CDs/DVDs
Liz Thomson
Bruce is back! His 21st studio album (can it really be 50 years next year since Greetings from Asbury Park?) and his second covers album. It’s a musical world away from the first, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006), but like that collection it’s a deep dive into a genre totally different to his own – American soul classics from the 1960s and 1970s.Begun in 2020, shortly after the release of Letter to You, the world in lockdown, it’s an opportunity for the Boss to put his “badass voice” at the service of 15 of the “most beautiful songs in the American pop sound book” – songs which Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s retro and there’s retro. Some music – what you might call the Oasis tendency – simply reproduces the obvious signifiers of the past as signposts of cool. But there’s other stuff that shows deep understanding of both the technique and the spirit of what came before, that really taps into the same wellsprings that created the sound it’s replicating in the first place.Exec producer Gilles Peterson and bandleader Jean-Paul “Bluey” Maunick’s STR4TA project is well and truly in the second camp, and its beauty is in its absolute adherence to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” principle. Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Owl Service is instantly unsettling, Bridget Appleby’s credit sequence cutting between flickering candles and shadow puppets while a plaintive Welsh folksong is drowned out by the sound of a motorcycle. Alan Garner’s uncompromising 1967 fantasy novel is a spare, elegant fable told mostly through dialogue; in Philip Pullman’s words, “everything we need is there, and nothing we don’t need.”Granada TV’s eight-part 1969 adaptation boasts a screenplay by Garner and was directed and produced by Peter Plummer, the series filmed, unusually, on location in North Wales in full colour, though a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“For life to exist, we need rhythm” announces Ian Parmel on the opening track of rising UK jazz saxophonist Xhosa Cole’s sophomore album. This is a view that Xhosa has taken to heart – for while his debut album was awash with echoes of John Coltrane’s classic hard bop sounds, Ibeji comprises a collection of saxophone and percussion collaborations with seven separate drummers, which explore West African beats and musical flavours through a jazz lens.“Andy’s Shuffle” features Jason Brown’s jumpy beats twisting and turning around Cole’s riffing, Adriano Adewale brings a hip-swinging groove to “ Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Under the umbrella Maniacal Mayhem, 1951's The Strange Door has been released on Blu-ray by Eureka Classics with two scarier Boris Karloff movies, The Invisible Ray (1936) and Black Friday (1940). It features one of Karloff’s least maniacal turns – as an abused, dungeon-dwelling servant loyal to his sadistic master’s imprisoned brother (Paul Cavanagh) and beautiful niece (Sally Forrest).The Strange Door, though, is all about Charles Laughton, whose lip-smacking portrayal of the villain, Sire Alain de Maletroit, is one of his fruitiest. Few directors could rein in Laughton when he’d got Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
London’s Morton Valence are one of those bands music journos love, not that it’s done their career much good. I’ve bigged them up a few times, myself, starting at least a decade ago, but widespread critical acclaim has not added up to countrywide recognition. They are now up to album eight, still based around core duo Anne Gilpin and ex-Alabama 3 dude Robert “Hacker” Jessett, and their latest album is as consistently pin-sharp as everything else they’ve done. If only more would hear it!As ever, their default setting is doomed Leonard Cohen-meets-Raymond Carver narratives, deliberately English Read more ...
Katie Colombus
First Aid Kit have grown up and moved on. So says the cheerful conglomeration of lockdown-emergent pop sounds that makes up their fifth studio album.The record has the movement of a road trip around the USA with kitschy Americana, echoes of Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty, folk and acoustic country. It makes you feel as though you’re driving down open highways under warm starry skies with the roof down. But Palomino is actually the first album Swedish sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg have recorded in Sweden since their debut, The Big Black & The Blue 12 years ago.Written during the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Much of Amateurs is observational. “Folk Festival” ponders appearing at said event: is the place on the bill right; would fitting in be easier if the lyric’s subject were a different age? During “Market on the Sand”, it’s wondered while browsing whether there is “something here that is meant just for me”.Amateurs, by Australia’s Laura Jean Englert, feels as if it’s the result of a period of contemplation. The album begins with “Teenage Again”, an acoustic guitar-driven mid-tempo folk-rocker with a Neil Young feel. “When I was 17, my mama couldn’t handle me” are the opening lyrics. Approaching Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In 1970, the coffin of America’s new vampire count travels to his lair in the hills of LA on a pickup truck. A giant billboard for John Wayne in True Grit observes his passage through Hollywood’s urban bustle, as this Gothic monster enters the then modern world.Soon retiring the increasingly cosy familiarity of Hammer’s period-set Dracula series, the two Count Yorga films restored the ferocity of the 1958 original, when Christopher Lee’s lofty aristocratic veneer hid feral violence. They played to a late hippie crowd hip to camp and the put-on, and drive-ins demanding date-squeezing shocks. Read more ...
joe.muggs
There is now a kind of “leftfield mainstream” in electronic music. It’s populated by people a decade or more younger than the original acid house generation, but who take their core inspiration from post-rave experimentation of the early-mid Nineties. Dusky, Bicep and to an extent people like DJ Seinfeld, Four Tet and Jon Hopkins all channel the rich melodies and textures of Future Sound of London, Orbital, early Aphex Twin, Underworld and co to arena-filling effect. And Daniel Avery has been chief among these. Running through his work from the beginning have been tones and Read more ...
Tom Carr
Queens of the Stone Age. The Dead Weather. The Raconteurs. For those who know these bands intimately, Dean Fertita is no stranger. But to those less familiar he might need a little introducing.Fertita has long been a prominent, yet, background figure in the American rock and hard rock scenes. An invaluable member of both QOTSA and The Dead Weather, he has also worked with Iggy Pop, The Kills, Beck amongst many others.Until now he has been content to avoid the spotlight. But the pandemic gave him time to turn his attention to the demos he had built up over the years. The result is Tropical Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The British folk horror wave of the late Sixties and early Seventies wasn’t impervious to American influence. Though Roddy McDowall (1928-98), the director of The Ballad of Tam-Lin (1970), was born in Herne Hill, he was as Hollywood-steeped as its London-based star Ava Gardner.McDowall is best-known as a prolific actor (How Green Was My Valley, The Planet of the Apes films) and photographer than for his only foray into filmmaking. He can't be faulted for dynamism and sensitivity, even if some of the inexperienced actors needed more guidance.The medieval Scottish Border romance Tam Lin (Child Read more ...