CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
Warpaint, the all-female four-piece band from Los Angeles, introduced themselves to the UK in 2010, with the release of their debut album, The Fool. While not the most dynamic set of tunes, there was spirit and atmosphere, and the song-writing talents of Theresa Wayman and Emily Kokal generated fans in both the music and mainstream press. The band was even nominated for the BBC’s Sound of 2011 award after “Shadows” received plenty of airplay on Radio 1.The eponymous second album takes a different tack, with many of the songs apparently being written by the whole band through jamming and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The “Good War” was so vast and intricate, its moral perspectives shift according to dozens of national points of view. 1944: The Final Defence lands us in the middle of Finland’s second battle for national survival against the Soviet Union, whose 1939 invasion had been startlingly defeated. The Finns were among the eastern nations who, caught between a rock and a hard place, then joined Nazi Germany in its 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. In June 1944, D-Day meant little to Finns as the Soviets rolled back in, battering their defenders towards a line around the village of Tali.Tali-Ihantala Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Damien Jurado last surfaced as one of Moby’s collaborators on the Innocents album. From the sound of Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son, Beck might have been a more logical musical partner. Texture-wise, Jurado’s new release sits alongside Sea Change-era Beck as well as the dense, fuggy atmosphere of his own last outing, 2012’s Maraqopa.Like that album, Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son is produced by Richard Swift. He has become integral to helping Jurado move from the lo-fi folkie he was characterised as to becoming an auteur breaching musical barriers. The songs are lyrically Read more ...
mark.kidel
Ed Harcourt – with his vulnerable tenor vocals – treads the knife-edge between melancholy and self-indulgence, romantic yearning and comfort-zone sentimentality. At his best, he delivers literate songwriting, with poetic imagery that is inspired and imaginative rather than contrived. At his weakest, the sombre colours of his emotional palette and the meandering introspection grow wearisome, and soon grate.His new mini-album, mercifully concise (at 28 minutes) in this time of digital ramblings that far exceed the useful rigours imposed by last century’s LPs, is billed as a stab at Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Small Faces: Here Comes the Nice - The Immediate YearsWhen theartsdesk last covered Small Faces’ reissues in May 2012, the review concluded “the Deluxe Editions are probably (who knows what might lurk in obscure archives?) the last word on these albums.” As anticipated and as revealed by this box set, more did indeed lurk in obscure archives. Moreover, the appearance of Here Comes the Nice calls into question just what half of those Deluxe Editions of the band’s four albums used as their sonic source materials. This new release boasts that it is “all sourced and remastered from recently Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It is almost 20 years since Mogwai emerged into the post-rock scene with their particular brand of ambient art rock. In recent years, they have also dipped into producing soundtracks for French television’s Les Revenants (which appeared in the summer of 2013, as The Returned, on Channel 4) and Douglas Gordon and Philippe Pareno’s film Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait. However, they have never strayed far from their dreamy, fuzzy (yet not necessarily mellow) and largely instrumental style. Indeed, Rave Tapes sees them continue to press on in that direction with no radical change. In fact, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Released here last month, nearly five years after it was issued in America, The Age of Kings is a five-disc glory. It comprises the BBC production of Shakespeare's eight English history plays – Richard II, both parts of Henry IV, Henry V, the three parts of Henry VI, and Richard III – which were broadcast live to three million viewers from the Riverside Studios and the then new Television Centre between April and November 1960.The series – a repository of classical Shakespeare, made in the days before fascist uniforms became a wardrobe option for Richard III and his henchmen – was Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It was almost a decade ago, when that Mercury-winning Antony and the Johnsons album was everywhere, that I learned that there was no such thing as critical consensus. The writers who raved about the album were correct in that Antony Hegarty’s voice gave me chills, but they were the chills of a morning shower with a boiler malfunction rather than of rapture. Post Tropical, the second album from James Vincent McMorrow has received similar reviews and performs in what, from the opening bars of single “Cavalier”, could almost be the same voice. But as the song, and the album, starts softly to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This debut album came out a couple of years ago in New War’s native Australia but is now receiving a full international release courtesy of All Tomorrow's Parties. It deserves it. The quartet from Melbourne give rock, indie, punk - and a whole lot else - a dramatic shake-up, notably boasting lyrics by frontman Chris Pugmire that are intriguing, literate and sometimes poetic. The band also add weight to their driven sound with keyboards and effects utilised in a way that recalls the explosion of millennial New York bands such as Interpol and Out Hud.Try these lyrics - from "Revealer" - for Read more ...
David Nice
The dishonourable parents call each other "fucking headcase" and "asshole" in front of the child rather than "nasty horrid pig" and "your beastly papa", but the essence remains of Henry James’s social comedy with queasy undertones. As transplanted by directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel from late Victorian London to contemporary New York, six-year-old Maisie – she doesn’t age, as she does in the novel, for obvious reasons – is still the shuttlecock rebounding from one careless divorcee’s racket to the other’s.Since the fragments of dissolution and dishonour are seen entirely through Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Drawing colour from country and Appalachian traditions while echoing the world-weary moods of singer-songwriters like Karen Dalton, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Townes Van Zandt, the third album from Oklahoma’s Samantha Crain doesn’t surprise musically. Kid Face constructs its world carefully and deliberately, but although like the disclosure of a private world still feels immediate.Kid Face follows up to 2010’s You (Understood) and is more sparse. It’s even more so than the album which preceded that, 2009’s Songs in the Night, recorded with her former band The Midnight Shivers. By Read more ...
peter.quinn
Musically, lyrically, dramatically, on every count this debut album from The Gloaming is exceptional. Four-fifths of the group - Clare fiddle player Martin Hayes, Chicago guitarist Dennis Cahill, the Cúil Aodha sean nós singer Iarla Ó Lionaird and Dublin-born hardanger player Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh - are all well-known figures within traditional Irish music. It's The Gloaming's fifth member, New York-based pianist (and album producer) Thomas Bartlett, whose harmonic, rhythmic and textural effects serve to paint this music on a wider, more expansive canvas.Bringing together a song and six Read more ...