CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
Luciferian Towers, the third album since Canadian oddballs Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s 2011 reunion, is an instrumental psychedelic masterpiece that reflects our times without resorting to political bluster. Indeed, with two of its four tracks almost touching a quarter of an hour long, it’s also an album to sink into and absorb rather than a likely source of any radio hits.Godspeed You! Black Emperor are true sonic explorers, albeit with relatively traditional instruments, and in Luciferian Towers they take jazz, classical and electronica influences and wrap them in a post-rock blanket Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Recorded in Rhinebeck, upstate New York, the ninth album in Josh Ritter’s 18-year career strikes many moods, from the manic to the contemplative. It is, he has said, a record of storms, internal and external; of the darkness before a summer storm, “the smell of gathering electricity in the atmosphere” – literally and metaphorically. The cover artwork – he is an accomplished painter – is suitably evocative.Ritter has talked of his wish to escape “the shadow of my earlier self, my earlier work”, and of the discovery of “an exciting sense of dissatisfaction” – a curious phrase, perhaps, but one Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the UK, the best-known version of “Shadows and Reflections” is by mod band The Action, who issued it as a single in June 1967. At that point, the north London outfit had merged their predisposition towards soul with a taste for American harmony pop and psychedelia. Covers of Byrds songs featured in their live set. The American song wasn’t originally theirs: it was co-written by Tandyn Almer, whose compositions were recorded by The Association, and had been issued in the States by Eddie Hodges and an obscure band called The Lownly Crowed. In The Action’s hands, and with George Martin’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Foo Fighters are a global superstar act. And why not, as the late film critic Barry Norman used to say. After seeing them at Glastonbury, they strike me as an irresistible proposition; their Sonic Highways TV documentaries, about music in American cities, are superb; and Dave Grohl, even after decades in the spotlight, still seems like a top fellow. Someone said to me recently they didn’t like him because he was “too nice”. That’s stupid, isn’t it? Who wouldn’t want to share a beer over a barbecue with him?Concrete and Gold involved a lot of barbecuing. Recorded at a studio complex on Sunset Read more ...
graham.rickson
Describe the plot of My Life as a Courgette to someone who’s not been lucky enough to see it and they'll find it hard to understand how a film with such a bleak premise can be so funny and emotionally involving. Swiss director Claude Barras’s magical little animation is an extraordinary thing, and a miracle of concise, clear storytelling.Based on a French children's novel, it tells the story of nine-year old Icare. Nicknamed "Courgette", he’s living in a children's home after inadvertently causing the death of his alcoholic mother. The brutal details of why he's sent there aren't dodged by Read more ...
joe.muggs
One of the more interesting developments of this decade is a blurring around the edges of modern soul music: almost a complete dissolution, in fact, of the boundaries of R&B. From the hyper-mainstream – Drake, The Weeknd, Future – via Solange, Frank Ocean, Blood Orange and Sampha, to fringe experimentalists like Atlanta's Awful Records, international Afro-diasporic collective NON and UK one-off Dean Blunt, R&B is being remade as dark, unpredictable and unsettling.It's into the weirder, gloomier end of this territory that Bristol trio Jabu fit with discomfiting comfort. They come out Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Nina Simone once famously declared all artists to have a duty to reflect the times in which they live. This a philosophy that has saturated the careers of all the members of Prophets of Rage during their times in such iconic bands as Public Enemy, Cypress Hill and Rage Against the Machine. So, it should be no surprise that the Prophets of Rage debut album is a muscular sonic push back against the so-called alt-right and the entrenched injustices of the American Way.“Living on the 110”, “Strength in Numbers” and “Fired a Shot” all rail against western capitalism and they’re quite a heady brew Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Hot on the heels of his furiously original sci-fi noir, Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich cranked out this film adaptation of Clifford Odets’s tortured play about tortured artists in venal Hollywood. The Big Knife doesn’t wholly escape its stage origins – most of the action takes place in one Bel Air living room – but Aldrich makes the most of his camera angles and wrings considerable dynamic energy from his cast.Jack Palance plays Charlie Castle, a charismatic movie star living a life of luxury. We meet him boxing in the back yard of his palatial Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The one-time drummer of the Beatles is all about peace and love. Even when he takes to YouTube to tell his fans to stop writing to him, he does so with peace and love. All you need, it would appear, is love. And peace. But mainly love – and more of it, if at all possible. For his 19th studio album, Ringo Starr's original intention had been to make a country album in Nashville. Judging by “So Wrong For So Long” and “Don’t Pass Me By” – the only country numbers here – everyone dodged a bullet when he decided to invite a few mates round for a knees-up instead. Of course, being a former Read more ...
Russ Coffey
When, in 2006, Yusuf announced his return to music, speculation was rife as to how he might now sound. At first, the music felt gentle and touchy-feely. Then came 2014's Tell 'Em I'm Gone – a strutting, blues record full of attitude. More exciting than either of these new musical directions, though, were those odd moments where Yusuf offered a glimpse of his old, wistful self. It gave hope that one day he might record another full-on Cat Stevens album. And here it is.The Laughing Apple consists of three new songs and eight re-interpretations of forgotten tracks from the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gary Numan famously has a devoted fanbase. For this album he had a live video feed that allowed them, for a small fee, to watch him in the studio, working on it from conception to completion. Unlike any of his peers from the post-punk years, he draws new young fans to his contemporary releases. His 21st century career has seen him growing more and more gothic, heading far into industrial-electronic Nine Inch Nails territory, albeit with his own twist. He is many leagues away from the pristine synth-pop that made his name circa 1979-81.Numan’s last few albums have grown progressively more and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
James Scott’s filmography is wide-ranging, including the 1982 short film A Shocking Accident, based on the Graham Greene story, which won an Academy Award the following year, and other works on social questions. But these documentaries, several supported or commissioned by the Arts Council, concentrate on the visual arts.The longest, Every Picture Tells a Story, is a 1983 biopic based on the early life of his northern Irish father, William Scott (1913-1989) who moved from Scotland to Enniskillen as a teenager, studied art in Belfast, then went on to London and a vastly successful career. The Read more ...