CDs/DVDs
Kathryn Reilly
Wes Anderson and Jarvis Cocker do 1960s French pop – this frothy confection couldn’t be any more “art school” if it were smoking a gauloise in a black polo-neck. Truly, what a match made on the Eurostar! For one so thoroughly Sheffield born-and-bred, Mr Cocker has oodles of French chic (plus a French ex-wife and Paris-based son). He nails yé-yé, of course, but you can imagine he was weaned on the genre.It all started with his cover of the 1965 Christophe hit “Aline” made for Wes Anderson’s latest film, The French Dispatch (Jarvis told We Present recently that the director actually guided Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Chris Martin has talked, not for the first time, of this finally being the Coldplay era of “no rules or fear”. Swedish pop producer Max Martin (The Weeknd, Taylor Swift) gives Music of the Spheres a contemporary, EDM-pumped veneer, with further demographic-heat-seeking pacts with Selena Gomez and K-pop stars BTS.But this ninth album merely deepens the band’s failure to find hard edges to their soft rock, or root their healing generalities in any recognisably bleeding, sweating, human individual. Instead, here are more hollow anthems for everyone. And if this is Martin laying it on the line, Read more ...
joe.muggs
This record is a heck of a metatextual experience to listen to. In releasing his debut album, 24 year old Finneas O’Connell is attempting to step out of the shadow of one of the biggest pop cultural behemoths of our time – his own sister, Billie Eilish, who he also writes and produces for – and mark out a creative lane of his own. And he’s documenting this in many of these songs, which touch repeatedly on his experience of fame, struggles with identity and the like.Struggles-of-success narratives (and make no mistake: as Billie ticks inexorably towards 100 billion streams, her brother is Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Oh boy, there’s nothing like slipping on an old pair of jeans and cowboy boots. That’s the comfy feeling you get from the opening notes of Pokey’s new road trip in the company of some great musical ghosts. Hank Williams, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins – perhaps even the whole damn Million Dollar Quartet, with Buddy and the Everlys dropping by. Pokey hugs them all close, with the best of results. A trip through Middle Americana.LaFarge had just embarked on a tour when Covid hit and he found himself stuck in Austin, Texas. What to do but make music! In the Blossom of Their Shade is Pokey’s lockdown Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mariya Saakyan’s 2006 debut feature is bookended by grainy footage of what looks like a fire-ravaged diary, the distressed, crumbling scraps of paper torn and charred. The missing pages and unfinished sentences spill over into what follows, Saakyan inviting viewers to fill in the gaps in this haunting, elegiac film.Mayak (translated as The Lighthouse), is the semi-autobiographical tale of a young woman returning to her war-torn homeland in the early 1990s, attempting to persuade her elderly grandparents to come with her back to Moscow. Saakyan described Mayak as “a personal story”, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Some guitar sounds are instantly recognisable. Carlos Santana blazed a trail in the late 1960s, with incandescent licks that made him world famous. He has traded on that brand – as brand it inevitably is – for more than half a century.He is in a way a prisoner of those trademark heart-warming, dream-provoking guitar flourishes, and yet he has also experimented and collaborated as few others of his generation. But paradoxically, this restless urge to work with many different people, and explore different genres has been his undoing. This new album starts with a “Santana Celebration”, complete Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There I was, gleefully prepared to give this a good kick-in but, annoyingly, it’s defied my expectations. I’ve come to associate James Blake’s singing with the worst excesses of I’m-so-vulnerable-me, post-Jeff Buckley, falsetto-voice-breaking, and his public persona with joylessly prescriptive and enfeebled ultra-wokeness. While Friends That Break Your Heart closes with three tracks, including the title song, that fulfil my Blake stereotype, ie translucently wet Bon Iver-tronica, there’s also much on board that is impossible not to admire.Blake did, after all, begin his career with huge Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The ghost of Phil Spector’s mixing desk looms large over the new album by the Danish/Brazilian garage rock revivalists the Courettes. There’s even a cry of “Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!” to accompany the rocking go-go surf beat of “Hop the Twig”.The influence of the Shangri-Las in particular, is even more explicit on likes of “Want You! Like a Cigarette” and “Hey Boy”, with its “Give me a kiss before you go” reprise. Saxophones, tambourines and spoken lyrics join Flavia and Martin Couri’s twanging guitar and strident drumming in the echo chamber to make some serious teenage Read more ...
joe.muggs
Grand, sweeping romanticism with strong Celtic leanings is the order of the day lately, in a way it hasn’t been since the 1980s heyday of U2, Waterboys, Bruce Springsteen, Dexys and Simple Minds. The likes of Lewis Capaldi, Dermot Kennedy, Declan McKenna, Ed Sheeran in “Castle on the Hill” mode and Fontaines D.C. when they show their softer side are all taking yearning songs of big dreams colliding with small realities all the way to the bank. The Manic Street Preachers too have turned up the Van Morrison-ish swoon to 11 on their new album – and indeed The Waterboys’ Room to Roam and Dexys’ Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“How concerned are you?” asks a looped sample on “Alert Level”, the opening track on Ministry’s new album, and it is immediately clear that fans of the current economic and political status quo may not be the target market for this disc. That said, the optimal volume for playing Moral Hygiene would probably scare off most mainstream audiences too – as it really should be heard very loudly with the bass suitably jacked up for maximum enjoyment.In fact, while other musicians like Eric Clapton, Van Morrison and Ian Brown embarrass themselves by releasing reactionary anti-vaxxer anthems, these Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen left me dumbstruck in the cinema in 1998 with its brilliant depiction of an incestuous, viciously glamorous family imploding over a family celebration. At the time, I hoped that my Danish mother never saw what looked, to all intents and purposes, like a home movie about her former life in Copenhagen. More than 20 years on, Vinterberg did it again with Another Round, a black comedy about four high-school teachers navigating their mid-life crises by drinking their way through routine lessons and boring family suppers. The result was an Oscar-winning masterpiece Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Windflowers showcases Efterklang at their most direct, its sixth track “Living Other Lives” is its most instant, most straightforward composition. However, the Danish art-poppers’ sixth studio album does not instantly makes its case as a full-bore adoption of up-front dynamics. Windflowers opens with “Alien Arms”, an understated reflection where vocalist Casper Clausen ponders whether the highpoints of the past can be reproduced in the present. Despite the restraint – and an intimate, Blue Nile-esque atmosphere – the flow is linear, the melody precise. “We’re moving through the Read more ...