CDs/DVDs
Tim Cumming
Expansive, free-form, handmade and improvised, the extravagantly-titled The Liquified Throne of Simplicity is the fourth album from this freewheeling Slovenian trio of multi-instrumentalists. They forage among the world’s musics as well as their own, making their own handmade instruments, and creating huge tracks redolent of a borderless musical world where the guembri rhythms of the opening 20-minute track, “Wilted Superstition Engaged in Copulation”, ring and resonate with the sound of chimes, balafon, ocorina flute, ribab and viola, the peeling Egyptian double-reeded mizmar, plus "various Read more ...
Nick Hasted
West Side Story’s cinema release crashed into Omicron and never recovered. Maybe Ariana DeBose’s Oscar will help the world wake up to this Spielberg masterpiece, which definitively betters 1961’s Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins version.Spielberg loves West Side Story as much as its Romeo and Juliet, Tony and María, love each other. The material is part of his childhood, as personal as upcoming semi-memoir The Fabelmans. A film about romantic transcendence that ultimately falls to earth, this is one of his most exuberant and serious works, propelled by Leonard Bernstein’s music, ironised by Stephen Read more ...
joe.muggs
The global popularity of Latin music in the past few years is almost incomprehensibly huge. 2017’s “Despacito” by Puerto Rican Luis Fonsi was the point where it became clear that Latin America – like South Korea – was now operating entirely on its own pop terms and making the rest of the world dance to its beat. And a look at global streaming charts will show consistently vast figures for artists like Brazil’s Anitta whose “Envolver” is currently the worldwide no.1 single with streams in the hundreds of millions. All of which has altered the shape of the Anglophone pop mainstream Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Jack White is still unsatisfied, and rock’n’roll still unfinished business for its most extremist exponent. His last pre-pandemic album, Boarding House Reach (2018), seemed a major blow to his career, its experiment in warped dynamics and Beat spoken-word relatively rejected, despite its chart-topping start, a setback barely arrested by the Raconteurs’ reunion.This fourth album in his decade-long solo career is barely more conventional than its predecessor, but is really a sequel to Lazaretto, in which The White Stripes’ fetishising of the blues was widened to absorb hip-hop and R&B. This Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“You know you’ll always be my best friend” and “There’s no-one else who gets me quite like you” run a couple of the lyrics to “Happy New Year”, the opening song from Norwich duo Let’s Eat Grandma’s third album. And the whole is laced with love songs from band members Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth to each other, not romantic love, but songs passionately, poetically affirming their long friendship.Two Ribbons is a celebratory synth-pop explosion but also laced with bittersweetness. It has a key back-story. Let’s Eat Grandma appeared six years ago, aged only 16, Norfolk schoolgirls firing Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Wet Leg’s self-titled debut album is one that has generated significant expectations over the past few months. Last year’s singles “Chaise Longue” and “Wet Dream” especially created all kinds of hype and led to plenty of media coverage.But now it’s here, Wet Leg feels somewhat lacking. Indeed, this exciting new noise doesn’t sound particularly new nor especially exciting. Instead, it’s rather insubstantial and it will be interesting to see how much play these tunes are still getting in a couple of months when the media hysteria has calmed down.Sure, many of Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers Read more ...
graham.rickson
“Everything bad that has happened to me has happened because I’m black,” laments teacher Joseph Pascale (David Oyelowo) in Shoot the Messenger, directed by Ngozi Onwurah in 2006 from a script by the late Sharon Foster. Handsomely produced and visually stylish, it was originally broadcast by the BBC.They presumably kyboshed Foster’s original title, Fuck Black People! Not that there’s any suggestion of Foster’s message being toned down: Shoot the Messenger’s anger and energy are infectious, and leavened with judicious splashes of sly wit.We first meet Joe as an over-confident young teacher Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Moon Rally has unambiguous musical roots, pinning down where it’s from is trickier. The album’s title nods to Air’s Moon Safari, as does a fair degree of the rhythmic chug and shimmering atmospherics. Sweden’s Radio Department come to mind. So do Belgium’s Antena and Estonia’s Maria Minerva.Continental European then. And with a sense of a lineage too. But although most of the album is sung in English, two of its last three tracks are in Russian. The last, “Вчерашний день” ("Yesterday"), twins an echoey vocal and acoustic guitar with a keyboard wash: it’s different to what has come Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Despite a five-year career and no breakout hits, Australian outfit Confidence Man has grabbed the attention of some heavyweights.Signed to Heavenly Records, a label which knows their Roscoff onions from the common-or-garden variety, their 2017 single “Bubblegum” was remixed to bouncing brilliance by the late, great Andrew Weatherall, and there they are, squeezed between Clairo and Courtney Barnett on Glastonbury 2022’s banner poster. Their second album fulfils such faith. It’s a primary-coloured, sexy, cheeky dancefloor explosion.It's pop, but with a 1990s feel, as in doused in beat-bustin’ Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Anthony Kiedis’s autobiography Scar Tissue, an extreme example of wisdom through sometimes squalid excess, explains a great deal about the Chili Peppers’ mix of priapic lust and wistful romance. The return of guitarist John Frusciante and producer Rick Rubin, ever-presents on all their good albums, signals the band’s retrenchment after an inconsequential decade, Rubin’s usual back to basics MO ensuring that Unlimited Love sounds comfortingly familiar, naturally following on from peaks such as Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991), Californication (1999) and Stadium Arcadium (2006).Opener “Black Read more ...
Liz Thomson
What an exquisite album! Beautiful voices that harmonise to perfection, superlative instrumental work, and songs both new and old yet all somehow familiar and timeless. Ink of the Rosy Morning: A Sampling of Folk Songs from Britain and North America is a lockdown album that captures the spontaneity that few of us felt during that dark time.Emerging in 2016 with Before the Sun, Hannah Sanders and Ben Savage – self-described “children of the folk clubs” – met in a Cambridge folk club doing floor spots, she having returned from America, he from a tour with The Willows. The chance encounter Read more ...
joe.muggs
The three Canadians Richie Hawtin (Plastikman), Jason Beck (Chilly Gonzales) and Tiga Sontag (aka just Tiga, who exec produced this album) are each so laden with image and persona it is easy to forget they are musicians sometimes. Hawtin has since the early Nineties not only brought techno to mass audiences, but adorned it with all kinds of conceptual and design spectacle in arenas and galleries as much as in nighclubs. Sontag too, has turned dance music into theatre to huge success, albeit in a much more knowing, camp sense ever since the turn of the millennium electroclash era. And the Read more ...