CDs/DVDs
joe.muggs
Aaron Jerome has always cut his own path through British music. After a few jazzy, groovy experiments under his own name in the 00s, he came dramatically to prominence at the end of that decade as SBTRKT. He was always associated with the post-dubstep moment where the UK bass subcultures of dubstep and grime folded back into house and techno, launching big names like Hessle Audio and Disclosure – but in fact he didn’t quite fit there.There was always something a bit restless about his music. As a British Asian producer coming to fame working with a Black singer (Sampha) yet making music that Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Those kooky ex-child-actors from Long Island are back again, all flares and mullets. And they’ve got something to tempt us. What kind of musical cake might you expect to savour if you mixed a little bit Simon and Garfunkel, a soupçon of Fleet Foxes, a dash of Bread, the occasional smattering of the Everly Brothers, a twist of Beach Boys and a dollop of the Carpenters? A Lemon (Drizzle) Twigs cake, that’s what. And it’s a bit sickly sweet.Deeply unfashionable as that concoction might sound, it doesn’t quite close the cool/not-cool circle as they’d probably hoped. The trouble is that it simply Read more ...
graham.rickson
I can still (just) remember Saturday morning cinema being a thing, only because my big brother was old enough to attend weekly sessions at the local ABC and I was too young to go. He would presumably have watched several of the films in this latest BFI collection, all produced by the Children’s Film Foundation.This state institution produced 55-minute features designed for Saturday screenings from 1950 up until the late 1980s, when dwindling audiences and the popularity of Tiswas rendered it obsolete. Funding came from the Eady Levy, a 5% tax on box office receipts intended to support Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Reuniting with Russ Titelman, the producer of her eponymous 1979 debut and its follow-up 1981’s Pirates, Rickie Lee Jones approaches the great American songbook as if she was reuniting with an old flame, the thrill of it smouldering and concentrating itself in 10 elegant, soulful jazz-blues performances. These Pieces of Treasure open with the shimmering vibes of “Just in Time”, takes in a very different realisation of “Nature Boy”, a languid version of “One for My Baby” that burns the midnight oil, and closes up shop with a walk on “The Sunny Side of the Street” and “It’s All in the Game Read more ...
peter.quinn
The seed for this wonderful third album on ACT from the Vancouver-born vocalist, pianist and songwriter Laila Biali was first sown in 2013 when, in advance of a gig in the Canadian port city of Hamilton, she opened up the floor and asked fans what songs they’d like to hear her sing. Cue a deluge of requests.A trio of these suggestions – beautiful reharmonisations of Coldplay’s “Yellow” and David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”, plus a ruminative take on Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today” – ended up on Biali’s impressive 12-song, self-titled ACT debut released in 2018, for which she Read more ...
joe.muggs
“If you’re going to do it, do it well” goes a chanted refrain in the opening title track here. And it’s words Jessie Ware clearly lives by – she is not someone who has time to do anything rubbish. From featuring on the cream of post-dubstep electronic dance production circa 2010 (SBTRKT, Joker, Disclosure), through creating a gorgeously brooding Eighties flavoured hinterland on her Mercury Prize nominated debut album Devotion, all the way to creating one of the brightest rays of sunshine during the Covid weirdness of 2020 with a magical video for her Rotary Connection indebted single “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Damned could have been bigger contenders. As anyone who’s seen Wes Orshoski’s feature film biog, Don’t You Wish We Were Dead, will know, their career has been blighted by chaos, line-up changes, catastrophic business decisions and just plain bad luck. What they have never been short of is songs. From “Smash It Up” to “New Rose” to “Stranger on the Town”, their golden years were littered with corkers. Their new album, their 12th, assembles a dozen songs that, while not in the league of the aforementioned, showcase rock’n’roll songwriting chops intact, exuding melodic charm and lyrical Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s 25 years since Lonnie Liston Smith last released an album. But this a man who earned his musical stripes with Miles Davis and Pharaoh Sanders, pretty much invented Jazz Funk with the Cosmic Echoes in the 1970s and then helped to reboot hip-hop with Guru and Digable Planets in the 1990s – and so, you pretty much take what you’re given and are thankful for it when dealing with such a musical titan.JID017, an album produced in collaboration with A Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammed and film score composer Adrian Younge for their long-running label Jazz Is Dead, is a smooth mix of Read more ...
graham.rickson
The ne plus ultra of donkey films remains Robert Bresson’s heartbreaking Au hazard Balthazar (1966). Veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, premiered at last year’s Cannes Festival, is a very loose variant, Skolimowski revealing in a booklet interview with David Thompson that Balthazar “was the only film at which I really shed a tear at the end”.Watching the earlier film after seeing EO highlights how very different the two films are. Bresson’s donkey is seen very much through the eyes of the humans who variously love and abuse him, while Skolimowski shows us a confusing, often Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
From Icelandic, blómi translates as “bloom” or “flower”. Other song titles from the new album by Norway's Susanne Sundfør also look Icelandic. Actually, it’s Old Norse, which informs modern Icelandic. Although one track is recited in German the lyrics elsewhere, as per her other albums, are in English. The linguist fluidity telegraphs Blómi is not necessarily straightforward.The personal nature of the follow-up to 2017’s Music for People in Trouble is declared by its cover, a vintage photo of Sundfør with her grandfather, the academic, linguist and theologian Kjell Aartun. Blómi is dedicated Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Orb’s story is rooted in the widescreen psychedelic explorations of Pink Floyd as much as the MDMA-fuelled musical adventures of acid house. This is music to get high to, laced with all the effects, from distortion to reverb, that play with the mind and take it on a trip.There was a time tripping for self-discovery or pure fun were not proscribed. With many drugs recognised today as beneficial, and increasingly used in therapy (as they were in the 1950s),The Orb’s music, although it’s in many ways stuck in a form of retro music that takes you on a voyage into inner space, is now part of a Read more ...
joe.muggs
You’ve got to hand it to New Yorkers Easy Star All Stars: their records do what they say on the tin. This starts with a simple reggae drum rhythm fading in, couple of echo effects, a nifty fill, then in comes David Hinds of Steel Pulse singing, beautifully, “pushing through the market square / so many mothers sighing”. It’s “Five Years,” delivered straightforwardly in dub reggae style, no messing about, job done. This has been ESAS’s for knocking on two decades now – Dub Side of the Moon, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band, Radiodread and Thrillah each Read more ...