CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
“Julio Bashmore” is actually the nom-de-dancefloor of Bristolian DJ-producer Matt Walker who’s been slowly building a rep over the last five years. Outside clubland, music-lovers may have heard of him via his production on Jessie Ware’s early singles. In the nightworld, he’s better known as the purveyor of classy, propulsive house sprinkled with a smidgeon of grit. His debut album combines both these aptitudes to increasingly enjoyable effect as it progresses.It opens with the title track, which samples early Eighties easy listening R&B-disco queens The Jones Girls and, for a few songs, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Urban streets are littered with bodies. Barricades constructed from cars are ablaze. The national broadcaster works behind security suitable for a prison camp, Fearful old people live communally in underground warrens. Gangs roam cities, while in the countryside the hippy-like Planet People chant and wander, looking for sites from where they can ascend to salvation on another, mythical planet.Professor Bernard Quatermass arrives in this chaos from his Scottish retirement retreat to take part in a TV show marking the moment when Russian and American space projects become one. He sees the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
With the sad news of John Taylor’s sudden death at the age of 72 following a heart attack during a performance at the Saveurs Festival (France) earlier this month, this delightful and intimate but low-key release acquires unexpected lapidary weight. Taylor, an undisputed and much admired, though self-taught, master of contemporary jazz piano, made his name in London in the late 1960s collaborating with both mainstream (John Dankworth and Cleo Laine) and avant-garde (Kenny Wheeler and Norma Winstone, with whom he formed the influential Azimuth trio). He saw his fortunes follow that of the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
There is something strange happening in mainland Europe at the moment. Perhaps this has been spurred on by a feeling that the old certainties of the past aren’t quite so solid, but a mind-expanding psychedelia with an eye for the dance-floor and free of navel-gazing pastoral whimsy has been springing up in all kinds of unexpected places. Bands like Goat and Sonic Jesus (from Sweden and Italy respectively) have begun to make themselves heard by peddling sonic rituals that take their cues from a far bigger world than late ‘60s California, and it is out of this miasma that Portuguese threesome Read more ...
graham.rickson
Improbably described by the French archivist and critic Henri Langlois as “the greatest technician and the greatest poet of British cinema”, it seems incredible that Richard Massingham isn't better known. A doctor by training, his first shorts were made in the early 1930s as a weekend hobby, and he began shooting promotional and training films to make a living. Twenty two of them are collected here: they’re all highly watchable, the best combining rare technical skill with sardonic humour. Massingham‘s bumbling, childlike everyman stars in many of them, with a series of one-minute 1940s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The listless Complete Strangers drifts by in such a haze that it’s impossible to maintain any concentration on it after the first 10 minutes or so. When it ends, after 43 minutes and 10 songs, awareness that it’s finished only comes when whatever else has been focussed on instead comes to an end. Appropriately, for Vetiver’s mainstay Andy Cabic, it seems his attention has been elsewhere too since the release of 2011’s The Errant Charm. The Complete Strangers press release says he has been “experimenting with elaborate vegetarian cooking” and digging through San Francisco’s record shops to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tennessee Ernie Ford: Portrait of an American SingerAlthough there are different American music charts, success in one category but not another is not a marginal accomplishment. A major star on the country chart can be as popular, heavy selling and as big a live draw as one on the mainstream chart – now known as The Hot 100. But crossing over is still the dream. Taylor Swift isn’t for the country charts alone. Back in the Nineties, nor was Alan Jackson. The daddy of them all though was Tennessee Ernie Ford (1919–1991). In 1955, his single “Sixteen Tons” figured as strongly on the pop Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
That I’ve tended to lump The Maccabees in with a certain brand of mid-Noughties landfill lad-rock is my problem, not theirs; not least because the Londoners’ ambitions on their latest album are pitched more at cinéma vérité than Kasabian. The band’s self-professed “difficult” fourth album, Marks to Prove It, takes its inspiration from the nightlife of the inner city – and it’s certainly sonically ambitious, if sometimes a bit joyless in its execution.London and guitar bands go hand in hand, but the things that differentiate The Maccabees from their brethren are apparent right from Read more ...
Matthew Wright
To some critics, Joss Stone manages her career with the authenticity and conviction of her accent at the 2007 Brit Award ceremony. Yet with seven albums under her belt, a Grammy, two Brit Awards, and her own record label by the age of 28, her approach seems to be working. And for this latest, she’s stepped boldly outside her familiar soul territory. She got to know Jamaican star Damian Marley for Mick Jagger’s and Dave Stewart’s project Superheavy, and amongst the stew of flavours on display this time, reggae is the spiciest. There is a story of sorts to the album, about the break-up of Read more ...
ellin.stein
As Noah Baumbach moves into his forties, his youthful archness is becoming increasingly tempered with a wry melancholy. It adds depth and piquancy to this story of a forty-something couple trying to come to terms with the fading of youth’s infinite possibilities (“What’s the opposite of 'the world is your oyster'?”) by embracing, occasionally literally, a pair of Millennials who introduce them to cool enthusiasms such as cycling, walking in disused subway tunnels, and ayahuasca ceremonies (self-realization through shamanic ritual and copious magic mushroom-induced vomiting).Josh (Ben Stiller Read more ...
Russ Coffey
A cover of Talking Heads' “This Must Be the Place” opens Sing Into My Mouth and it's classic Iron and Wine - all Appalachian harmonies and gently plucked guitar. Like Sam Beam's earlier cover of The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” the arrangement lends the original - a slightly abstracted piece of electronic pop - fresh heart and simple emotion. But it's the only song in this collaboration with this trademark sound. What then of the other 11 tracks covered by the big-bearded singer and his friend, the Band of Horses’ front man?Oddly for two such colourful Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Owl & Mouse is a name so cutesy that even the Scottish legions of twee who bloom, decade after decade, from the ashes of Eighties indie – the Pastels, Camera Obscura, Belle & Sebastian, etc – might flinch at it. And like that movement, with its endless coy, baby-sweet reassessment of the Velvet Underground, the music of Owl & Mouse initially seems to have a glaze of guilelessness about it, a pride in naivety. Keep listening, though, sucking down the sugar-coated but eventually lovelorn lyrical themes, and this debut defies such expectations.Owl & Mouse are not from Scotland, Read more ...