CDs/DVDs
Barney Harsent
We are living, I think it’s fair to say, in troubled times. That is, if we’re living at all by the time of publication. Putting aside, for a second, the sabre-rattling of two monstrous egos, there is a need, in such dark days, of some light. Thankfully, Hard Lines, the third album from British pop act Lucky Soul shines with the force and intensity of the Sun – admittedly still not as hot as an exploding thermonuclear warhead, but let’s work with what we have.The album has been a long time coming – it’s seven years since the band’s well-received second outing, the Motown flecked A Coming of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For the last four years US pop superstar Kesha has had a huge but miserable media presence. Her bitterly fought court battle to be released from her contract with producer/alleged Svengali Dr Luke, which involved allegations of abuse and sexual assault, created reams of headlines and social media conjecture, but gave the lie to the notion that “all publicity is good publicity”. And there’s been almost no music in that interim. Now, however, minus the dollar sign that used to make up the “s” in her name, Kesha returns with all guns blazing, and the best of her third album takes the listener by Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Neil Gaiman understood the country where he’d landed as an immigrant in the Nineties by writing American Gods. His first substantial novel after his crowning comics achievement, The Sandman, mined an idea of infinite plenitude: if every immigrant since the Vikings took their gods with them to America, what happened when the worshippers assimilated, and forgot?This first season of Bryan Fuller and Michael Green’s Gaiman-overseen adaptation answers with an increasingly discursive road-trip taken by Mr Wednesday (Ian McShane as a genial but ruthless con-man, the twinkle in his eyes sometimes Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Alternative versions of familiar songs, it seems, have never been more popular: the better the composition, the more they reveal new depths. That was how fans and critics saw Richard Thompson's first volume of Acoustic Classics - a kind of unplugged retrospective of his unique song-craft. It was so well-received that Thompson has now produced a sequel, Acoustic Classics II, which casts an even wider net to include the Fairport Convention era.The album begins with "She Twists the Knife Again" from 1985, one of Thompson's most bitterly eloquent numbers. This new arrangement possesses Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
The Duke Spirit’s newest album, Sky Is Mine, comes quickly on the heels of 2016’s well-received Kin LP and Serenade EP. Produced by the band themselves, and featuring vocal contributions from the likes of Josh T. Pearson and Duke Garwood, it shows a softer and more contemplative side of The Duke Spirit. Frontwoman Liela Moss goes so far as to claim that “sonically, Sky is Mine is the most tender record [The Duke Spirit] have made”, and she’s not wrong.Ironically then, the first thing that hits you about album opener “Magenta” is the dirty and propulsive bass of Toby Butler, yet this sets the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1978, Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (L’albero deli zoccoli) is a glorious fresco that reveals, over the course of an unhurried three hours and with a pronounced documentary element that virtually eschews narrative development, 19th century Lombardy life in all its hardship and paradoxical beauty. It’s a world defined by labour on the land and Catholicism, in which the details and rituals of existence appear unchanged over centuries. Yet its opening scene, in which a priest convinces a peasant couple that their young son ( Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The term “hip hop” has become a catch-all that now includes a multitude of autotuned chart-pop rubbish which bears no relation to the genre’s origins, central tenets or recognised sonic imprint. Is Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” hip hop? Many would say so, due to it having the visual identifiers of hip hop. But it isn't really, is it? At the other end of the scale, there are artists who’ve wandered off into all manner of abstract electronica, with LA’s Low End Theory/Brainfeeder axis the most acknowledged hub for such activity. ZGTO fall into this latter category and, while some of their music Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Offa was an Anglo-Saxon king of Mercia, and now his name is attached to this outstanding collaboration between English singer and multi-instrumentalist Olivia Chaney and Portland indie band The Decemberists. The record draws on Seventies English folk rock and the songs largely comprise gems from the British tradition.The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy sings lead on two, the vicious Northumbrian broadside, “Blackleg Miner”, and a beautiful album-closing account of Lal and Mike Waterson’s “To Make You Stay”, from the (recently reissued) cult classic Bright Phoebus. But it’s Chaney’s mellifluous Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
At the start of 2016 shouty Essex bedroom musician Jordan Cardy – AKA Rat Boy – was on all those media tastemaker lists of stars about to imminently explode. Maybe he’s been in major label development hell since. His debut album’s been a long time coming and, commercially, it will possibly need that lost initial momentum. But that’s for the streaming public to decide. In the meantime, SCUM is a bouncy, youthful, over-excited Labrador of a thing, distortion-amped, loud, flicking the Vs, and generally bringing the kind of party where crockery gets smashed.The obvious comparison is Jamie T’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The story of the man (and it usually is a man) who voluntarily disappears has been told and told again. Wakefield is based on an EL Doctorow short story which is itself inspired by a short story by Hawthorne, so it’s a narrative with deep ancestral roots. In this iteration Bryan Cranston plays Howard Wakefield, a New York salaryman who, thanks to a chance train delay one evening, decides on a whim to absent himself from his own life.As this life involves marriage to Jennifer Garner, who has given him two gorgeous twin daughters, this looks like senseless squandering of a winning hand. But as Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The blossoming of modern classical into a serious commercial contender has been an unexpected recent development. Then again, it should come as no surprise that in a world raddled by stuff to hear and look at 24/7, people are turning to music that offers contemplative peace and quiet, that’s all about eyes-closed, non-verbal beauty. For it is the floaty, gentle, soothing styles that are taking off, not a resurgence in Wagnerian opera. The likes of Ludovico Einardi, Max Richter, Joep Beving, Nils Frahm and Jóhann Jóhannsson, often with connections to cinema, are offering rich, mostly keyboard- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Hope Dickson Leach’s debut dissects lives in a wintry English landscape. The catastrophic 2014 floods in the Somerset Levels are the background to the return of Clover (Game of Thrones’ Ellie Kendrick) to a farmyard home which simmers with unspoken secrets. The death of her brother, soon revealed to be a mysterious shotgun suicide, and the oppressive repression of dad Aubrey (David Troughton) are the barriers which need breaching before anyone can start to get healed.The bruised, low West Country sky looks dirty grey, staining the ground below. Country life, too often marginalised in British Read more ...