CDs/DVDs
mark.kidel
Africa is an endlessly surprising source of new music: sounds that grab you instantly, and combine the wisdom and grace of the ancestors with the creative and playful use the latest technologies. Linda Ayupuka is the latest singer to look out for, as well as her prolific and inventive producer Francis Ayamga.Ayupuka hails from Bongoe Soe, in North Eastern Ghana, close to the border of Burkina Faso. She is deeply involved with the local Presbyterian Church and leads two choirs that travel around the region raising the spirit of young and old. The sound of her very danceable music on this album Read more ...
Katie Colombus
This year marks 25 years since the release of Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill album. Not content with hitting the road for a celebratory world tour, the Canadian songstress is also releasing a new album – but it’s probably not what you might think.Morisette has been open about her musical journey of self-discovery and healing as far back as "Thank U", a song written for her 1998 album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, after taking some time out and visiting India. Her relationship with divinity, healing and personal growth continued in 2008 album Flavours of Entanglement, which saw Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Dream Like A Dogwood Wild Boy (Gearbox Records) is such a strong album. Listeners who know Binker Golding from his numerous other contexts – the free jazz incarnation or the duos with Elliot Galvin or Moses Boyd – are going to be surprised; some really good things have coalesced here.There’s a signal right at the start of the first track, “(Take Me To The) Wide Open Lows” that we are on on a different tack. The saxophonist (b.1985) has an undeniably strong musical personality, and there have been times in the past when he might have been described as a bit relentless. No longer Read more ...
Tom Carr
For the Oxford alt-rock mainstays Foals, the past two years brought an anti-climactic pause to a triumphant 2019: their meteoric trajectory had kept pace with their duo of albums, Everything Not Saved Will be Lost Part 1 and 2. The sister albums had given the group their first UK album #1 with Part 2, and their live reputation was glowing brighter still.And then it all stopped.Now, as the bleak lockdown years silhouette their new album Life Is Yours, it’s no surprise they return with a sound steeped in summertime vibes. Moving away from the cinematically framed Part 1 and Part 2, Life Is Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Last Metro (Le dernier métro), from 1980, is without doubt one of François Truffaut’s best films: a story beautifully told, strong on character, sometimes funny and always profoundly moving. Most of the credit has gone to Truffaut and co-stars Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu, but there is a key member of the team whose name is barely known outside the world of French cinema history.There are echoes here of the director's 1973 La nuit américaine (aka Day for Night), a film also set behind the scenes of show business, whose strength derives to a large extent from the many Read more ...
Barney Harsent
In 1990, teenage prodigy Ron Trent released a single on Armando’s Warehouse imprint. Recorded on cheap equipment it was, nevertheless, a staggering piece of music. Urgent, insistent and unrelenting its piercing strings, metallic cymbals and juddering, robotic bass created a spiralling sense of joy that has remained undiminished for more than 30 years.While the low-level lighting and smooth-as-silk production on Trent’s latest outing, under his WARM moniker, has more in common with the lush and expansive deep house he pioneered alongside Chez Damier on the Prescription label, there is Read more ...
graham.rickson
Salvador Dali loved when he saw it, describing Steven Arnold’s debut feature as “an extraordinary, fantastic film”, subsequently inviting Arnold to help decorate his museum in Figueres.Maybe you just had to be there; viewing the film on a sunny afternoon in suburban Leeds can’t compete with hanging out at New York’s St Regis Hotel in 1974. Second Run’s release of this 1971 curio is well worth a look, though I’d suggest watching the videoed introduction from media curator and film historian Steve Seid before pressing play. Seid was instrumental in the preservation and rerelease of Read more ...
joe.muggs
A gothic aesthetic is very common in the left field of electronic/club music these days – but it tends to go with fairly extreme sounds: either industrial pummelling, or glitched-out “deconstructed club” as in artists like Ziúr.But Andy Butler and his Hercules & Love Affair project have gone for something altogether different on the fifth H&LA album. Just as, in his early records, Butler went back to the source building blocks of house and disco music, here he's gone right to the roots of goth. So this album is rife with influences. Woven throughout, you can clearly hear Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In these meta times when everything – EVERYTHING! – is ironic, a smirk to be replayed forever on a screen, the last thing we expect is a hippy, a proper real-life hippy, preaching oneness and love. Even yoga sorts these days mostly go on about their own “wellness”, rather than the cosmic inference of it all. Nick Mulvey’s previous albums were lightly marinaded in Baba Ram Dass and ayahuasca revelation but, with his third solo album, New Mythology, he’s gone full mystic.After creating some of the most gorgeous, original singer-songwriter music of the last decade he doesn’t let empyrean Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title The Great Awakening is a metaphor for America’s switch from its previous presidential administration to the current: the arrival of a new era and, with it, a fresh phase of life. Emblematic of this is the xenarthran, a type of armadillo, which lends its name to the album’s third track. Native to South America, it slogs its way into Texas where it deals with a new environment.While Texas outfit Shearwater’s seventh album, the follow-up to 2016’s Jet Plane and Oxbow (there are other, less formal, releases) is chock-full of allusions, the band’s driver Jonathan Meiburg has chosen a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Commenting on Australia’s horrendous colonial history at the start of an audio commentary packaged with this BFI Blu-ray release of John Hillcoat’s impeccably directed, newly restored The Proposition (2005), Alexandra Heller-Nicholas declares, “It’s fucking awful.”Critics are usually more circumspect on the record, but Heller-Nicholas’s reflection on the genocide of the First Nations people and the attendant squalor visited on the Lucky Country by the lawless settlers of the 19th century strikes the right note. She and her colleague Josh Nelson sustain her anger and disgust throughout their Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Who’d have thought that Steve “Interesting” Davis OBE (as he was mercilessly dubbed by the original Spitting Image in the 80s – at a time when he was wiping the floor with the best of the international snooker world on a regular basis) would turn out to be the most interesting ex-World Snooker Champion in living memory?In fact, Steve’s a bit of a polymath these days as a radio broadcaster, author, DJ and, most unexpected of all, a member of seriously spaced out ambient kosmiche heads, the Utopia Strong. Writing the outfit off as some kind of hobby group would be well wide of the mark though, Read more ...