CDs/DVDs
Katie Colombus
All eyes are on Daughter to see whether the indie-folk trio’s second album Not To Disappear can live up to the first. If You Leave (2013) was lauded a critical success, and the band fronted by North Londoner Elena Tonra earned a fiercely loyal following.There’s no great change in direction for their music but Not To Disappear is basically more and better. The tracks are immediately recognisable for their shadowy and intimate signature style but they are – not more mature, exactly – but kind of deeper, darker. Recorded in New York with Nicolas Vernhes (War On Drugs) the new album has Read more ...
mark.kidel
Lucinda Williams steers just the right side of mannered, with a voice that’s raw and bruised, and a slurring delivery that would do a barstool drunk proud. She is the deep South incarnate, evoking with resigned melancholia the mood of the swamps from her native Louisiana.Once again, in the latest of her very regular albums, she visits hurt, loss, love and death. She moves with great ease from the almost romantic feel of “Place in Your Heart” to the bitterness of “If Love Could Kill”. This is a mostly quiet album, less raucous than some of her early work – though she’s been getting Read more ...
graham.rickson
Up to 1942, British civilian deaths outnumbered those among front line troops. Keeping the home front on side was a serious business, especially when a large chunk of the population might have been reluctant to obey the strict rules and regulations imposed by a government desperate to save money and resources whilst maintaining morale. This capacious BFI anthology contains nearly 30 short films commissioned by the Ministry of Information. Nothing here is as well crafted as anything directed by Humphrey Jennings or Richard Massingham, but much still resonates in a modern age of austerity. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The waiting room is a despondent place. Wherever it is a staging post for is not bringing its occupants delight. Unsurprisingly, as it is by the perennially sombre Tindersticks, The Waiting Room is a grey-hued album which does not suggest imminent rescue from this predicament. After a brief rendition of the theme from Mutiny on the Bounty, the ensuing 10 tracks set lyrics of estrangement, loss and rootlessness to musical settings which could soundtrack a penumbral nightclub conjured by David Lynch.The album's resemblance to a soundtrack is unsurprising. Tindersticks have composed for Claire Read more ...
Jasper Rees
About a dozen years ago the publishing industry cottoned on to the sex lives of women. Memoirs in which women wrote with complete candour about their sex lives appeared in sudden profusion, from Belle de Jour's blog-turned-book and The Sex Life of Catherine M to Jane Juska’s account about what happened when she advertised in the NYRB, aged 67, for sexual partners. At the younger end of the market there was One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by a Sicilian teenager known only (at her parents’ insistence) as Melissa P. Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl feels like a late Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
All-female London quartet Savages’ debut album came raging out of the traps in 2013. It was a taut, driven dose of punk and post-punk bite, powerfully Banshee-howled by French frontwoman Jehnny Beth. Three years later, the follow-up swaps the constant tension and snap of its predecessor for something moodier and less immediate but with, if anything, an even deeper underlying fury, an emotional torment that’s marrow-deep rather than explosive.Adore Life is something of a concept album. The theme is love as pain, love as a wounding uncontrollable force, love as brutal catharsis. The opening Read more ...
Matthew Wright
As a whole, J-Sonics are fairly new to the London jazz scene, but the members of this slinky sextet, assisted by vocalist Grace Rodson, have many years’ experience between them in other projects, which means they can sound both fresh and highly polished. Their debut album is a tasty cosmopolitan medley of originals and Brazilian classics characterised by the twining of smoky brass lines from twin horns of saxophonist Matt Telfer and trumpeter Andy Davies, fretboard acrobatics from guitarist Clement Regert and the propulsive bass of Mike Flynn, all tied down by the drums of Gabor Dornyei, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Though Soft Machine were the first band to suggest Canterbury could be musically noteworthy, the appearance of Caravan’s debut album in late 1968, Kevin Ayers' post-Soft Machine solo outing two years later, and the subsequent arrivals of Gong, Matching Mole, Hatfield & the North and the solo Robert Wyatt confirmed the city had a fertile scene. It was a fluid environment where musicians from one band played with others. The mutability was captured in one of the most entangled of Pete Frame’s celebrated Rock Family Trees.And at its top: The Wilde Flowers. The band formed in 1963 and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Guadalupe Plata are a Spanish three-piece whose tunes will be a sonic treat for those who like their blues raw but with an extra dash of flavour. On their self-titled second album, spikey blues, bebop and rockabilly sounds rub up against the Moorish and Romany roots of Andalusian traditional music to produce a very special gumbo that will appeal to lovers of RL Burnside, Tav Falco, Link Wray and gutsy Latino bands like The Plugz and Tito and Tarantula. In fact, there are plenty of times on this disc when Guadalupe Plata could quite easily be deputising for the supernaturally groovy house band Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ryuichi Sakamoto must be the most low-key megastar around. He came to prominence with the witty electro of Yellow Magic Orchestra in the late 1970s, then with some era-defining soundtracks like Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and The Last Emperor in the 1980s. Latterly, though, his work has been quite extraordinarily subdued and experimental – collaborations with far-leftfield glitch, electronica and ambient luminaries like Christian Fennesz, Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto, Sachiko M and Taylor Deupree – yet interest in him remains so great that when I published a short interview with him and Read more ...
mark.kidel
Andrew Haigh’s portrait of a marriage on the rocks has plenty of style, and a near-funereal pace suffused with the decay that gnaws away at long-term relationships. He has also elicited brilliant performances from Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay. And yet, there is something missing, as if the characters were speaking their lines rather than living them.The story is simple enough: the film follows Kate and Geoff, as they prepare for their 45th wedding anniversary. At the start of the week, Geoff hears that the body of his life’s love, Katya, as been discovered in the Alps, frozen in the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This album is a gorgeous New Year surprise. Much of it is a delicious investigation of old-fashioned pre-rock songwriting, but done from the heart rather than for kitsch kicks. Sometimes this means it wanders into easy listening which, after all, was originally just swing generation musicians continuing in their own sweet way long after the world had followed The Beatles instead. Then again, there’s also something of The Beatles here too – or at least their production mastermind George Martin – in the orchestral pomp of songs such as the confessional “What’s a Man To Do?” and the “I Am the Read more ...