CDs/DVDs
Saskia Baron
In an era when toxic masculinity has become a clichéd accusation to throw at any portrait of men behaving macho, it’s fascinating to revisit Dennis Hopper’s 1980 movie Out of the Blue.Years before his performance as the sinister Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, Hopper created Don Barnes, a truck driver with an extremely unhealthy relationship with his daughter and wife. After ploughing his rig into the school bus, Don does five years in jail. Daughter Cebe (Linda Manz) is left in the same small town and goes to the same school as the victims while her waitress mother Kathy (Sharon Read more ...
joe.muggs
Alejandra Ghersi – Arca – is one of the most influential musicians on the planet in the last decade. Even aside from working with huge names like Björk and Kanye West, her ultra-detailed, high drama, electronic abstractions have set the pace for a legion of artists from very underground to ultra-pop. And the combination of mind-bending textural shifting in her sound, outré performance and collaborations with visual artists like the master mutants Jesse Kanda has created an archetype (Arca-type?) for a generation of queer and gender non-conforming artists who find analogies for transformation Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Adams has long been Robert Plant’s guitarist in bands including the Sensational Space Shifters, as well as working with fellow Space Shifter Juldeh Camara in the band JuJu. He is steeped in American Blues as well as its West African and Desert Blues roots, having worked as a producer for Rachid Taha and on some of Tinariwen’s finest albums. More recently, he has produced and performed with the outrageously energetic southern Italian Taranta band, Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, and it’s from that collaboration that this new set with CGS’s violinist and percussionist, Mauro Durante, stems.They Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jason Isbell is a bigger noise on the other side of the Atlantic than he is in the UK but his last three albums have, nonetheless, bothered the middle-regions of the British album charts. He’s built a critically lauded career with his band The 400 Unit since leaving Drive-By Truckers a decade-and-a-half ago, merging country with rock and various southern US styles. His latest is a covers album benefit for three non-profit social justice organizations, including Black Lives Matter, and is, he says, a celebration of Georgia “turning blue” (voting Democrat) in last year’s US election. Happily it Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Initially, it’s about the voice. Thirteen seconds into the first track, it arrives: close-to disembodied, delivering lyrics as if they were a psalm, yet still melodic. Just over a minute in, there’s a shift into an ascending-descending chorus. The instrumentation is a gauzy wash, adroitly balancing the impressionistic with an understated rhythmic bed. Apart from its tougher seventh cut – evoking PJ Harvey if she were collaborating with Mazzy Star – this opener establishes the tone of Where The Viaduct Looms, a collaborative album by Nell Smith and The Flaming Lips. It’s her first LP.All nine Read more ...
graham.rickson
Why Les Triplettes de Belleville was rechristened Belleville Rendevous in the UK is one of several questions left unanswered by this reissue. Along with what happened to French director Sylvain Chomet’s animation career, which seems to have fizzled out after his 2010 Jacques Tati adaptation The Illusionist.The latter, while beautiful to look at, lacks bite, but 2003’s Belleville Rendevous is a masterpiece, one of the 21st century's greatest animated features. Tati’s influence is discernible throughout this near-silent film, and Chomet’s idiosyncratic use of sound will amuse anyone who’s Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Like most of the best things in life, it cannot be denied that the music of Sunn O))) is an acquired taste – and most certainly not for the faint hearted. Crushing and apocalyptic soundscapes dominate their largely instrumental drone metal, which is soaked in reverb, feedback and dissonant guitar sounds that focus fully on atmosphere rather than tunes and melodies.Metta, Benevolence, a set recorded at the BBC Maida Vale studios for Mary Anne Hobbs’ Radio 6 show, during their October 2019 tour, sticks very much to Sunn O)))’s beatless, yet heavier-than-heavy template. However, with additional Read more ...
Katie Colombus
For those of you who didn’t think it was possible for Adele to up her stakes in the game of soul-baring, think again. Her first album in six years is here and it is as raw as it is rowdy, as searing as it is silk, as relatable as it is enjoyably escapist.30 begins with warm-up song “Strangers By Nature”, a retro kitsch drift with dreamy strings and the melancholic caress of Karen Carpenter, ending with a spoken word line in that distinct Tottenham accent, “Alright then I'm ready”. Deep breath.The first single, as you will know given the abundance of radio play in the feverish anticipation of Read more ...
Barney Harsent
A poet I know once went to a boarding school to deliver an open class on poetry. Part of the day consisted of the children producing poems of their own, which their guest teacher then looked over and discussed with them. Almost every one was about flight, or escape into vast, open swathes of nature. These weren’t poems, he realised, these were the yearning, silent screams of perpetual prisoners.I was reminded of this when listening to Flying Dream 1, the ninth studio album from big-hearted rock band Elbow. Even pop stars with a nifty niche in singalong anthems couldn’t escape a pandemic- Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Deap Vally’s debut album, Sistrionix was a breath of fresh air for the heavy blues rock end of the musical spectrum when it was released in 2013. Feminist anthems, like “Gonna Make My Own Money” and “Creeplife” blasted out like artillery salvos and rightfully grabbed plenty of people’s attention. Since then, however, Lindsay Troy and Julie Edwards have never really lived up their initial promise.A second album just revisited old ground and a collaboration with the Flaming Lips didn’t give the impression that they were anymore than hired hands. Their new long-player, Marriage is something else Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The Outlaw meets Jesus, at least on CD. The Willie Nelson Family finds The Red Headed Stranger singing some of country-gospel’s most celebrated songs, including Hank Williams’ “I Saw the Light”. It’s his second album of 2021 – the first, That’s Life, released in February, was a beguiling collection of Frank Sinatra covers.Willie Nelson will turn 90 next April, and doubtless like most folks his age his thoughts turn to the day he will meet his Maker. But whatever your age, God is never far away from country music – sung about as one of the family. And that easy relationship is what gives Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The fourth feature made by writer-director partners Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing is not as celebrated as the six consecutive masterworks with which they followed it. It’s nonetheless a remarkably atmospheric film that outlined the shape of things to come.It was inspired by the sacrifice of five farmworkers of the hamlet of Greup (near Oud Beijerland in South Holland), who were executed by the Germans on 19 September 1941 for attempting to spirit away the crew of an RAF Wellington bomber downed by flak. The six British airmen became POWs.Since this Read more ...