CDs/DVDs
mark.kidel
Nick Cave has always been a spoken-word man, and these seven short poems set to music with regular collaborator Warren Ellis are the latest in a genre he explores with exceptional talent. He is an artist driven by a need to create, constantly and in many forms, from concept albums to collage, and from drawing and song-writing to shamanic stage performances.This latest excursion was written over seven days in lockdown and recorded at the tail-end of a more conventional studio session. These are short texts, prayers to a God who is as wrathful as he is a saviour. The psalms invoke the deity Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Initially, the weird thing about this is it’s being released as a Neneh Cherry album rather than a compilation of artists doing Neneh Cherry covers, which is what it is. That said, awareness slowly grows of a kindred sensibility to recent Neneh Cherry output, the esoteric jazzual spirit that’s imbued her last couple of albums. The Versions is a crafted, mellow, late night affair containing material different enough from the originals to be interesting, even if it cannot top their cheeky hip hop-pop potency.Take the version of 1989 cut “Heart” by Los Angeles violinist-singer Sudan Archives, Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s hard to know exactly when new age music passed from being a retro curio to being part of the language of alternative music. Certainly it can be traced back to the early-mid Noughties, with acts like Emeralds, Oneohtrix Point Never and James Ferraro, and labels like Kranky and RVNG Intl. bringing synth repetitions and cosmic aesthetics into the world of North American noise and DIY music. This was linked in part to newer internet-native genres like vaporwave – and in the case of Oneohtrix Point Never, to a vast and sprawling web of connections which led to his behind the scenes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Side Two of A Child’s Chant for a New Millennium opens with “Wrenbird,” a consideration of whether it’s possible to have a bird’s freedom of mobility. “Anywhere but here,” sings Wren Hinds. He may not be happy where he is, but the accompanying soundtrack is enough to make anyone stick around.During its four-and-a-half minutes, “Wrenbird” shifts from an acoustic guitar-accompanied reverie to incorporate strings, brushed drums and flute-like keyboard lines. By the mid-point, it’s epic – albeit in a restrained way. When wordless vocals appear towards the end, there’s a hint Hinds may have taken Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Songs are what feelings sound like,” Mary Gauthier told medics from Brigham & Women’s Hospital as she participated in the Frontline Songs post-Covid initiative that aimed to help doctors, nurses and first responders process their pandemic trauma. No stranger to loss and trauma herself, Gauthier had earlier worked with Songwriting with Soldiers, a programme that led to her last (Grammy-nominated) album, Rifles and Rosary Beads (2018).Gauthier’s ninth studio outing, Dark Enough to See the Stars, is as empathetic as anything she’s written. Music in its highest form, she believes, “is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
As the pandemic receded, Wilco huddled together in Jeff Tweedy’s Chicago studio and played country songs, an easefully naturally act as the world around them shook. Though famed for the experimental, eerily timely Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001) and the crackling electric contrails of its further-out follow-up A Ghost Is Born (2004), Wilco have often returned to simpler verities.Now their 12th album adds a recognisable branch to Tweedy’s ex-band Uncle Tupelo’s tree, as this founding father revisits Americana: 21 songs framed by steel and acoustic guitar, stripping himself and his country to their Read more ...
Guy Oddy
If you’re feeling that you might be missing a certain glide in your stride and a dip in your hip during these uncertain times, then perhaps you might benefit from some funk on your record player. Well, cometh the hour, cometh the men.Boston’s Lettuce may have been in the game for some thirty years, but their latest (double) album Unify, suggests that they’re still running with a finely tuned engine, which shows no sign of grinding to a halt. In fact, they’ve even managed to get the great Bootsy Collins on board to bring some primetime P-Funk to the very fine “Keep That Funk Alive” – and when Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Crispy Moon is a musical kaleidoscope encompassing free-jazz skronk, Japanese folk melodies, Krautrock insistence, echoes of Recurring-era Spacemen 3, South African percussion styles and space rock. One is overlain onto another, or there are sections where one approach dominates before diving into another.The album opens with the gentle “Makkuroi Mizu (まっくろい水)” where a reggae lope gradually gives way to a more linear rhythm. Next, “Dividual Individual” – with the album's only English-language lyrics: declaring “you are free to go” – brings more on board: bubbling sounds, spacey synth and what Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Nouvelle Vague directors have grown to seem more diverse than bonded, a golden generation linked by extreme cinephilia and the mutually supportive main chance. Godard endures at one extreme, pushing the movement’s implications to their terminus, collaging gnomic capitalist critiques holed up in Swiss self-exile, still fiercely repulsing acceptance.Claude Chabrol lasted almost as long making chilly thrillers beloved by the French public but distrusted by the academy, steeped in Lang and Hitchcock, but most of all Georges Simenon. He was similarly prolific and accepting of human Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album starts and ends so brilliantly. It kicks off with a salvo of three tracks that remind you exactly why Def Leppard became one of the biggest bands in the world in the mid Eighties. They distilled the things they most loved growing up – T Rex, Mott The Hoople, Queen, ABBA – down to their rawest essences, then built up a sound using the most elaborate studio technology available at the time that was in tune with the current post-Van Halen US rock world but actually belonged entirely to them. “Take What You Want”, “Kick” and “Fire it Up” are archetypes of that process. They are Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
While Britpop was a retrogressive media construct, Oasis were a genuine socio-musical phenomenon (albeit also retrogressive!). And at their heart was, of course, Liam Gallagher, bullishly Manc, sneeringly rude and pugnaciously charismatic, a proper rock star, perhaps the last before the oncoming generation of coffee-drinking, fleece-wearing nice-boys-next-door.He’s mellowed with age; the 2019 documentary As It Was revealed a more self-aware, likeable fellow, yet retaining just enough truculent edge. It’s a shame that more the latter is not present on his third solo studio album.Gallagher told Read more ...
graham.rickson
Parallel Mothers unfolds at a daringly slow pace, and there are moments in the first half of Pedro Almodóvar’s 2021 drama when you wish that things would speed up. And then you’re wrong-footed by the unexpected shifts in tone and direction, and amazed at the veteran director’s ability to knit together so many seemingly disparate threads.Penélope Cruz plays affluent photographer Janis; becoming pregnant after a liaison with Israel Elijalde’s married forensic anthropologist Arturo (whom Janis asks to help investigate a Civil War grave in her home village), she later shares a hospital room with Read more ...