CDs/DVDs
mark.kidel
Dreadzone make feelgood music, but with serious intent and a historical dimension. Dreadzone‘s new album reaches back, in a style they have made their own, to the origins of Reggae – with the opening track “Rootsman” that lilts forward appealingly from a sample of Grounation’s African-tinged drumming.The simplicity of the music’s origins in Jamaica and beyond gives way to the gently undulating pulse of the music, with spacey production, filled with the echoes of dub and a use of reverb that opens the mind and lifts the heart.The toasting on “Mountain” is reminiscent of Massive Attack, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Ryan Adams’s 16th solo album since he debuted in 2000 with Heartbreaker reveals many influences, including AC/DC and the Electric Light Orchestra - notably on the opening track and single, “Do You Still Love Me”, where keyboards are to the fore. But mostly Adams is channelling The Boss.Bruce Springsteen seems everywhere evident – the vocal style, the keening harmonica breaks, the big echo and much besides: "Haunted House", with its pounding drum, acoustic guitar and a vocal line that coils around just a few notes; "Shiver and Shake", its vocal almost spoken over two or three gently Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Mixing up your yakuzas and your triads can be a bloody business, as Takashi Miike’s films show in the goriest detail. The title of the earliest work in his “Black Society” trilogy, Shinjuku Triad Society from 1995, says it all – a Chinese criminal gang at the heart of Tokyo’s Kabuki-cho nightlife district, the traditional turf of Japan’s own deeply entrenched native criminal element. But Miike’s work – at its best when it’s most unsettling, and that's something that goes beyond the sometimes cringingly unforgettable violence – is about bringing all sorts of other different things Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
British bass music has played a gigantic role in contemporary pop. Twenty years ago it nearly crossed over when the major labels wrongly assumed that, post-Goldie, drum & bass was going to explode commercially. It didn’t and the whole scene disappeared back underground, mutating, breeding, moving forwards. Drum & bass begat speed garage which begat 2-step/UK garage (giving us Craig David!) which begat grime which begat dubstep, all of which begat monster hits by everyone from Justin Bieber to Jax Jones.But far ahead of the Top 10-chasers, there have always been stranger, more Read more ...
mark.kidel
For a young singer like Joel Culpepper, blessed with a fine set of vocal chords and remarkable skill in using them, there is a wellspring of black singing tradition to draw from – from gospel and blues through to soul and contemporary R&B. There are echoes in his sensual and seductive singing of Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Prince and many others. Like many African- American or Afro-Caribbean talents before him, and in tune with ancient African tradition, he pays homage to his teachers and yet manages at times to strike out into new territory all of his own.The production, in the assured Read more ...
graham.rickson
Eureka’s restored print of Charles Vidor’s 1944 musical Cover Girl looks and sounds astonishingly vivid, especially when watched on Blu-ray. Would that everything were so simple: despite a starry creative team, the film makes for frustrating viewing. Doubly so when you consider that this was one of Jerome Kern’s final scores, with lyrics provided by Ira Gershwin which are the film’s one constant pleasure: couplets like “Because of Axis trickery/My coffee now is chicory” are peerless, especially when delivered in brash style by a young Phil Silvers.Gene Kelly plays Danny McGuire, injured in Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Thievery Corporation are veterans of the mid-'90s chill-out scene from well before the point when it disappointingly descended into a soporific dirge for middle-class dinner parties. Laying down Brazilian sounds and laid-back beats, they brought a broader international dimension to the tunes favoured by our weed-smoking brethren while avoiding hippy self-indulgence. The Temple Of I and I, however, sees their sound take a distinctly Jamaican turn, albeit one that is more reflective of a Seventies “roots and culture” vibe than the harsher sounds that are more usual today.While the groove on The Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Tinariwen are one African band you don’t dance to. It’s not that kind of music. They emerged from refugee camps, guerrilla camps and nomadic desert camps through the Eighties and Nineties, and since reaching a global audience via The Festival of The Desert, they have released eight consistently fine albums (the recent Live in Paris is particularly good).Their music is internal, meditative, sombre, political, philosophical, poetic, and returns again and again to the long line of troubles besetting the Tuareg region of Saharan Mali, riven by Islamists – a former friend of the band ended up Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s an extraordinary story about a ordinary-seeming guy. No one can accuse the industry of promoting pretty blond teens this time. Rory Graham, the emerging blues-tinged soul star from the deep south – Sussex, of course, or the Uck Delta, perhaps – has built his reputation from the ground up, working as a carer, initially, as he developed the Rag’n’Bone Man persona.He’s now 32, but even before Rag’n’Bone Man, he learned music by doing it: rapping, MCing in jungle clubs, and singing at blues festivals his dad (who has a big collection of Muddy Waters and BB King) took him to. With a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the extras on the DVD release of The Wailing, South Korean director Na Hong-Jin says, “Every genre of film has its own strengths and weaknesses. By combining many genres you could say that I was able to build and emphasise the strengths, while diminishing the weaknesses.” And indeed, over its monumental 156 minutes, The Wailing attempts to meld comedy, an overt homage to The Exorcist, zombie movie tropes and social commentary. Unfortunately, the different stylistic elements play off against each other instead of melding into a cohesive whole, making The Wailing lack consistent tension.The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
So where’s Devlin been? Last heard of four years ago, he was hot property on the back of two critically acclaimed, commercially successful albums. He was Dagenham’s own Eminem, the only white guy in the grime crossover A-league, yet it’s peers such as Skepta, Wiley, and Wretch 32 who are now the big names. So what happened?“I’ve been away for a while,” he spits on the opening title track, “’Cause shit weren’t sweet like Tate & Lyle, I held it together with a faker’s smile.” He parted ways with “men that I thought were tight” (the new album’s not on Island, like the last two), and ended up Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Elbow fans will remember how 2014's The Take Off and Landing of Everything took the band's existing sound and twisted it a fraction. The result was a piece of work that, above all, felt powerfully uneasy. Not simply because of the personal heartache it expressed but also the impression of an entire world out of kilter. How interesting then that, now half the world feels unsettled, Elbow return with an uplifting album full of heart.Little Fictions was written around the time of Guy Garvey's marriage, and it's this sense of personal contentment that dominates the album. "You Read more ...