CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
It must be exhausting to be a member of Belfast hip-hop crew, Kneecap. Having already recorded a debut album and fistful of fine singles like “H.O.O.D.” and “Get Your Brits Out” in the late 2010s, during the last couple of years they’ve participated in a semi-autobiographical film and its soundtrack, put out the splendid Fine Art, toured relentlessly and then had to endure the circus of being named pop’s latest bogymen because of their support for the Palestinian people.Not ones to retreat into moneyed exile, however, their new album tries to make sense of the situation with a barrel load of Read more ...
peter.quinn
This first full-length album from K-pop sextet NCT WISH – one of a number of NCT sub-units including NCT 127, NCT Dream, WayV, and NCT U – is a 10-track delight, with not a filler in sight.A multilayered, widescreen banger, album opener “2.0 (TWO POINT O)” channels the bassline-driven, vocally rich melodic pop of SM Entertainment labelmates SHINee. The immaculately produced title track is an up-tempo, 130+ BPM anthem with strong UK Garage influences, delicious harmonic motion, and an abundance of ear candy, not least the way in which it reimagines the opening earworm vocal hook from The Read more ...
Joe Muggs
All of us, no matter how media-literate we think we are, in some way or another absorb received opinion about particular musicians. It’s particularly easy when they are, in the literal sense of that most abused of words, iconic: when you are constantly exposed to a condensed simulacrum version of them. So it is that I realise that, even though I know deep down that it’s a construct, I have bought into the cliché version of Ringo Starr: the lunkish, clowning, “not even the best drummer in The Beatles”, along-for-the-ride foil for his more mercurial bandmates.Of course, it’s not like he hasn’t Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lurking within the heaviness and tractor-reversing-through-sludge dynamics of Hastings-based hairies Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s fifth album is a sense of poppiness. In an early Seventies Status Quo way, that is. Although it has a lengthy breakdown section, “Kind Boy” evokes Quo hits such as “Paper Plane” and “Caroline.” The vocals nod to the trademark Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi blend. There is a tune.However, this is not 1972 or 1973. Nonetheless, this power trio – named after the Admiral of the British Fleet and MP who perished at sea in 1707 – are wedded to an approach which might Read more ...
Tom Carr
To say the last few years have been some of the most painful and tumultuous for Foo Fighters would be quite the understatement. The band's long term drummer, Taylor Hawkins, passed away in 2022, followed only a few months later by the passing of band leader Dave Grohl’s mother. Understandably, the band needed time to process and adjust.What followed in 2023, was previous album But Here We Are, arguably some of the most nuanced work yet from the band. Here, Grohl and co worked through all stages of their grief and excised their pain by breathlessly sharing it with the world. With Josh Freese Read more ...
graham.rickson
French director Maurice Tourneur (1876-1961) trained as an interior decorator and illustrator, the move into film a logical progression after working as an actor and designer in Parisian theatre. Emigrating to the US in 1916, he enjoyed a brief but successful Hollywood career before returning home in 1929 as a director ideally qualified to oversee the French film industry’s transition into the sound era.Released in 1943, The Devil’s Hand (La Main du diable) is a lively supernatural thriller, drawing inspiration from the Faust legend and WW Jacobs’s influential short story The Monkey’s Paw. Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Along with Harry Styles, Zayn is one of the stars to emerge from the immensely successful boy-band One Direction. Now no longer a mere "boy", he’s part of a mainstream in which music is carefully fashioned to gleam, the product of artisans of the kind of pop that reaches the widest possible audience – uncannily astute talent-spotters such as Simon Cowell and super-producers that hold the keys to dressing the songs up with catchy hooks, appealing riffs and contagious rhythms. Pop is now an industrialised hit-machine, with a seemingly endless supply of singer and songwriters trained in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This is, surprisingly, Judie Tzuke’s 24th album since her 1979 debut with Welcome to the Cruise. After early stints with Elton John’s Rocket Records and later Chrysalis, Polydor, Columbia, then her own Big Moon label, it follows on from 2023’s Jude the Unsinkable which emerged out of the Covid years and her own confrontation with cancer. She’s had just the one chart entry in all those years, at No 16 in the UK charts for “Stay with me Til Dawn”, but anyone who heard that way back then, or saw her on Top of the Pops, or heard it in the decades later, tend to not forget that moment. Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s fifteen years since Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan, two boys from Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, let slip their debut album. “Released” is not the right word, for Prologue (2011) was posted quietly online as a free download, the link sent to friends. Fame and fortune weren’t the goal – it was another f-word: folk, in a pure sense. Simple, quietly affecting music-making with authenticity and honesty at its heart. “We were very conscious back then of trying to make our two voices sound like one thing,” Ryan recalls. “And we wanted our guitars to sound like one instrument too.” The San Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s ten years since Tiga’s last solo album, the slightly tepid No Fantasy Required was released. So, it is something of a relief to discover that the Canadian DJ, producer, remixer and label head has taken a somewhat more direct route with his new disc, Hotlife.In Tiga’s 2026, harsh and sleazy electro-clash tunes rub up against more minimalist techno-punk workouts in an album that reaches backwards as much as it pushes forward. So, while there are collaborations with contemporary fellow travellers like Boys Noize, Fcukers and Maara, there’s also a hypnotic reworking of INXS’ 1987 megahit “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Blues? Maybe, in atmospheric terms. But not in the 12-bar, blues-rock or Delta blues sense. Or most other senses. The album title is a play on Miles Davis’ end-of-Sixties LP Bitches Brew which, at that point, was his most overt nod to the dynamics of rock music. Nonetheless, Bitches Blues doesn’t obviously use the 1969 set as a point from which to jump. But the reference sets up the first studio album from Hedvig Mollestad Weejuns – the latter word a slang reference to the trio’s Norwegian identity – as non-conformist, carving-out their own musical character; albeit just within the limits of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Superbloom is the third chapter in Jessie Ware’s transformation, over the last six years, into a self-proclaimed and full-blown disco diva. How does it differ from 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure? and 2023’s That! Feels Good!? Arguably, it leans further into Seventies stylings, as opposed to the more electronically updated direction of its predecessors. It is also juicy with sex and fleshy queer nightclub shenanigans.Ware is a hugely successful podcaster (Table Manners, with her mum) so she probably doesn’t need to make music anymore. This has clearly freed up her approach and she sounds like she Read more ...