CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
24 years since their last album, it’s pleasing to have Everything But The Girl back. That voice! They were conceived amidst post-post-punk “new pop” conceptualism, consistently made hit albums for 15 years, and only quit because they’d become bored of the naff entertainment industry circus. Happily, as only happens with a few bands who reappear after decades, Fuse does not disappoint.Also happily, it’s not the sound of a once-successful unit settling on their laurels. In the period since they were last Everything But The Girl, Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn have written compulsive books and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In Sight & Sound’s recent Greatest Films of All Time poll, Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) placed joint 48th with Ordet (1955), just ahead of The 400 Blows (1959) and The Piano (1992). Loden’s existential indie drama about an uneducated working-class Pennsylvanian woman (played by the writer-director herself) haplessly fleeing the role society allotted her might lack the intellectual heft of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which topped the poll, but it’s the more accessible and compelling film.Loden made a diffident, self-deprecating guest when Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lucy Farrell has a singular voice, contained and controlled but subtle and expressive. Since graduating from Newcastle’s folk course in the noughties she’s performed and recorded as a duo with Jonny Kearney, as one quarter of the BBC Folk Award-winning Furrow Collective, alongside further musical adventures with Carthy, Oates, Farrell & Young, and Eliza Carthy’s Wayward Band.Now she is releasing her long-awaited solo album of original songs, recorded at Wenlock Abbey in Much Wenlock, home to actress Gabrielle Drake, sister of Nick. It was his piano and guitar that were used in these Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Julia (Mia Farrow) stands jolting and shuddering, a butterfly pattern of blood on her blouse, shocking the ambulancemen on her doorstep. Her nine-year-old daughter Kate, who choked on an apple like Snow White before Julia cut her throat in a desperate tracheotomy, lies dead and unseen in the kitchen.This traumatic eruption into a quiet Kensington morning sends lingering tremors through this atmospheric, understated London ghost story. Based on the first horror novel by Peter Straub, an American genre master best-known for Ghost Story (1979), director Richard Loncraine shares Straub’s fine- Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Ahead of two spring dates in the UK, Rodrigo y Gabriela release their seventh studio album, In Between Thoughts… A New World, a beguiling set of guitar-based music that has echoes through time and hints of rumba-flamenco and occasionally the heavy metal that brought the two musicians together in their native Mexico City back in the 1990s.Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero grew up listening to jazz, rock, and flamenco but it was Metallica which brought them together at La Casa de Cultura as teenagers. They were soon spending summers playing as Tierra Acida for audiences vacationing in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
To music-lovers of the era, The Selecter are known as part of the 2-Tone ska explosion which blew up as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. The Selecter were right in the middle of that, their eponymous song on the B-side of The Specials’ debut single “Gangsters”, and their own singles, notably “On My Radio” and “Three Minute Hero”, there right at the start. What will be more surprising to most is that they’ve been almost consistently producing music since. This is their 16th studio album.Frontwoman Pauline Black has become an iconic figure in her own right, a polymath, awarded an OBE last year Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s hard to think of an album that’s simultaneously as dramatic and as restrained as this. But then Dave Okumu has always put his music and ideas out into the world in the subtlest of ways.As a guitarist he’s been omnipresent for many years, playing with Jane Birkin, Adele, King Sunny Adé, Grace Jones, Theo Parrish, 4 Hero, Matthew Herbert, Amy Winehouse, Tony Allen, Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien and many others, and as a writer/producer he’s quietly sculpted a highly influential sophisticated pop sound for the likes of VV Brown, Nilüfer Yanya, Jessie Ware and Rosie Lowe as well as his own band The Read more ...
Tom Carr
This year marks 40 years since the release of Metallica’s debut Kill ‘Em All and their heralding of a new era in metal. With countless worldwide, headlining tours, hundreds of millions albums sold – it’s understandable if some may wonder what keeps them going in this late stage of their careers.But for the band’s iconic vocalist and guitarist, James Hetfield, the years since 2016’s …Hardwired to Self-destruct have been challenging. Hetfield re-entered rehab and divorced his wife of 25 years. As a result the 11th album 72 Seasons is marked by a restless Read more ...
Tim Cumming
If you key in "Josienne Clarke" on Google, you’ll hit on the "About" section of her website, and the following declaration sets up her stall: "No label, no musical partner, no producer. Clarke is in complete control of her songwriting, arranging, producing, release schedule and musical direction."Onliness is her third solo album, following on from 2019’s In All Weather, 2021’s expansive A Small Unknowable Thing, as well as a couple of EPs, I Promised You Light, and a covers EP Now and Then. Onliness is a band album, with Clarke’s voice, guitar, piano and saxophone, backed up by her partner, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Last year’s Brad Pitt vehicle Bullet Train was an affable action comedy except in those parts – including the dreadful coda – when it was an insufferably smirky one. Freighted with more thrills, intelligence, gravitas, and social commentary, 1975’s The Bullet Train, released in a 2K restoration on a Eureka Classics Blu-ray, is the better movie.Director and co-writer Jun'ya Satô’s main character is HIkari 109, a button-nosed 0-series (first-generation) Shinkansen express travelling the 1100 km between Tokyo and Hakata, a trip that then took seven hours. Seeking a $5 million pay-off, criminals Read more ...
Guy Oddy
GoGo Penguin’s new album, Everything is Going to be OK, is so named, not because the band are in possession of an hopeful crystal ball which predicts an imminent end to the UK’s present social and economic problems or of Vladimir Putin’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine, but is a somewhat more humdrum statement about the easy listening neo-jazz trio and their future.This reflects the Manchester band’s optimism now that they have a new drummer, a new record label and, apparently, a “more sonically liberated” sound. Quite why Chris Illingworth, Nick Blacka and Jon Scott have decided to celebrate Read more ...
Cheri Amour
This is technically Leslie Feist’s first release since 2018’s Pleasure. But that doesn't mean the Canadian songwriter has been resting on her laurels.In the five-year period, she’s stepped into the role of solo parenthood by adopting her daughter Tihui, relocated to Toronto, and launched a chart-topping podcast series, Pleasure Studies. All this during a global pandemic that’s thrown the art industry into a bin fire.Accolades and adoption process aside, something else was percolating in the ether though. During the first lockdown, the musician found herself more productive than ever. As she Read more ...