CDs/DVDs
joe.muggs
Aside from the title track, there are pieces here called “Febrile,” “Red Sex,” “Drowned in Water and Light,” “Kin to Coal.” You might not be surprised to learn, then, that this is not a set of jaunty singalongs. But neither is it the techno the young Bristol producer has become known for, either. If you wanted the point hammered home that this isn't an easily accessible record, the sub-two-minute opener “Febrile” appears to be an improvised jam between death metal drummer, road drill and police siren, punctuated with long silences, while the following instrumental “Red Sex” is a seasick Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The story is a familiar one: four lads rattling through three-minute garage rock songs full of sweary, lovelorn couplets. With the exception of the name (a tribute, apparently, to a busker that frontman Van McCann met as a child) there’s little to set Llandudno four-piece Catfish and the Bottlemen apart on paper - but there’s something about their debut album that makes me smile. Clocking in at just under 40 minutes, making it the perfect length for my walk home from work, The Balcony is the aural equivalent of orange squash: drunk too often it tastes cheap and a little bit sickly, but Read more ...
mark.kidel
Tricky has consistently displayed the genius of the self-taught DIY music magician and his latest album, a varied collection of sounds sombre, mysterious, melancholy and ceaselessly surprising, proves his continued worth as one of the most creative of the ground-breaking musicians who emerged from Bristol in the 1990s.In giving the album his real name, “Adrian Thaws”, he once again proclaims his mixed-raced roots, the Knowle West boy who turned his wounds – the loss of his poet mother when he was a young child, asthma and eczema so serious he was often kept away from school – into a source of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Dream Your Life Away is the debut album from Vance Joy, a pop-folkie whose style suggests Ed Sheeran without the cloying niceness. These songs of young love and of a young man spreading his wings are pretty much created out of little more than vocals and an acoustic guitar. There is occasional support from other musicians, but this is understated and the rolling groove that characterises much of Dream Your Life Away is pretty much just Joy singing and strumming along.Most of the first half of the album is mellow and laid-back but still manages to swing from time to time. The previously Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I suspect that, a good few years after a dodgy couple of albums, Ryan Adams has reached a stage in his career where they’re all going to be dubbed a return to form. I seem to remember writing something similar about 2011’s Ashes and Fire – but here we are, three years on, and I couldn’t tell you the last time I listened to it (I should probably mention that I’m writing this not just as a critic, but as somebody with his artwork tattooed on my arm).There are a few things about Ryan Adams – the album, not the man – that make the story. Firstly there’s that self-titled thing, which will always Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Calypso CrazeIn 1956, calypso battled it out with rock ’n’ roll to become America’s hottest musical craze. As the year ended, newspaper reports quoted pundits predicting it would wipe Elvis and his like out. One such was Reverend Norman O’Connor, a “Catholic chaplain at Boston University and a jazz authority”, who said “rock ’n’ roll is on the way out.” Showbiz trade mag Variety concurred in December, proclaiming calypso “the exterminator of rock ’n’ roll” and “the hot trend.” They seemed to have a point. Pop’s first million selling album became Harry Belafonte’s Calypso, Read more ...
joe.muggs
A fleetingly interesting exercise with this album is to try and imagine it as an instrumental record. Would it pass muster for its high production values and neat fusions of Celtic folk, bluegrass, West African sounds, blues, prog, some U2 widescreen action and a little bit of Nineties mainstream electronica? Or would it just seem like glib, WOMAD-tastic fusion, or perhaps the sort of thing that successful session musicians might fling together to soundtrack a high-class travel documentary?There's no question it's exquisitely mixed and structured, and there are certain instrumental breaks, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bilko doesn’t date. The 143 episodes here are as deathless as Fawlty Towers’ 12, but occupy a very different place at the sitcom’s peak. When writer-producer Nat Hiken put Phil Silvers’ inveterate gambler and conman in charge of a motley platoon in the peacetime backwater of Fort Baxter, Kansas in 1955, it was a New York Jewish comic partnership as happy as S.J. Perelman’s with the Marx Brothers. Hiken ensured his series was shot in New York, where he knew Silvers from card games, to keep a crackling energy unavailable in Hollywood studios.Its original title, You’ll Never Get Rich, was Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Karen O’s first solo outing is an intimate confessional full of short, lo-fi, angst filled songs which mark a period in her life when she “wasn’t sure I’d ever fall in love again.” Recorded in private over 2006-2007 after a break-up with Spike Jonze the year previously, the album leaves the listener to ponder not only her mind-set at that time but the reasoning for making this heartfelt debut available now. Released under Julian Casablanca’s label Cult, and accompanied by a tour of small gigs, the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs' extraordinary front woman is currently showing no signs of despair. Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Blue Ruin, the American thriller which won the coveted FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes last year, will amaze. It stars actors you don’t know, made by a director you don’t know yet Blue Ruin is proof of life beyond Hollywood: this is a tremendous independent film. We’re not talking something shot through an iPhone with one location. We’re talking an entertaining, incredibly smart and deftly-made story with heart, a message and memorable characters and scenes. Clue: when the cinematography, script, acting and direction are mesmerizing, you’ve got a winner.Macon Blair is Dwight, a long-haired vagrant Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The swamp, all grime and alligators, is not somewhere most jazz or rock fans will expect to spend much time, a soggy Glastonbury aside, and it’s a puzzling title for a work of reflective delicacy and sympathetic instrumental colouring. Partisans have now been playing together for 18 years, and this album, their fifth (a leisurely work-rate indicative mainly of how busy the players are elsewhere) is a sensitive tonal portrait and quiet trove of electronic loveliness. The sweetness of Robson’s guitar and Thad Kelly’s bass, singing and growly, is layered with Siegel’s reeds, from piping soprano Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Five albums down, and it seems that The Pierces are yet to stop dressing up their music in different, albeit recognisable, clothes. If 2011’s You & I was the big pop album that with any justice would have made Allison and Catherine household names, then its follow-up finds them going full Stevie Nicks. The sisters have made much in interviews of enlisting the help of a shaman and the hallucinogenic tea ayahuasca to get them in touch with their “spiritual” sides before recording Creation – and certainly these compositions make for a heady brew, even if the basic premise of the musings Read more ...