CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
The first reaction to Introducing Karl Blau is to wonder whether it’s an overlooked album from the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. It opens with a creamy smooth voice that’s close to cracking with emotion. The song being sung is a version of country singer-songwriter Tom T Hall’s “That’s How I Got to Memphis” which sounds as though it was recorded at Alabama’s FAME studios at least 45 years ago. With gently funky guitar, shuffling drums and a slightly deeper vocal register, the next track, “Six White Horses”, bears the influence of Tony Joe White.As the album progresses it becomes clear that each Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The fountainhead of creativity is at the heart of Paolo Sorrentino’s English-language follow-up to the Oscar-winning The Great Beauty. The film is set in a Swiss hotel-cum-sanatorium whose summer residents include Michael Caine as a composer who remains resolutely retired even when the Queen sends a messenger to request he perform for her, and Harvey Keitel as a fading filmmaker who still believes he has skin in the game.Also loitering on the premises are Rachel Weisz as the composer’s heartbroken daughter, whose marriage to the scriptwriter’s son has just ended, and Paul Dano as a hot Read more ...
joe.muggs
Skepta (aka Joseph Adenuga Jr) and James Blake provide a fascinating parallel as voices of the UK's “generation bass”. Both are from north London, and both have come from a grounding in the subsonic undercurrents of London's early 21st century underground genres – Skepta mainly in grime, Blake in dubstep, although each reached into the other's scene a little via early collaborations – and both have risen to international success, in particular becoming influential on the American mainstream.Skepta has attracted the patronage of premiere league US hip hop stars, particularly Drake, A$AP Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any appreciation of Scotland’s The Associates is coloured by the knowledge that Billy MacKenzie took his own life at age 39 in January 1997. More than his band’s voice, he personified their unique approach to music. Between 1979 and 1982, with collaborator Alan Rankine, he created a string of vital records which defy genre pigeonholing and define their vehicle The Associates as one of Britain’s most wilful pop acts. Rankine split from MacKenzie in 1982 at the point when they had broken into the charts. MacKenzie, despite continuing to record as The Associates, solo and in collaboration, never Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Corinne Bailey Rae’s heart may speak in whispers, but it dreams in glorious technicolour. The title of the Leeds-born songwriter’s new album is an echoey chorus line that swims among the layers of its opening track – a song with the bridge of a boiling ocean that hints at dance-pop beats, reinvention. “The Skies Will Break” was surely an album title contender in its own right, perhaps not so much for its dubious poetry as for the glorious moment of catharsis it signals – a head rush, and then a moment of serenity.Fans concerned, from that giddy opener, that new love and a six-year hiatus have Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When US singer Meghan Trainor broke through a couple of years back with the massive hit “All About That Bass”, it seemed a clear-cut case of a woman’s response to lollipop-headed, bulimic mainstream media images of her sex. No argument, right? But no, a backlash quickly arrived, saying that Trainor was anti-feminist and the song was “skinny-shaming”. What a load of bollocks. In a culture where women are consistently, ruinously, continually portrayed as pneumatic bikini babes, or with the bodies of adolescent boys, Trainor was a breath of fresh air.She still is, and Thank You’s standout Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The concept of Room as a home entertainment is freighted with irony. Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel, which she adapted for Lenny Abrahamson to direct, tells of a young woman who, abducted at 17 and held in captivity, has for five years brought up her son in the eponymous room. Their world – the world of Ma and Jack - is 121 feet square, and they have to make their own home entertainment.The film is most celebrated for the compelling performances. Brie Larson won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Bafta as a mother who like a magus recreates her narrow world from scratch. Just as remarkable is Jacob Read more ...
joe.muggs
Canadian singer/producer Jessy Lanza's records – and this one more than ever – can feel like they're mapping an alternative history, one where populist and leftfield electronic music were never separate. Two aspects dominate her sound: her crisp, clear pop vocal, and a palpable love of the sonorities of drum machines. Through every song you can hear echoing a history of electro, from its roots in Suicide, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk, on the one hand through eighties pop, new wave, Madonna, Prince and Timbaland, and on the other through the underground Detroit techno Read more ...
howard.male
When the Tuareg band Tinariwen first started to come to prominence a decade or so ago, world music purists tried to lay claim that they were purveyors of what they called "desert blues". The reason being, presumably, that the blues in their blinkered eyes was a purer, more authentic form than rock (which was what Tinariwen were really all about). But having said that, Tinariwen sound like Tanita Tikaram compared to parts of this second album from fellow Saharan desert rockers Kel Assouf (who feature Tinariwen guitarist and singer Anana Harouna). The title translates as "Surprise" and a Read more ...
mark.kidel
Tarantino’s latest bloodfest is a claustrophobic piece of cinema in which a very wild bunch, holed up in a Wyoming shack in the middle of a blizzard, confront their various pasts, recent and less so, and gradually eliminate each other in a stunningly staged series of surprises, reversals of fortunes and outbursts of homicidal frenzy.Tarantino is the master of meta-narrative, subverting genre and yet paying homage to it. This is a riveting story of the old frontier but also a meditation on the Western, not least the sub-genre that draws on the violent heritage of the Civil War, which Tarantino Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Snarky Puppy make music on their own terms. Boundary-straddling is their stock in trade, from their origins between Brooklyn and Texas, their technique comprising complex orchestration and individual improv, an expansive approach to genre that spans spiky experimental to the seediest lounge-funk, and an aesthetic that’s heavily amplified but flavoured with horn-driven acoustic sound.After a series of Family Dinner albums that flouted their eclecticism with guest appearances from world music, gospel and blues stars including Lalah Hathaway, Salif Keita and Laura Mvula, for this, their 11th Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The figures are approximate, but the Yardbirds’ first studio album has been issued on CD at least 12 separate times. With The Move, their debut album and its follow-up Shazam have each had a comparatively paltry eight outings on CD. As for vinyl editions, setting aside the UK originals in mono and stereo and contemporaneous worldwide pressings, similar quantities of reissues of the three albums have hit shops from the mid-Seventies onwards. The Move have not been afforded au courant hipster vinyl editions, but a few versions of the Yardbirds’ set have been issued over the past six or so years Read more ...