CDs/DVDs
Tim Cumming
It’s been a while since Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood sat down together at the Hackney Empire to introduce their first album of new songs in 18 years, and their single, “Angry”, is now approaching 20 million views on YouTube.The album is released this Friday, and a raft of four- and five-star reviews are already in: after a week of listening to a record company stream, they are on the money. Hackney Diamonds is 45 concentrated minutes of peak-level Rolling Stones, a bravura performance benefiting from the level of focus and detail the band, under the producer’s baton of Andrew Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When ABBA split in 1982, Agnetha Fältskog went on to a solo career that was mostly overshadowed by the titanic popularity of her former band. By the 21st century ABBA’s status in pop, especially with the Mamma Mia phenomenon, had become iconic.They were as big as it’s possible to be, now cemented by the continuing success of the holographic Voyage show in London. Fältskog also finally achieved widescale solo recognition and Top 10 chart placings across the world with 2004’s My Colouring Book, an album of covers, and its successor, 2013’s A. Her new album, A+ is a reimagining of the latter Read more ...
mark.kidel
Nitin Sawhney never fails to produce albums that draw on the talent of his brilliant friends, touch on issues of current urgency, and bridge musical styles with great deftness and in a way that avoids the frequent artifice of fusion.Perhaps more than any other British artist, Sawhney has managed to celebrate both diversity and identity, qualities that have nourished the culture of this island nation for many centuries. Following on widely acclaimed albums – including Beyond Skin (1999), London Underground (2008), Immigrants (2022) – that have built on his infallible instinct for Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
You may have heard that Mike Skinner’s made a film. He’s certainly done the rounds, press-wise, so you’d be hard pushed to have missed it. You have to admire the man’s tenacity. When the money to make a feature film didn’t surface, he decided to fund it himself. And direct, produce, write, edit, score and star in it, too. Financing it himself gave him complete independence – which is probably why its a noir murder mystery following the life of a DJ. Interestingly, a large chunk of that money came from writing music for the Inbetweeners movie. Which seems appropriate – it’s hard to imagine Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Il Viaggio is a form of soundtrack. Its lyrics, music and soundscapes are created in response to the journey referenced in the title. Though born and raised in Belgium, Melanie De Biasio’s paternal grandfather was Italian. After the Europalia arts festival contacted her to see if she would create a work on its chosen theme of “Trains & Tracks” she chose to explore her roots. This took her to Abruzzo, in central eastern Italy – where Il Viaggio was born.The resultant album arrives six years after its predecessor, 2017’s Lillies. Like that goth-flavoured outing, it’s a long way from her Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Movie Blu-rays and DVDs brim with superficially engaging extras that frequently fail to illuminate the main attraction. The opposite is true of Cry, the Beloved Country, which has been restored in 4K and newly released in StudioCanal’s Vintage Classics series of British films. The disc’s extras have been carefully chosen to contextualise Zoltán Korda’s potent 1951 drama as the first film to condemn apartheid.The white activist Alan Paton’s bestselling novel, published in Britain and the United States in February 1948, warned the world about the clampdown looming for the black majority in Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The artist formerly known as Afterlight returns with her first self-titled album, a collection of songs which “delves into the cracks between the paving slabs of life's big themes” and which explores “the understanding that comes with experience”."Nice Normal Woman", the track, which opens the album, was inspired by a quote from Bette Davis in All About Eve (“write me one about a nice normal woman who just shoots her husband”) and it arrives in the world with an 800-frame stop-motion video attached, filmed by Gilmour in her bedroom.Having chronicled her escape from a toxic relationship in Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Drake’s new album is his fourth full-length in under two years. While his peers like Kendrick Lamar and J Cole disappear for years at a time, Drake seems to be afraid that leaving the limelight means he will evaporate into thin air. As a result, For All the Dogs arrives with a side-order of Drake fatigue, which isn’t ideal considering the album is 23 songs and an hour and half long.For All the Dogs is filled with moody R&B, trendy rap and a stacked roster of guests. Like recent Drake albums it is terminally bloated and coloured by Drake’s cagey worldview and distrust of women. Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Prior to the release of Goat’s last album, Oh Death, it had been six years since our favourite Scandi shamen and women had treated us to any new tunes. Less than 12 months later, however, Goatman and his band of hipsters and tripsters are back with a fine serving of Medicine that will elevate the soul of anyone who cares to tune in.Possibly influenced by their pagan folk soundtrack for Shane Meadow’s The Gallows Pole TV series, however, Goat’s new tunes see them move some of their wide-ranging global influences into the background, taking in a considerably more north European sound for their Read more ...
peter.quinn
With beautiful playing from the Norwegian Radio Orchestra conducted by Ingar Berby, sumptuous arrangements which hint at everything from the great jazz orchestrator Gil Evans to the haunting "night music" of Béla Bartók, and – at its heart – the wonderfully singing quality of Nils Petter Molvær’s trumpet playing, these symphonic reimaginings present a remarkable conspectus of the Norwegian musician’s work.The trilling strings and ominous bass drum thuds of album opener “Maja” (otherwise known as “Little Indian” from Molvær’s 2002 album NP3) serve as an arresting prelude before the crystalline Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Canberra band Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers continue the recent tradition of Australian indie bands having unwieldy comedy names. However, their music, as laid out on their debut album, has higher aspirations, bridging their scuzzy punkin’ roots and a larger sound, loosely somewhere between The Breeders and Foo Fighters, yet very much their own thing.Sometimes they sail too far into mainstream rock for this writer but, overall, they win the day. The best of I Love You tends towards either catchy new wavey power pop guitar or snarling, sneering numbers vehemently raging at mistreatment in Read more ...
mark.kidel
Targets (1968), Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature is generally regarded as a great film. And yet, it came out of a mixture of false starts and opportunism. Could it be that its unique quality, the elements which make it stand out in the history of cinema, owed as much as anything else to the randomness that accompanied the movie’s creation?Bodganovich, a cinephile and writer for the magazine Esquire, had come to the attention of Roger Corman, the genius of low-budget horror and sleaze. After assisting him on a feature, Corman asked the eager young man to make a film with Boris Karloff, who Read more ...