CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
There’s been a sense of anticipation around Ghanaian-Australian Genesis Owusu ever since his ebullient 2021 debut album Smiling with No Teeth. He won a bunch of Arias, Australia’s Grammys, but could he break internationally? He’s toured the US with Paramore and is due to hit Europe in the Autumn, including a stop at Berghain.His new album is a match for its predecessor, in terms of eclecticism and bravado, and has a higher quantity of immediately hooky songs, so it shouldn't be a hindrance in taking things next level. Owusu has said that it was partially inspired by Waiting for Godot and Read more ...
Justine Elias
Even more than David Lynch, to whom her work has been compared, director Lucile Hadžihalilović is a strange agent between this world and the dreamworld.From her debut feature, Innocence, an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s symbolist novel about pre-adolescent girls who undergo rigorous training to prepare them for (or protect them from) the perils of womanhood, Lucile Hadžihalilović forged a daring path into the unknown. With her first English-language feature, she journeys even further. Told this time from the perspective of an adult, Earwig – based on the experimental novel by B Catling Read more ...
joe.muggs
On the face of it, this is an extremely simple record. It is big, stomping, party-monster neanderthal synth-rock.There’s no new sounds here: the structures are classic garage punk, the synthesisers’ growl and squeal sounds like some jerry-rigged setup from the 1970s, and the double drum kits and John Dwyer’s growls and yelps are downright primal. Aside from the equally retro-sounding big synth pop ballad finale “Always at Night”, it’s music to fling yourself around and get loose to, and in a sense that’s all you need to know. But the more you live with it, the more complex and perplexing Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In late 2019, BC, another age, Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi stepped on to a Southbank Centre stage and gave one of those mesmerising performances that forever stays in the memory.In the three years or so since, Giddens has been given a clutch of awards, most recently a Pulitzer for her opera Omar. A musical seeker, her career is a journey of exploration through the highways and byways of American music and its intersections. All attempts at categorisation are rejected, Giddens seeing them – largely correctly – as a marketing tool. No doubt that’s why she remains at Nonesuch, an Read more ...
Tim Cumming
A curious and rather marvellous sonic chimera manifests in the twilight of the rock gods, an album from 1977 finding its physical release 46 years after it was committed to acetate, and then abandoned, reasons unknown. Neil Young’s Chrome Dreams comprises 12 songs, including early versions of "Powderfinger" and "Like a Hurricane", among others, and was recorded at various sessions and stage shows between 1974 and 1976, including at Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch with his band Crazy Horse.Sixteen years ago, Neil Young decided to release Chrome Dreams II, while the original, unissued album Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Sky at Night” begins Radio Red. Its brooding atmosphere is shared with Saint Etienne’s “Hobart Paving.” Also, a sinuous sense of melody is at one with Todd Rundgren’s finest ballads. Melodic filigrees suggest Laura Nyro or Brighton band The Mummers. It’s some album opener.Subsequently, the Shipley-born, London-dwelling Laura Groves’ first album under her own name takes in gently soulful reflections and floating creations – mostly built around an electric piano and her multi-tracked voice – which are hard to pin down. Perhaps she’s been listening to The Carpenters, maybe Tin Drum-era Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The world might end with a whimper or an inferno, but it’s hard to imagine a day will dawn that extinguishes John Lydon’s scorn for other people’s fecklessness and idiocy. That hand-made polemic typically drives the cauterising post-punk hosannahs and disarming post-pop ditties on Public Image Limited’s 11th studio album.Maintaining the momentum of This Is PiL (2012) and What the World Needs Now (2015), also recorded with the settled lineup of Lydon, Lu Edmonds (guitar), Bruce Smith (drums), and Scott Firth (bass and keyboards), End of World opens with two barnstormers. "Penge", seemingly Read more ...
graham.rickson
Describe The English Surgeon as the story of a plucky doctor attempting to defeat a brain tumour and you’d incur the wrath of its protagonist Henry Marsh, who, in a recent interview included here as an extra, moans that he hates seeing surgeons portrayed as heroes, as, in his words, “patients are more heroic.”Marsh, a pleasingly self-deprecating neurosurgeon, can’t help saying something profound every time he opens his mouth, and you can see why documentary-maker Geoffrey Smith was drawn to him. An awful lot has changed since the film was made in 2007 and shown in BBC Four’s Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone who has seen the Hives playing live will know that they far transcend their rakish lounge lizards playing garage rock image.The Hives live are a truly life affirming experience. Their performances are full-on from beginning to end and are not unknown to feature guitarists crowd surfing on their backs while still playing and vocalist, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist brings enough energy to light a city – albeit with plenty of knowing humour. In short, The Hives are about fun and they are about exhilaration. And that’s about it.Clearly expending that kind of energy all the time can be Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I first saw Erol Josue on stage in Essaouria, Morocco, during the Gnawa Festival of 2011, when he fronted Jazz-Racine Haiti. The Haitian-born voudou priest turned R&B singer struck me as one of the most flamboyant frontmen ever to hit a stage.He cut a striking figure – half-cat, half Little Richard, all ordained prelate of the Voudou religion, into which he embarked on a long initiation into its priesthood before emigrating to Paris, and later to America, where he refashioned himself as an R&B singer in Florida before relocating to Brooklyn, New York, where he released his debut Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ruarri Joseph is not a household name but in a Sliding Doors scenario, he might have been. Scottish, raised in New Zealand, and based in Cornwall, he signed to Atlantic in 2007, and had the same management as Damien Rice and David Gray. His output was, however, too early for the folk micro-boom engendered by Mumford & Sons, and his songs weren’t whiney enough for mass 21st century tastes in singer-songwriters. He’s consistently been making music, though, and his latest proves the fires are far from out.Seven years ago, Joseph focused his attention on a new project, William The Conqueror, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Despite contemporary cultural zeitgeist fair zingin’ with reappreciation of under-celebrated female artists of previous eras, Girlschool haven’t been much shouted about.This is partly because they’re a metal band. The music media ignores most metal. But it’s also likely because Girlschool have never had much interest in actively espousing doctrinaire feminism, despite their whole career being a feminist statement. They’re generally more interested, as on their new album, in kicking up a rock’n’roll good time.The band, led by unstoppable frontwoman Kim McAuliffe, have been around the block a Read more ...