CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
It’s about 30 years since the ever-influential Spacemen 3 called it a day amid a storm of backbiting and recriminations. Yet in 2022, within a couple of months of each other, the band’s twin powerhouses have both released albums of their own. However, while Jason Pierce’s Spiritualized let rip an opus of space rock sounds on Everything Was Beautiful, Sonic Boom has linked up with fellow adopted Portuguese and Animal Collective-ist, Panda Bear for something considerably more breezy and poppy, if no less trippy and head-spinning.Apparently influenced by listening to Sonic Boom’s collection of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Violinist and composer Ruby Colley combines elements of folk, contemporary classical and jazz with explorations and evocations of the natural world.Her debut release, 2010’s Murmurations, was a minimalist, paired-down evocation of nature and natural forms, and since then, she has written music for films, collaborated on a range of theatre and dance projects, and played with the likes of Sinead O’Connor, The Unthanks and Cosmo Sheldrake.Some of the music from Overheard, her first album in 12 years, stems from collaborations with the arts-and-tech AltPitch festival, and a film of the album’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s polarising discourse and there’s polarising discourse, and then there’s Beyoncé discourse. On the one hand, there’s “the Bey Hive”: the very model of a furious modern fandom who will boost her and monster her critics at a microsecond’s notice. There are the commentators for whom everything she does is by definition profound, moral and important, regardless of any hypercapitalist excesses and hanging out with dicators’ offspring. And they're all buoyed up by a press so desperate for “access” that every profile is done with HELLO! magazine levels of management-vetted swooning. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Over the past few years, Joe Pera Talks With You has been one of television’s joys. Each episode finds the small-town American music teacher navigating life in Upper Michigan. Unhurriedly, with good humour, he deals with the day-to-day small things. The big things are more complicated, but he finds his way. Every programme is a warm bath in goodness.Joe Pera himself is a stand-up comedian who has created the character with his own name. Now, he has directed the promo film for “Hank” from Philadelphia band Friendship’s fourth album Love the Stranger. An older man goes by boat to Little Read more ...
Liz Thomson
From Brighton to Berlin with the Brit School alums, who formed 20 years ago – allegedly out shopping in Primark. Virgin signed them three months later. What started as “a joke” has endured through five albums – and here comes their sixth, 10 Tracks to Echo in the Dark.And how appropriate that this slice of Eighties retro should appear right now – just as we’re reprising many of the grimmer aspects of that decade, not least a recession and, possibly soon, a Thatcher 2.0 if Liz Truss cosplay fools the ever-gullible public.It was also the decade of synthpop – electronica, disco, Eurodance – as Read more ...
mark.kidel
Director Mike Hodges's Get Carter (1971) has been praised as the best British gangster film. I would go even further, and put it up against the best gangster films of all time, on the same level as Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), Melville’s Le deuxième souffle (1966), Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) and Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990).Watching it again after many years, I was struck by how it continues to feel fresh and original Indeed, still ahead of its time, not least because of Wolfgang Suschitzky’s documentary-style location shooting and intimacy with the action Read more ...
Guy Oddy
When Jamie T first appeared in the early noughties, he was trumpeted by some who should have known better as the musical heir to Joe Strummer, while actually sounding more like a Kate Nash acolyte. Six years since his last album, The Theory of Whatever dips into a range of genres from dreary indie rock to low energy hip hop and acoustic ballads fuelled by a seemingly endlesss word-spaghetti of clichés.Opening track “90’s Cars” is low tempo, early-80's sounding electropop which comes over like a tribute to Ricky Gervais’s short-lived band Seona Dancing, while the tepid indie rock of “The Old Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of this century, Ben Harper achieved global stardom, although the UK was a territory where he never achieved lift-off. By contrast, in the US, Australia and much of Europe, he’s regarded as a heavyweight (he’s won three Grammys!).His career has combined the earnestness of Sixties/Seventies singer-songwriter political activism, with lively musical eclecticism, and, sometimes, a blander middle-of-the-road vibe redolent of his pal Jack Johnson. His latest album showcases the rawer end of his appeal.Bloodline Maintenance is Harper’s first “proper” album Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kathryn Williams’ creativity leaves most singers standing. She’s always up to something and it’s usually interesting. As well as multiple albums over two decades, including one themed around Sylvia Plath and another created with the poet Carol Anne Duffy, last year she had her first novel published, the ominous island-set tale, The Ormering Tides. She’s done loads else too, her work often loosely in the folk form, heavily seasoned with the hurts of loving and living. Her latest contains much of the latter, but its production is more opulent, electronic and experimental than her usual Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Maybe it’s inevitable that their fate is to receive just a fraction of the recognition they deserve. Gareth Williams is one of the crop of truly remarkable – and now fully-formed – jazz pianists from the UK born in the years 1968 and 1969. I can think of three of them – there may be more.So, to over-simplify radically: Liam Noble is the one who will always, without fail, take a listener off in a surprising direction, and do so again and again. Jason Rebello has the most naturally poetic touch and can overwhelm with the sheer beauty of his playing, and yet is Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jack White’s last couple of albums, Boarding House Reach from 2018 and Fear of the Dawn from April this year, were both driven by experimentalism, dipping into electronics, hip hop, noise and more. They were both, to differing degrees, admirable in intent, coming from an artist perceived as zealously retro, but they were also only partially successful.Entering Heaven Alive is a less wilful beast and, in terms of enjoyably straightforward songwriting, the better for it. It will, naturally, and as is undoubtedly intended, be viewed of-a-piece with Fear of the Dawn, since the latter only came Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jiří Menzel's Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti) was in production while Soviet tanks rumbled into Prague in August 1968. Predictably, the film was banned by the new Czechoslovak regime and it remained unreleased until 1990, though illicit video copies were circulating for several years before.Like Menzel’s Oscar-winning Closely Observed Trains, Larks on a String took inspiration from the writings of Bohumil Hrabal, Menzel and Hrabal’s screenplay here based on a collection of short stories written in the 1950s. Set in the industrial town of Kladno, Hrabal’s characters are dissident members Read more ...