CDs/DVDs
joe.muggs
Ambient is everywhere now. After a quiet (lol) 2000s, when it rather disappeared into the cracks, perhaps tarred with the sense that the more cosmic sides of the Nineties rave experience were passé, beatless music steadily rose in profile through the 2010s – aided by the rise of “post-classical”, increased accustomisation to home cinema and immersive gaming soundtracks, the wellness movement. Finally came lockdown isolation and a slew of former dance artists finding they’d always had an ambient side, and we reach the point where you can’t move for pulses, throbs and audio floatation.Formerly Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Let me start by being pretentious and self-referential, spending ages doing that rather than reviewing the album. My theory is that most male music journalists aged between 45-65, like me, don’t PROPERLY love the music of 21st century female pop stars – Gaga, Dua Lipa, Beyoncé, Britney, MØ, Kesha, whoever – for reasons that are idiomatic. In fact, possibly most males of that age, full stop (and a good few women too).They cannot get beyond the form, beyond timbre, beyond cultural notions of authenticity or lack of it connected to the innate sound, rather than the song. If the same song Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
I can’t help enjoying the continuing elevation of the jazz pianist Oscar Peterson (1925-2007) to national monument status in Canada. A park or a square here (Montreal), a boulevard there (Mississauga), a school, a concert hall, a statue, a commemorative one-dollar coin. Now Barry Avrich’s 2021 documentary Oscar Peterson: Black + White, which is being released on DVD.It tells Peterson's story well. A wide range of archival footage, notably several interviews with the pianist, has been trawled, carefully assembled, and juxtaposed with new interviews and specially commissioned Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Velvet Underground’s music is hardly heard for 45 minutes in Todd Haynes’ film on the band. The director’s debut documentary instead sinks deep into the early Sixties New York underground culture they rose from. It is as much a loving tribute to the cinema of Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol as the songs of Lou Reed and John Cale.A premonitory, violent sliver of Cale’s “Venus In Furs” viola jolts the titles, then Haynes splits screens like Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, paralleling his Sixties screen test portraits of Reed (high-strung stillness) and Cale (sensuous) with imagery signifying their Read more ...
Guy Oddy
During the late Seventies and early Eighties, Robin Dallaway was one of the prime movers behind both dada punks the Cravats and art-pop weirdos the Very Things. His new outfit, Silverlake are ploughing a distinctly different furrow though – one that has more in common with Kylie’s more sophisticated disco tunes and dreamy trip hop grooves than anything of his previous outings in fact.Drawing from a similar well as Saint Etienne, when they are at their best, Jim Rockford’s Smile brings psychedelic soul, disco and luscious poppy sounds into play and is far more concerned with encouraging hips Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Rock'n'roll rejuvenators, Eurovision winners with more of their songs streamed online than there are people in the world, the glammy young Roman rockers have opened for The Stones in Las Vegas, delivered a city-stopping sold-out show at Rome’s historic Circus Maximus and been hailed as “America’s New Favorite Rock Band,” in the Los Angeles Times. They recorded a lovely interpretation of Elvis’s late-Sixties hit “If I Can Dream” for Baz Luhrmann last summer, and their raucous, gritty, upbeat and confrontational third album, emerging from that audience explosion of the past year or two, is a Read more ...
joe.muggs
Despite the silly name, the pigtails, the propensity for cutesy posing with ice cream and candy, and of course the title Bubblegum all playing with ingenue tropes, Biig Piig – or Jessica Smyth – is a serious proposition. Irish born, partly Spanish raised, now resident in both London and LA, she’s been in the public eye since her songs started clocking up millions of streams in her late teens, and she seems to have quite a good grasp of where she’s going.Linking with Lava La Rue’s NiNE8 multimedia collective, she’s taken her own sweet time in finding her voice and identity and is only now, at Read more ...
mark.kidel
John Cale has always walked a cutting-edge. At 80, he is still making music that stretches the mind. He is accompanied on his most recent album by a number of talented and original ground-breakers from both sides of the pond – from the eccentric and pure voice of Natalie Mering (aka Weyes Blood) to the Stockhausen-flavoured explorations of Actress, the psychedelic anarchy of Animal Collective to the avant-pop sweetness of Tei Shi.Cale was one of the founders of The Velvet Underground, but he soon established himself as an independent force on the fertile fringes of classically-tinged rock, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Quentin Tarantino’s is the first voice you hear in Reservoir Dogs (1992), riffing on Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”. The gang of fellow robbers we see gathered round his character all talk like versions of the obsessive ex-video store clerk at times, rapping pop culture opinion and relishing pungent language.Soon Steven Wright’s doleful DJ is cueing a Seventies song, the gang leave their diner meeting in immediately iconic slow-motion and, after a fade to credits black, we hear Mr Orange (Tim Roth) scream before we see his shirt soaked in blood, supported by Mr White (Harvey Keitel) as they Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After a few listens, the second album from Evan Uschenko’s musical alter-ego Ghost Woman increasingly resembles something which could have emerged from the early Eighties Los Angeles scene dubbed the "Paisley Underground". However, this does not seem to be what Canada’s Uschenko is aiming for.The promotional text for Anne, If on the label’s website is peppered with different references: the harmonies of Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Nuggets compilation, a 12-string guitar evoking The Byrds, Love, and Jefferson Airplane, Safe As Milk-era Captain Beefheart, Shel Talmy's Sixties productions for Read more ...
Cheri Amour
As second-wave feminism vouched in the late 1960s, the personal is political. For Billy Nomates, the moniker of Sleaford Mods-approved musician Tor Maries, that sentiment is rife.Entrenched in her eponymously titled debut in 2020, the songwriter tapped into flailing societal structures, dead-end jobs in dead-end towns and the dichotomy of the Fat White Man. Despite touching on such evocative and self-assured issues, Billy Nomates came to being after a period of intense instability.Leaving the West Country with a relationship and a job in tow, Maries set up her seemingly picture-perfect life Read more ...
Guy Oddy
What do power-poppers do when they get older and return to the fray after an eight-year lay-off? If they’re the Subways, they recruit a new drummer, invest in a synthesiser and add some alt-rock sounds to their repertoire.That said, plenty else has also been going on with the Subways during their hiatus. In addition to Camille Phillips replacing original drummer, Josh Morgan, lead vocalist and guitarist, Billy Lunn has studied for an English degree at Cambridge University, embraced his bisexuality and had to deal with various personal mental health issues – never mind having to negotiate the Read more ...