CDs/DVDs
Graham Fuller
Terence Davies’s Sunset Song, adapted by him from the first part of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Hardyesque A Scots Quair Trilogy (1932-34), is a farming family tragedy that morphs into the story of the young heroine’s doomed marriage during World War I. Lambently photographed by Michael McDonough, it succeeds as a paean to the spiritual tug exerted on Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn) by the landscape of the Mearns in north-east Scotland. Yet by Davies’s impeccable standards, the film is oddly disjointed and underwhelming.Like his masterful Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), it evokes its Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
PJ Harvey's ninth album is one with a message. I know this because it marks the first time that my pre-release copy of an album has come with a lyric booklet, despite the fact that it is perhaps the least oblique thing that the Dorset-born songwriter has ever recorded. Inspired by a series of trips to Washington, Kosovo and Afghanistan, and partly written in full public view as part of an art installation at Somerset House in the summer of 2015, The Hope Six Demolition Project is effectively a travelogue set to music: its lyrics, a series of postcards scrawled from a taxicab window; its music Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Hawkwind are one of rock's stranger institutions. Enigmatic too – despite inventing 'space rock', and teaching Lemmy his trade, they're still essentially known just for singing "Silver Machine". Yet search within their canon and you'll find real depth. Indeed, at their best Hawkwind's cosmic musings have the sense of humanity and society worthy of some futuristic folk music. You could call them prog rock's Fairport Convention.The Machine Stops looks at the tribulations of society, via an E. M. Forster short story with a very H.G. Wells theme. The story concerns a people Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Before the resurgence in vinyl, and the resultant pursuit of audiophile perfection on pointlessly expensive sound systems, was the musician’s fetish for vintage equipment and analogue synths. Live, this makes sense: sounds go direct into the audience's ear, air its only conduit. After the painstaking pathway that most recorded music has to take – downloaded onto a phone and compressed to flux through headphones made entirely out of snidely weighted plastic reputations – you wonder why they’d bother. Generator, the second album from Berlin-based producer Rodion, shows exactly why, boasting a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Around the turn of the century, when Brit Pop was infatuated with a Beatles-esque plodding beat, the Dandy Warhols were putting out some fine slabs of Glam-infused Garage Rock that often bothered the charts with a substantial dash of decadent swagger. A couple of decades on, and four years since the stripped-back This Machine, they’re back with a heady mix of driving electronics, power pop hooks, trippy psychedelia and garage rock attitude which suggests that the middle of the road is a long way off.Album number ten, Distortland may be full of many of the things that have made the Dandy Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The most radical of the directors who forged a “cinema of resistance” at the BBC in the 1960s, Peter Watkins completed two groundbreaking docudramas there – Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965) – before the suppression of the second prompted his eventual exile to countries more receptive to his internationalist films and his anti-capitalistic approach to financing and making them.Half a century hasn’t dimmed the seismic power of this pacifist diptych, now handsomely restored and packed with supplements by the British Film Institute for its release in a dual format edition. The antithesis Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s been a lifetime in pop music since the Last Shadow Puppets’ debut album, The Age of the Understatement, went straight to number one in the UK charts. With Alex Turner taking a break from his day job with Arctic Monkeys, however, he’s finally got back together with ex-Rascals’ mainman, Miles Kane, to resurrect their side project for album number two. Cinematic orchestral beat pop may still be the order of the day on Everything You’ve Come To Expect, but there have been changes, and the melodramatic Scott Walker and David Bowie-like flourishes have been turned down somewhat to allow plenty Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Is greatness there from day one, does it evolve or suddenly strike? Do artists – in any discipline – develop in steps or arrive fully-formed? How does the quotidian become exceptional? With the new triple-CD set Highlife-Jazz and Afro-Soul (1963-1969), the man who would be dubbed the Black President has what amounts to 39 musical baby pictures made easily available for the first time. As to how this release answers any of these questions, it is a question of degree.First issued in Japan in 2005, Highlife-Jazz and Afro-Soul (1963-1969) was a pioneering collection of the bulk of Fela Kuti’s pre Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's an area in American music that is oddly under-reported given its scale. Somewhere between the garish mania of mainstream dance music, “EDM”, and the cool cachet of more underground sounds is a kind of “festival electronica”: very musical, often subtle and sophisticated, acts detached from nightclubs and often far more visible on the live circuit, where lasers and LED displays create epic backdrops for their sound. Acts like Tycho, Pretty Lights, Ratatat and British export Bonobo have, mostly through hard touring, built highly lucrative careers, and increasingly form a layer within the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Never ever have I felt so… nostalgic for the late 90s. While memories of platform jelly shoes, silver eyeshadow and purple all-in-ones mostly have me cringing, there’s no denying that the ultimate coolest thing about that generation was "Pure Shores". And now, despite the tabloid mayhem of the band’s first split in the early Noughties, All Saints are back, with a vengeance.I mean that literally – there’s a lot of fighting talk in Red Flag. There’s a nod to the high-profile, relationship-fuelled tabloid fodder that became the band’s downfall, but (dare I say it) there’s a smidgen of girl power Read more ...
graham.rickson
The earliest film collected here, 1963’s Elgar, stands up incredibly well. Some of its quirks were imposed from above: fledgling director Ken Russell was initially employed by the BBC’s Talks Department and was discouraged from using actors in his documentaries. So Elgar is packed full of reconstructions of scenes from the composer’s life, though the actors never speak and there are no close ups.All of which adds to the realism, aided by Huw Wheldon’s sonorous narration of Russell’s script. The images are glorious: the recurring scenes of Elgar traversing the Malvern Hills accompanied by his Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“7 Years” is one of the biggest hits of 2016, spending five weeks at the top of the UK charts, with plays on streaming sites running into the hundreds of millions. It’s by 27 year old Danish singer-songwriter and former successful child actor Lukas Graham Forchammer and his eponymous band. They have been pop stars in their homeland for half a decade and this album – now boosted with a couple of previous Danish hits – was a chart-topper there last year. The appeal, it seems, is Forchammer’s guileless lyrical honesty, backed with a Clearasil-spotless, squeaky clean stadium pop pitched somewhere Read more ...