CDs/DVDs
Sebastian Scotney
Among the plentiful bonus items in this Criterion Collection Blu-ray of Round Midnight, the last one is a surprise. It shows Dexter Gordon in his prime, back in 1969.He’s doing the thing for which, purely as a jazz musician, he’s best known. We see his blistering inventiveness as a bebop improviser. He is playing his own tune “Fried Bananas” with barrelling energy at a club in Copenhagen. In other words, it's nothing whatsoever like the slow, atmospheric playing of Dale Turner, the character played by Dexter Gordon, that we hear throughout Bertrand Tavernier’s moody film.By the time Tavernier Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album starts with an unfortunate sound. Its title track begins with the kind of drum loop that rock bands from U2 on down adopted in the early 1990s having heard Massive Attack and Happy Mondays and deciding that they were going to get on the groovy train. It’s unfortunate because as with all those Nineties bands, it remains completely beholden to a very Eighties Big Rock production style with over-egged notions of “fidelity”. Every element is neat, tidy, separated, sparkling – completely missing the point of what dance and hip hop producers were doing by hacking the possibilities of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Around a decade ago, Scottish singer Emeli Sandé appeared during a golden time for original female songwriters. On well-wrought, richly-inhabited songs such as “My Kind of Love” she quickly established herself as a characterful performer able to write grown-up songs with emotional heft, in the same league as the mighty Adele. She sold millions, and maintained course, balancing elegant, thoughtful, soul-pop with more interesting fare, such as 2016’s “Garden” with Jay Electronica. Her fourth studio album, however, while rife with contemporary electronic tics, wanders steadily into the middle-of Read more ...
howard.male
The album title ‘Where’s the One?’ is the question that often cropped up during the album’s creation. That’s to say, ‘the One’ is the opening beat of each bar that the western rock musicians often had trouble locating in the rich, complex brew of distorted thumb pianos, duelling guitars and intricately overlaid percussion generated by the Congolese musicians. And in some instances, the mystery was never solved. But clearly this problem became a mere technicality when the band of 10 rock musicians (including Deerhoof, Wildbirds & Peacedrums and Juana Molina) joined 10 Congolese musicians ( Read more ...
Tom Carr
When the pandemic closed in, Canadian experimental indie rock troupe Arcade Fire were on the cusp of heading into the studio to record their new album. COVID had other plans. But rather than pause, the husband and wife duo of Win and Regine Butler continued to work on more songs together. As they admit, this has ended up being the longest time they’ve spent writing for an album.The result, WE, is a concise, 40 minute LP that explores the experience of living through a pandemic: the first side is emotive and dark, tinged with isolation and fear; the latter half brighter and celebratory, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Not quite 50 and already Kate Rusby has notched up 30 years on the professional stage, an anniversary marked by a new album featuring newly recorded favourite songs from across her career on which “the Barnsley Nightingale” is joined by an array of special guests.Among them are compatriots Richard Hawley and KT Tunstall and, from across the Atlantic, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Sarah Jarosz and the gloriously talented Darlingside. For those buying the physical album there’s also the Royal Northern Sinfonia on a “full version” of “Secret Keeper”.The celebration opens in appropriately upbeat style Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Fifteen years after John Carpenter scored a massive box-office hit with his ingenious low-budget sci-fi thriller Escape from New York (1981), he was given a free rein to make Escape from LA. Unfortunately, unlimited access to extras and all the toys available in the special-effects cupboard in 1993 didn’t make for a better movie. The original dystopian satire turned Kurt Russell into a star as leather-clad, eye-patch-toting Snake Plisken. Former soldier turned convict Snake was offered his freedom if he could rescue a corrupt POTUS from the prison island of Manhattan, Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
When Soft Cell first caught the imagination of the nation it was a time of hope, opportunity and change. One of the first bands to bring technology to the top of the charts, they seemed to herald a new age after the grey years of the Seventies. They felt it too and they were also wrong. What colossal idiots we were, National Treasure Marc Almond confirms. Right from the start on this lockdown album – the first offering in nearly 20 years – in "Happy Happy" he lambasts how easily we swallowed the lies and followed the money. "Bruises on my Illusions" reiterates the point. Perhaps Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Radiate Like This is the first album in six years from American indie rock outfit Warpaint. The wait is, in part at least, down to Covid, which took hold just after they’d finished early recording sessions, forcing the band – like the rest of the world – into a solitary stasis of sorts.This resulted in time to tinker – space to iron out the creases and finesse the folds as band members Emily Kokal, Jenny Lee Lindberg, Stella Mozgawa and Theresa Wayman recorded their parts in isolation, building the songs slowly, carefully, layer by layer.The result is really quite beautiful. Read more ...
Liz Thomson
All power to Willie Nelson – marking his 89th birthday this week with a new album, A Beautiful Time. He and Trigger have been making music together for more than half a century, Nelson releasing his first album in 1962. From his pen have come some of the most powerful, poignant and enduring country songs ever written and he’s not done yet. How many of today’s artists, from whatever genre, will survive even half as long?Produced by Nelson’s old pal and long-time partner Buddy Cannon, who co-write six of the 14 songs, the album’s line-up includes the distinctive sounds of Jim "Moose" Brown on Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Drummer/vibraphonist Ches Smith’s previous release on the Pyroclastic label could not be more different from this one.Last year's Path of Seven Colors was well received: it was the Guardian’s 2021 jazz album of the year. That disc was an exploration of the Haïtian Vodou tradition through the prism of the contemporary New York jazz scene. We heard lots of busy pattering from a trio of tanbou drums, contrasted with the protean energy of saxophone hero Miguel Zenón bursting forth. Lovely stuff.In Interpret It Well we are in a very different place: these pieces tend to emerge from the Read more ...
mark.kidel
François Truffaut’s Nouvelle Vague masterpiece revolves around an endlessly mutating love triangle, set in a world that encompasses the hedonism of the Belle Époque, the horror of the First World War, and the book burning that ushered in the Nazi period in Germany. The film is a triumph of humanity as well as a deep and touching reflection on friendship, love and marriage.Jules et Jim marked an era, not least because the two male protagonists, the Austrian actor Oskar Werner as Jules and Henry Serre as Jim, are more sentimental than Catherine, the near-psychopathic and yet overwhelmingly Read more ...