CDs/DVDs
Tim Cumming
When Van Morrison last released an album of original songs, during the Covid pandemic, it didn’t go down well. Indeed for many, 2022’s What’s It Gonna Take squats in Morrison’s catalogue like a toad in a fruit salad.“A self-absorbed descent into Covid lunacy” one critic opined. Well, we’ve all been there, dear, but here we are now, out on the other side, blinking into the blinding lights of incendiary wars, mechanically rendered intelligences and toxic substances masquerading as world leaders. It’s not a place for dreams and visions, but here’s Van Morrison, just shy of 80, bringing us a Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
While the Gallagher brothers scrabble around in the dirt for their rich pickings, an altogether more dignified experience is on offer from Sheffield. More is Pulp’s first album for 24 years, which is a sobering fact for those of us who still remember the first time. Thankfully, this isn’t a reprisal of past glories but a vibrant and moving work of some significance. They’ve ripened delightfully and are living proof that age does not diminish creativity or relevance.The title of the first single had me worried. While slightly dreading a return to having left an important part of Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Turnstile’s NEVER ENOUGH is a vibrant, shape-shifting album that proves the Baltimore-based band is fully committed to evolution. Since their formation in 2010, Turnstile have been known for injecting a fresh, genre-blurring energy into hardcore punk. With each release, they’ve pushed further into new territory, and NEVER ENOUGH might be their most fearless leap yet. While still rooted in the intensity that defined their early work, this record expands far beyond those borders, bringing in lush textures, genre-blending arrangements and a bold sense of experimentation.The album begins with the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Little Simz clearly believes in meeting situations head on. Her sixth full-length album kicks off, in every sense of the phrase, with “Thief”: unambiguously a lyrical barrage at her childhood friend and frequent collaborator Inflo, who Simz is currently suing for alleged failure to repay £1.7 million in loans for ambitious recording and performance projects.It’s a topic she returns to on at least two other tracks on the album, going into quite some detail about her sense of betrayal and broken trust and the impact of this on her sense of self and creative process. It feels kind of bleak that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away called the late 1990s, there was a scene known as “big beat”. It consisted of club culture sorts making music closer in flavour to rock, and easier to drink beer to than house and techno.It gave us both Fatboy Slim and Chemical Brothers, as well as a thousand long-forgotten acts (with apologies to those still listening to Hardknox and Boom Boom Satellites). But perhaps the most intriguing artist was Death In Vegas. Their seventh album is Spartan, stern, crafted, enigmatic and dripping with Berlin-esque cool.Death in Vegas is now just DJ-producer Read more ...
John Carvill
What constitutes a “lost classic”? I guess we can’t say it’s an oxymoron, since we readily accept the concept of “instant classic”? Either way, the “classic” aspect may be in the eye of the beholder, but “lost" is more easily quantified. Simon Perry’s slippery 1977 psychological thriller Eclipse certainly fits the bill, having languished unseen in the BFI vaults for nigh on half a century.Tom Conti plays Tom, twin brother to the deceased Geoffrey (also played by Conti), or “Big G” as he was known to everyone, including his son. Tom was present when Geoffrey died in mysterious circumstances, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Nick Mulvey’s first two albums, First Mind in 2014 and Wake Up Now in 2017, are among the loveliest singer-songwriter fare released this century. With his last album, 2022’s New Mythology, his ayahuasca-fuelled search for spiritual meaning went full-blown mystic. Where has it led him? To Jesus.The first Dark Harvest album (the second is due in the autumn) is touched by Christianity, notably on the slightly preachy “My Maker” (“God shares His secrets with those who fear Him”). But, like Bob Dylan’s first Born Again outing, Slow Train Coming, upon occasion the spark of religion lights the fuse Read more ...
joe.muggs
A couple of months ago, I wrote here that Lady Gaga was the godmother of the new generation of ostentatiously “theatre kid” pop stars – but actually, perhaps I was wrong and Miley Cyrus deserves that title. Ever since her teens, she has consistently gone the extra mile in adding pizazz and razzle dazzle to a gloriously messy discography and personal presence, smashing together her Disney Channel past and country royalty family ties with garish influences from across club and hip hop culture and a punkish, pansexual, psychedelic presentation that, given where she’s come from, makes her perhaps Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ready to Live a Lie is so sonically vaporous it almost isn’t there. While the album’s 11 tracks draw from continental European musical archetypes – specifically Italian disco and Eurovision-styled balladry – there is little solidity which can be grasped. The wispy clouds in the album’s cover image are emblematic.Taken individually, tracks can be lovely: slices of glacial electro-dance, of sighing balladry. There is pulsing album opener “The Other Days”; a glistening cover of Pet Shop Boys’ “Rent”; the languid, bossa nova-infused “He's Not You”; “Guarding Shell”, with its vague intimations of Read more ...
graham.rickson
DEFA was East Germany’s state film studio, operating between 1946 and 1992. Among its vast output were four lavish science fiction adventures, released between 1960 and 1976 and shown here in gleaming new transfers. Each one, to varying degrees, depicts the future through a rose-coloured lens, the world evolving into a utopian socialist paradise where disputes are settled peacefully.While Hollywood sci-fi films tended to resemble action-packed westerns set in space, these DEFA features are more cerebral and thoughtful. Their tone is closer to the humanist ethos espoused by Gene Roddenberry’s Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This album Firedove (Sony Classical), surely, has to be seen as part of a bigger story: that of organist, choir director and broadcaster Anna Lapwood, who, still in her twenties – just – has become an essential part of the (often cautious and conservative) classical music fabric of this country at a pace which defies belief. She works punishingly hard and has thoroughly earned her pivotal position both as performer and as advocate. Her passion for the organ as an instrument with a unique power to appeal to large audiences has already upturned perceptions, changed attitudes, broadened Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Morcheeba reach their 30th anniversary this year. The 1990s band, a unit once synonymous with phrases such as “trip hop” and “chill-out”, are up to album number 11. Their multi-million-selling oeuvre is based around a hazy combination of low-slung hip hop beats, stoned electronic atmospherics, spacey, slightly John Barry wah-wah guitar, and the luxurious voice of frontwoman Skye Edwards. Because the formula is always approximately the same, each album wins or loses dependent on whether they’ve nailed a sweet set of songs. On this occasion they do.Morcheeba has been the duo of singer Skye Read more ...