs of traditional Japan.The film has a character all of its own, and features stunningly reconstructed extracts from some of Mishima ‘s key novels to Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Death Grips are a self-proclaimed “conceptual art exhibition anchored by sound and vision” who are forever threatening to split up, but don’t let that put you off. Year of the Snitch, their sixth album in as many years, is an experimental hip hop diamond in a world that really doesn’t need any more fake macho rappers or self-obsessed multi-millionaires, propped up by auto-tuned backing singers. With a sound that frequently suggests My Bloody Valentine going toe to toe with Run the Jewels, Death Grips are throwing out anything but smooth and mainstream grooves backed by gangster-fantasy rhymes Read more ...
Barney Harsent
With Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys seemingly hitting the best form of an already outstanding career, the bar has been pretty high for any other Furries looking to leap into pastures new. Not that this should unduly worry Gulp – SFA bassist Guto Pryce and bandmates Lindsey Leven and Gid Goundrey – their 2014 debut, Season Sun, was a gorgeous summer haze of an album, all dreams and driftwood. After a four-year gap, however, could they replicate the success? The short answer is yes. Yes, they can. But that seems a little perfunctory, so I suppose I’d better drill down on detail. Much Read more ...
joe.muggs
In basic creative terms of the ingredients that make it up, this is not a bad record. Hip hop production is in extraordinary period right now, and the six tracks on this EP have the best production that money can buy: woozy, narcotic, digitally surreal, vast in scale, perfect for heatwave listening as they boom and slither their way along, every one built around microscopic but lethally memorably bleeping hooks. “Tokyo Snow Trip” and “Kawasaki” in particular are extraordinary.The lyrics, too, in theory at least, work on this instant level: they're about money, stripping, weed, swagger, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Men in a wilderness, uneasy interaction with the locals, a horse… German director Valeska Grisebach’s third feature Western certainly does not lack the staples of genre that her title suggests. But there’s a vulnerable heart to this tale of cross-cultural bonding, with accompanying ruminations about changing human landscapes and fate, that moves it far beyond the expected.We first meet her protagonists, a group of German construction workers, at their dour backwater home base as they’re preparing for the next job, and sense something of the group’s dynamics. But the assignment ahead isn’t at Read more ...