CDs/DVDs
Bernadette McNulty
Justin Vernon hasn’t put an album out under the name Bon Iver for five years but you wouldn’t necessarily have noticed. Falsetto-strained, bearded, lumber-jack shirted folk introspection seems to have spread through music like Japanese knotweed, its aesthetic lingering over everyone from Mumford and Sons to the neo-soul school of Frank Ocean and even Drake. Plus, Vernon has hardly disappeared from sight, keeping up a steady work rate producing the Watford sister-act The Staves’ last album, and co-writing tracks on recent records with Ocean, James Blake and most infamously Kanye West, the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Craig David’s comeback has been astonishing. Partly this is due to the reason his career stalled in the first place. Lampooning him was, famously, the core element of Channel 4 comedy show Bo’ Selecta!. That programme and his career wound down around the same time. Little did anyone realise that the affectionate memories of a generation who quoted Bo’ Selecta! in the school playground would eventually combine - in a very 21st century entanglement of irony and real enjoyment - with interest from longer-in-the-tooth millennial garage fans. Together, they were champing at the bit to welcome him Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There’s a doctor on Lampedusa who has nightmares about the corpses the sea brings to his island: the women who give birth on sinking boats with umbilical cords left uncut, the diesel-poisoned skins, and those left to dehydrate and rot in holds. Perhaps 400,000 refugees have arrived at this Italian outpost nearer to Libya than Sicily, perhaps 15,000 dying. Gianfranco Rosi’s Berlin Golden Bear-winning documentary closely observes both Lampedusa’s enduring seafaring culture, and the death and disaster crashing into it from neighbouring cataclysms.Rosi wrong-foots expectations by intercutting the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Super Furry Animals front man Gruff Rhys is a quietly prolific talent. Every few years or so, there’ll be another album, complete with the kind of thought-through concept that gives lift to his literate and expressive story songs and colours them with context.“Literate” is word very much at the centre of his latest project, a soundtrack to the 2014 film Set Fire to the Stars, which details Dylan Thomas’s time in New York in the 1950s. Recorded around the same time as Rhys’s wonderfully expansive ode to another Welsh traveler to the Americas, the explorer John Evans, American Interior, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1985, John Foxx released In Mysterious Ways: his fourth solo album since leaving Ultravox in 1979. In 1980, he had charted with “Underpass”, his first solo single. Subsequently, he charted a path where frosty, anomie-filled electropop gave way to the warmth of “Europe After the Rain” and the Beatles-inspired psychedelia of “Endlessly”. The 1983 album The Golden Section was his most straightforwardly poppy to date. Then, the patchy In Mysterious Ways and musical silence.In 1997, he re-emerged with two albums, Cathedral Oceans and Shifting City (made with Louis Gordon). From this point, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“In time, you’ll be mine,” sings Van Morrison in the opening song to his first new collection in four years. That line sets the tone for a warm bath of an album, a genial, reflective, though always finely honed stroll through the themes and styles of the last four decades. All but one of these are new songs, and the four years they have taken to write have been well spent, though we are, both musically and lyrically, looking backwards. Stylistically, it’s a kind of tribute to the genres he’s mined over the years. There’s bluesy harmonica and piano on “Going Down to Bangor”, while Read more ...
Guy Oddy
For a few years after their 2004 reformation, it looked like Pixies were going to be more than happy as a heritage act, churning out the highlights of their Eighties magnificence to enthusiastic audiences around the world. In truth, when they finally did get it together to put out their 2014 comeback album, Indie Cindy, what we got was a compilation of three EPs that was solid but not really what many had hoped for. So, it is with a great relief that their first album with new bassist Paz Leachantine, Head Carrier, sees the band finally get back in their stride and inject some serious heart Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In popular accounts of Hollywood history, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the insolent real-life first couple of Warner Bros film noirs, have traditionally overshadowed Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Paramount's fallen angels were quieter onscreen than Bogart and Bacall, but their visual harmony as slender, diminutive blond(e)s – he hard and unsentimental, she silky and insouciant – made for noir's coollest romantic partnership.Arrow Academy has now rereleased The Glass Key (1942) and The Blue Dahia (1946), the middle pair of the four thrillers that teamed Ladd and Lake, on Read more ...
Jasper Rees
John Prine was once touted, along with every other gravelly young huckster with a guitar, as the new Dylan. If this latest release is any indication, he’s more like the new George Jones. For Better, Or Worse is an anthology of classic country duets by the likes of Jones and other deities of the Grand Ole Opry. Prine has revisited them accompanied by a sorority of Nashville’s rootsiest songbirds to parry and spar in break-up songs and make-up songs.Prine did something similar with In Spite of Ourselves in 1999. This follow-up is another almanack of historical pleasures. They include George Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In 1983, on the raucous punk-a-billy number “A13, Trunk Road to the Sea”, Billy Bragg affectionately sent up the parochial nature of Britain as compared to the USA (“If you ever have to go to Shoeburyness/Take the A-road, the okay road, that’s the best”). He’s always had a thing for the wide open spaces of America that inspired the blues, country and, eventually rock’n’roll. Now, in an almost documentary fashion, his latest pays tribute to the way trains once brought a nation together, albeit very far from “Pitsea, Thundersley, Hadleigh, Leigh-on-Sea”.Shine a Light, subtitled Field Recordings Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“FW Murnau’s work is, at first glance, the most varied, even inconsistent, of the great German cineastes.” Those are the opening words of film critic David Cairns's What Will You Be Tomorrow? an extra conceived for Early Murnau: Five Films, 1921-1925, a new three-disc Blu-ray box set of the director’s early films. After watching them, it’s clear that what might seem a contentious statement is spot on.There is no expressionist horror like 1922’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens nor intense romantic drama akin to Murnau’s first American film, 1927’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Instead, Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes it seems there's nothing less progressive in life than progressive rock. That was certainly once true of Marillion; during the Eighties critics were quick to pounce on their ponderous 20-minute songs, and Fish's painful sixth-form poetry. But after Steve Hogarth's arrival the band underwent an epiphany. Their music became increasingly focussed and succinct. And soon there was only one word for it – tasteful.As such, the format of FEAR (aka Fuck Everyone and Run) may, initially, seem a backwards move. It certainly looks a lot more proggy than most of the recent material, with the Read more ...