CDs/DVDs
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Loretta Lynn’s first album in over a decade begins not with a song, but a spoken word introduction: the Queen of Country Music, still hands-on in the studio at the age of 83, telling her collaborators about the first song she ever wrote. “I had to get all these songs wrote in two days, so I wrote 12 of them,” she says, that rich Appalachian twang still strong in her voice, before the album proper begins with a new version of that very same song.Lynn and her longstanding producers – daughter Patsy Lynn Russell and John Carter Cash – have been exploring her archives, re-recording both the old Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s sometimes forgotten, as retro-mania runs rampant, that the 1980s gave us some of the most horrible records ever made. Especially loathsome was a style of music made by proficient session musicians, often ex-prog-rockers, trying their hand at ballads, light R&B and jazz-funk – Asia, Sting, REO Speedwagon, Go West, Chicago, late period Level 42, Genesis and, of course, anything by Phil Collins. This was Home Counties music, bland, nauseating, white bread shite-funk for people who’d reached middle age early and enjoyed showing off their stereo. It was, essentially, music for Tories.The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Audition was released in 1999, seeing it again reveals it as neither dated or blunted by subsequent, more alarming horror films whether Japanese or otherwise. As it was then, Takashi Miike’s study of a romantic relationship gone wrong remains out there on its own. Audition is arguably ground-zero for torture porn and would go on to influence films like Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005: in which Miike made a brief appearance) but the films made in its wake have none of its subtlety or flair with shockingly juxtaposing the day-to-day and the horrifying.Audition is a landmark film, and if it Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bombus kick ass. Not “arse” – my preferred anglicised spelling – but “ass”, because this, their third album, is Rainbow Bar & Grill-friendly, hair-flayling, leather-clad riffology. They come from Sweden, not LA, but, legs planted apart, they play head-bangin’ rock’n’roll with a truly enjoyable heft. Their music begs the listener to whack up the volume, run around the room roaring, and jump off the sofa windmilling air guitar. It’s a blast. The Gothenberg foursome fall within the framework of metal but don’t have truck with the ear-frazzling shredding guitars of death metal, nor do they Read more ...
Tim Cumming
While his old friend and sometime touring companion Bob Dylan has just re-entered Capitol Studios to record a new set of standards to follow the Sinatra-inspired Shadows in the Night, Willie Nelson’s latest release for Sony Legacy focuses solely on the brothers Gershwin – he was awarded the Gershwin Prize in 2015.Nelson, for whom this territory is like a second skin, and one he wears lightly, picks out a most charming late-career foray into the gold standard of American popular song. It's the latest in a fairly long list of albums in the genre, topped by his first, 1978's Stardust. Since Read more ...
graham.rickson
Taxi Tehran fits neatly into a recent tradition of films set entirely in cars; Jim Jarmusch’s Night On Earth comes to mind, as well as Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten. Initially we’re led to believe that we’re watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary, assembled from dashboard footage shot on a cheap digital camera by director Jafar Panahi as he drives a taxi through the streets of Tehran. There’s inevitably more to it; that the various passengers’ conversations are scripted becomes quickly apparent, despite the winningly natural performances which Panahi draws from his uncredited cast.Already banned Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The second album by Russian shoegazers Pinkshinyultrablast neatly side-steps any language-barrier issues either by submerging their mono-monikered singer Lyubov’s voice into their sea of noise, or ensuring that what is heard could be wordless singing along the lines of The Swingle Singers – even though she sings in English. As it should be with music so much about texture, the sound of Pinkshinyultrablast marks them as virtuosos of the indirect.However, where they draw from is clear. As it was with their debut album, 2015’s Everything Else Matters, Cocteau Twins, Lush, Slowdive and, of course Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lizzy Mercier Descloux was an early adopter. In 1975, she travelled from her Paris home to Manhattan and saw The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television and the Richard Hell-edition Heartbreakers. Although the first issue of the New York fanzine Punk came out at the end of the year, punk rock was not yet quite codified. Nonetheless, there was a scene and something new was in the air. Descloux had to check it out and on her return to France, she co-founded the new music monthly Rock News.The new magazine was dedicated to The Velvet Underground. Iggy Pop was its first issue’s cover star. There were Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The thing about having a very distinctive voice is that it gives the audience something to latch onto. That’s all well and good, but it can also mean people find it easier to hear without listening. As the familiar tones and comfortable cadences of King Biscuit Time and former Beta Band member Steve Mason drift in, it’s easy to see how people could simply think, “Ah, another Steve Mason album.” Which it is, to be fair – but it’s also the rather wonderful result of all his former experiments.From the Beta Band – the glorious, stumbling and staggering Beta Band, with their moments of ragged Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Back in the crucible of the early Eighties when Anthrax were forged, metallurgists spoke of the Big Four. Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer sounded like War, Famine and Death. Anthrax, from the East Coast, were Pestilence. Musically, the band combined the diabolical speed of Slayer with some of the British-influenced sound of the others. Yet, as time went on, Anthrax started to escape the confines of conventional metal, experimenting with hip-hop and a kind of groove, grunge sound. So, how do they sound now?More than ever, it would seem, like an apocalypse. “For All Kings” comprises all the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Colm Tóibín’s work has always eluded the attention of filmmakers. It took Nick Hornby, a writer who knows his way along the obstacle-strewn pathway between page and screen, to effect a beautifully smooth transition of his 2009 novel Brooklyn. The DVD arrives on the back of a BAFTA for best British film. In truth, Hornby is the most British thing about it. Like Tóibín, director John Crowley and Saoirse Ronan are Irish, while the story is set in the author’s native Enniscorthy and the eponymous Brooklyn, the Ireland in exile to which his young protagonist Eilis travels in search of work in the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Wolfmother have made something of a name for themselves over the last decade or so by grafting classic 1970s hard rock moves onto stoner grooves and letting their freak flag fly. Anyone who is keen for more from the same template is going to be more than happy with Victorious, the band’s fourth long-player and first since 2014’s New Crown. Wolfmother’s line-up may have been somewhat fluid over the years, but the song more or less remains the same. Not that it’s a bad thing, as there’s always a place for lively, in-your-face heavy rock music.Nevertheless, new textures and flavours do Read more ...