CDs/DVDs
Liz Thomson
Many will remember Jennifer Warnes as the backing vocalist on a mighty handful of Leonard Cohen albums, and from his touring bands – she was on the 1972 and ’79 European jaunts. The latter was in support of Recent Songs, mocked at the time for its painting-by-numbers sleeve and for just about everything else. For Cohen had become a figure of some derision (punk rock et al has much to answer for) and was as unhip and irrelevant as it was then possible to be. The notorious Phil Spector collaboration hadn’t helped.The ’79 London concert lives on in my memory still (and not just because I Read more ...
joe.muggs
Everything on this record changes shape. One moment in “RayCats” Far Eastern instrumentation is being glitched beyond recognition, then suddenly it sounds like something from a relaxation tape. “Same” shimmers and twists between 20th century avant-classical, Depeche Mode at their stadium peak and pure electronic sound. “The Station” sounds like Drake or Future crooning over the bassline from a 90s grunge track, but periodically dissolves into Autechre type abstraction.But that's Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, all over. Since he emerged from the US electronic noise scene, he's Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Their ninth album should please Morcheeba fans. Take the song “Find Another Way”, for example. It rolls in like a haunted breeze, an acoustic/twangy combination preceding front-woman Skye Edwards, one of the sweetest-sounding vocalists in pop, and she still has it. Tarred with the brush of being the bland dinner-party face of 1990s trip hop, due to their easy way with a pop song, there was always more to Morcheeba than many credited. “The Sea”, “Part of the Process”, “Trigger Hippy”, “What New York Couples Fight About” and others are simply delicious songs. The happy news is that Blaze Away Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Few bands divide opinion quite like Snow Patrol. Their fans see their slow, intense anthems as cathartic friends. Others - myself included - tend to regard their music as an insidious, dreary presence. As Nicky Wire (of the Manics) once put it, "the same drab little thing, over and over". Wildness, their first album in seven years, is being billed as being something completely different - more passionate, and with a lighter touch.Apparently, the shift in musical direction is down to various changes in the band members' lives. Singer Gary Lightbody has given up drinking. He's also been Read more ...
Owen Richards
When bands move to the US, some find themselves drawn into the commercial machine; when Scottish band Chvrches crossed the Atlantic, they were targeting direct assimilation from the start. Recorded with mega-producer Greg Kurstin, the band are aiming to be more direct than ever; perhaps a wise move considering they’ve always leaned heavily on the pop side of electro.This move is successful, somewhat. The production is appropriately crisp and expansive, and the songs nearly all follow the same structure (sleek verse, build up pre-chorus, hook-heavy chorus). Lauren Mayberry’s voice was built Read more ...
graham.rickson
The brightness and colour are deceptive; at its heart, Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina’s Coco is an affecting reflection on death, remembrance and the redemptive power of music, dressed up as a frenetic and gag-stuffed Disney comedy. I’d place it above recent hits such as Frozen and Moana; here, the music is integral to the film’s plot, and the closing scenes have an emotional impact comparable with the montage which opens Pixar’s Up. Have a box of tissues on hand, in other words, especially if you’ve had to deal with memory loss in an elderly relative.Set during the Mexican Día de los Muertos Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Gretchen Peters arrived in Nashville in the late eighties from Bronxville, New York, where she was born, and Boulder, Colorado, where she grew up. Within a decade she was writing songs for some of the biggest names in country music, among them Trisha Yearwood, Shania Twain, and George Strait, and for Etta James. It was “Independence Day”, which Martina McBride picked up, that led to her first honours (a Grammy and a Country Music Association Award), an occasional writing partnership with Bryan Adams and the release of a sequence of distinguished albums (including the garlanded Blackbird, 2016 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Loner’s opening track “More of the Same” lyrically tracks being at a party where “everyone’s well dressed with a perfect body and they all have alternative haircuts and straight white teeth.” It triggers a flashback to schooldays when it was, indeed, the same thing. “Cry!” looks a life in the limelight, “Money” is about doing everything for money and “Bikini” is about becoming a celebrity. The price of entry? Putting on a bikini and dancing.Caroline Rose’s third album is a smart, sardonic 11-track romp through how she sees aspects of the modern condition. A sadness-tinged cynicism is Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When a 49-year-old Welsh jazz’n’folk singer decides to make it her business to cover songs ranging from Drake’s “Hotline Bling” to Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling”, most people’s immediate reaction would be to advise her to leave well alone. I’d be with them. However, despite some real no-no’s contained in Judith Owen’s new album, there’s also fun to be had.Things do not start well for, despite Owen’s best efforts, her plaintive, sparse piano cover of Drake’s bootycall anthem “Hotline Bling”, while a brave idea (suggested by her husband, the actor-comedian Harry Shearer) does not Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Spielberg’s prequel to All the President’s Men was filmed at speed, and aimed squarely at the press-hating Trump, not the late Tricky Dick. This contemporary intent is already fading. What remains is the director’s second return, after Munich, to the sort of Seventies conspiracy thriller dabbled in by his own great hits of the decade, Jaws and Close Encounters. The story of the 1971 exposé by government whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers, which revealed the US government’s true, knowingly doomed conduct in Vietnam, is framed here by a less important question: whether the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Take a first, passing glance at the debut album from Hailey Tuck and she could be mistaken for Katy Perry, done up in florid new image finery. The Texas-born, Paris-living 27 year old, however, on further inspection (and, more to the point, on listening), is nothing like that pop superstar. The only thing they may have in common is ambition, for Junk is weighted with Sony money, recorded at LA's Sunset Sound Studios with top jazz session men and a sense of high expectation. It’s a major label punt but, happily, a likeable one.The man at the studio controls is jazz super-producer Larry Klein. Read more ...
mark.kidel
Ray LaMontagne is a versatile artist who for years has been navigating the territory between hard rock and contemporary folk. His voice can be soft and gentle and yet also filled on occasion with something close to aggression. He has a firm grasp of what makes a song unfold with a sense of inevitability that is pleasing to hear rather than just predictable.Born in 1973, he often resurrects classic rock sounds that are clearly the result of absorbing many treasures of the American and British back catalogues. There are echoes of Fred Neil’s sensitive tenor on the opener “To the Sea” and the Read more ...