CDs/DVDs
graham.rickson
Ealing Studios’ output encompassed much more than comedy, though a viewing of 1952’s The Gentle Gunman suggests that political drama wasn't one of their strengths.Based on a play by Alexander McKendrick’s cousin Roger MacDougall, and directed by Ealing stalwart Basil Dearden, The Gentle Gunman’s problems start with its casting. Dirk Bogarde and John Mills rarely convince as brothers serving in the IRA during the early years of World War II, both actors struggling to maintain convincing Irish accents for more than a few seconds.There’s a fascinating film to be made about Ireland’s shady Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The fourth Ibibio Sound Machine album is produced by Hot Chip (who also contribute musically). However, fans will not hear a drastic step away from their last album, 2019’s Doko Mien. Instead, it has the feel of a logical progression, albeit with just that bit more techno-pop heft in places, and a subtle flavour of the Eighties. Business-as-usual, then? Maybe, but Ibibio Sound Machine’s Afro-inventive business-as-usual stands out brightly from the competition.The London-based band, fronted by Eno Williams, who sings in both English and Ibibio, a southern Nigerian language, open proceedings Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Karim Aïnouz’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner and Brazilian Oscar entry is advertised as “a tropical melodrama”, and its Rio seems barely to have left the jungle. We first meet sisters Eurídice (Carol Duarte) and Guida (Julia Stockler, pictured below) becoming separated in lush foliage’s deep greens and humid shadows, and they will go on to live tragically parallel lives, crushed by patriarchal crimes while retaining rebel sparks.Eurídice is 18, Guida 20 as the Fifties begin. The sisters have hungry eyes and mouths, and quick, incredulous laughs at society’s absurd demands, as enforced by baker dad Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As a title, Coach to Vienna suggests an opulent Boule de Suif-like drama directed by Max Ophüls and starring the likes of Danielle Darrieux and Michel Simon. But Karel Kachyňa’s film is no Viennese waltz. It’s a bleak end-of-World War II drama in which a semi-conscious German soldier, Günther (Luděk Munzar), mutters about a woman, or women, he slept with – abused – in the “hellhole” of Ukraine. This long-buried 1966 Czechoslovakian New Wave gem is horribly relevant to 2022.Günther has been shot and is lying in the back of a two-horse hay wagon driven by its owner, a Czechoslovakian Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At first, Bortenfor comes across as an all-instrumental extended mood piece. A breathy saxophone and trumpet mesh over a gently see-sawing double bass. Clusters of piano notes occasionally intersperse themselves into the undulating textures. A pedal steel evokes shimmering water.After nine tracks the album ends with “I havn,” a hymnal composition with wordless vocals and a series of crescendos. Once it’s all over, the lingering feeling is of having leafed through old photo albums, the sense that frozen pasts are trying to assert their presence in the present; that Bortenfor – the title Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Wrexham band MWWB were known until recently as Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard. Perhaps they changed their name because its freak-friendly quality could be mistaken for spliffed Half Man Half Biscuit-style silliness. MWWB are no bong-head novelty act. THC-friendly they may be, but their stew of pummelling slug-riffage, Cocteau Twins-ish vocals, electronic ear-tickling, outright psychedelia, and sudden bursts of tunefulness is unique. Their latest album may be their best; it maintains their space-rock trajectory but pushes further towards wider accessibility.The Harvest was supposed to be released Read more ...
Tom Carr
Alternative rock icons Placebo make an anticipated return in 2022 with their eighth album Never Let Me Go. Their last release was 2016’s greatest hits collection A Place For Us To Dream, and the wait has been long for the next, proper instalment from vocalist and guitarist Brian Molko and bassist Stefan Osdal. The good news is they return with aplomb.Opening track “Forever Chemicals” begins with digitised percussion that arouses interest before enveloping all in its path with a thick, velvety smooth layer of distorted guitars and bass. Having begun their career with a more orthodox grunge Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Aldous Harding is one of those artists who has you scrambling for Shazam. You might not know the Kiwi singer, but when you hear her music there’s a sudden urgent need to find a place for it in your life.In her fourth studio album Warm Chris, there are all kinds of songs –strong, delicate, eccentric and plain indecipherable. But there’s an alluring warmth to all of them, and an offbeat sense of fun that keeps you listening. Her songs are strange little worlds you get lost in without quite knowing why. She invites you for a moment, into these intricately constructed places, to poke Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Charli XCX is the pop stars’ pop star. Working with everyone from K-pop megastars BTS to US rapper Lil Yachty to indie-rockers Vampire Weekend, her career arc has a meta aspect, initially personified by her joyously electro-punky second album Sucker, but then given addition human warmth by her COVID lockdown openness. Terms such as “hyper-pop” and “avant-pop” are sometimes used to differentiate her output, but why reinvent the wheel. Her fifth album is pop, pure and simple, well-crafted sonically snappy 2022 pop.The subject matter throughout is love and sex, infidelity and longing, but the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The 19th album from Canadian alt-country rockers, and very beguiling it is too. As its title suggests, Songs of the Recollection is a covers album, but such a description is reductive. Good songs live on, discovered anew by successive generations – think how many singers have stamped their identity on numbers from the Great American Songbook.It's a question of how you choose, and Cowboy Junkies have chosen well, offering up an album of nine songs from across the last five decades, none of them particularly obvious. And each is carefully thought-out and reworked – as Margo Timmins, one of the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Pete Doherty became a hunted man as he was falling apart, lent tabloid notoriety by his dissolute romance with Kate Moss. The Libertines were based on more solid ground at first - rickety ideals of old England and intimate rock’n’roll community with fans, fed by a mulch of old Graham Greene paperbacks and Hancock’s Half Hour tapes, Romantic poets and Smiths records.Doherty’s addictions holed that good ship long ago. In the years before The Libertines reunited, I’d seen a Babyshambles gig teeter right on the edge of dangerous chaos – thrilling, because it didn’t quite tip over – and seen Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s a period of British club music that deserves to be much better appreciated. Before hardcore and jungle, before the Underworlds and Leftfields and other arena acts, came a generation who were much closer to the most song-based US house music, to considerable success. Between 1988 and 1990 came dazzling records from S’Express, The Beloved, Coldcut’s earliest manifestation, and several Eighties pop acts that evolved with the times: The Style Council, The Blow Monkeys and Boy George with his Jesus Loves You project.Into this milieu came four Brummies known as the Groove Corporation, and Read more ...