CDs/DVDs
Markie Robson-Scott
In Présages, Joanna Hogg talks about ghosts. This short film from 2023, commissioned by the Pompidou Centre, is included as one of the special features in the new BFI Blu-ray release of Hogg's intensely atmospheric The Eternal Daughter, with its virtuoso performance from Tilda Swinton in a dual role. Other special features include a Q&A with Hogg, Swinton and Francine Stock.In LA, Hogg says, where she’s shooting Présages in preparation for a film she’s planning there, the constant regeneration of the city “creates the layers of ghosts, the reverberations of the past.” And she recounts an Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Critically acclaimed in the US, singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz has won four Grammies during the course of her career. Born in Texas, spending most of her adult life in New York, her seventh album was created in her new hometown of Nashville, with an all-star cast of country-flavoured session musicians and producer Daniel Tashian.She moved to Nashville to be with her future husband, and some of the songs reflect this, but musically Jarosz holds the line with what came before, highly polished, reflective folk-Americana.It’s a matter of taste as to whether listeners find her style of production Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Since The Smile drummer Tom Skinner’s bandmates Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood are two-fifths of Radiohead, the trio is often designated a “side project”, or satellite, as if its music pales beside the mothership’s. On the strength of its second album, that’s an absurd, not to mention insulting notion.A Radiohead-trip in spirit, Wall of Eyes’ deceptively airy post-punk, electronica, and jazz melange might prove rock's ne plus ultra in 2024. Its title redolent of Big Brother and pernicious social media, the album follows 2022's A Light for Attracting Attention and most of Radiohead’s Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
Alkaline Trio’s gruesomely named 10th album, Blood, Hair, And Eyeballs, is a commentary on the modern world through the dark, poetic lens that the band have honed over their 25-year career. In both theme and sound, it captures their identity while offering new observations.The striking riff and sombre lyrics that open the album in “Hot for Preacher” set the tone for the remaining tracks. Cries of “I just cannot seem to get my rotten head around this mess” and “God has given up on me” are intertwined with solid melodies and an almost romantic smirk. For every reference to horror and despair, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Halfway through this album, “They Sold My Home to Build a Skyscraper” unlocks it. On first listen I’d been nodding along with the first few songs, enjoying how they find glimmers of more or less forlorn hope in amongst sadness and middle-aged domestic stress.I’d been enjoying, too, how the gentle, even kitsch bossa nova and psyche pop lilt of the arrangements makes them into what I like to think of as “soft music for hard times” (in fact an obsession of mine, see my playlist series now over 130 volumes strong). And then came “...Skyscraper” which pulled all of those elements together, Read more ...
Cheri Amour
When Ed Sheeran sang about a Galway girl in his radio-friendly folk number of the same name, he hadn’t met NewDad vocalist and guitarist Julia Dawson. This Galway girl doesn’t play a fiddle. She fronts an ethereal foursome re-energising a classic shoegaze sound rather than falling in line with fellow Irish acts and their hard-hitting anthems (see 6Music staples IDLES and SPRINTS). The band, completed by Cara Joshi, guitarist Sean O’Dowd and drummer Fiachra Parslow, share a closer resemblance to their experimental rocker peers Just Mustard – another group happy to swoop in on the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Wax lyrical about the contents of a British Transport Films short and you might start sounding like a Daily Mail columnist, railing about things being better back in the day. On the evidence of this 15th volume in the BFI’s anthology series, many things clearly were. Take 1969’s Multiple Aspects, which shows engineers remodelling the lines leading into Paddington Station, the work completed on time, and presumably on budget, in exactly five weeks. Though it’s disconcerting to watch the workers slaving away without hi-vis jackets or protective headgear, just inches away from passing trains, as Read more ...
Tom Carr
Since his time fronting the hardcore band Gallows, Frank Carter has established himself as a figurehead of modern British punk-rock. His current project, Frank Carter & the Rattlesnakes is among the most lively and exciting live acts in the UK.On previous albums they have regularly tackled subjects such as mental health and toxic masculinity. Their last effort – 2021’s Sticky – was a free-spirted affair, cutting loose after the containment of the lockdowns of the previous year.Having honed a streamlined, yet powerful, sound heavily tinged with punk and hardcore, combined with Carter’s Read more ...
Liz Thomson
With this her third album, Bronx-born-singer-songwriter Lizzie No promises “an apocalyptic journey from exile to liberation” – a bold promise. Halfsies is certainly an album of musical contrasts: on the one hand the freneticism of “Getaway Car” or “Lagunitas”, on the other the gentle, delicate beauty of “Mourning Dove Waltz” or “The Heartbreak Store”.From folk to rock and back again, this is a beguiling album that’s tough and tender and full of sly humour. Listening to it, you can see why the audience at last year’s Celtic Connections was won over.No grew up singing in the church choir Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Shaun Ryder is now known mostly for being Shaun Ryder, via any random TV programme that will pay him a couple of quid. In this light, his musical achievements have lost some of their shine over the decades. But, if given the chance, a couple of those Happy Mondays albums and the first Black Grape album still own the room. It’s 30 years since that first Black Grape album, It’s Great When You’re Straight… Yeah (they weren’t!), but the band's two albums since have both been, well, pretty good, actually. And the same can be said for their fourth.The band now consists of just Ryder and his old Read more ...
joe.muggs
There are musicians on the UK dance underground who doggedly identify with particular scenes and evolve with them. There are those who adapt stylistically in order to move from scene, or manage to be part of several at the same time. And then there is Londoner Danny Native aka Altered Natives. He is truly the outsider’s outsider.He’s made tracks over the years that have been played by mainstays in scenes like house, broken beat, UK funky, post-dubstep and elsewhere, but by a combination of accident and design is part of none of these things. With a distinctively cantankerous and mordant wit, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Around the time the time that he retired his Ziggy Stardust alter ego, David Bowie put out an album of covers, done in a Glam/Proto-punk style. This included tunes by the Yardbirds, the Kinks and various other Garage Rock bands that were somewhat outside the mainstream at the time.Fifty years or so later (yes, really), Soft Cell’s Marc Almond and Neal X, most famously of Sigue Sigue Sputnik, have put together a new outfit with Mat Hector and Ben Ellis of Iggy Pop’s touring band and James Beaumont, called The Loveless, and have done the same – albeit with a couple of fine original tunes for Read more ...