CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
This writer has often pleaded to move away from vocal homogeny in pop. The current value placed on technical skill and hackneyed vulnerability-signifying has become a bore. It’s limiting that Chris Martin-meets-Ed Sheeran or Beyoncé-meets-Whitney Houston are primary templates. That said, the voice of Aussie singer Toni Watson – AKA Tones and I – is a challenge, a cloyingly cute teen-squeak of an instrument (although capable of taking flight). In the end, though, her music represents her bountiful character, and her voice suits it just fine.Debut album Welcome to the Madhouse will be a test- Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s kind of surprising Jimmy “Jam” Harris and Terry Lewis have never made an album as Jam & Lewis per se before now. The two have conquered the world, more or less: their band The Time was Prince’s regular support act in his breakthrough years, as a star production / songwriting duo they’ve written 41 US Top 10 hits over the years, and they have 27 Grammy nominations and five wins. Their most famous work was with Janet Jackson in her imperial phase, but they’ve provided a golden touch for everyone from Usher and Boys II Men to George Michael and The Human League.But now, at the ages of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It can be hard to separate this century’s male British troubadours, these children of Thom Yorke with their frail quavers, uniformly insisting on sensitivity, but too often sounding like entitled bleats. Maybe, as James Blake has defensively indicated, they simply reveal an epidemic of depression. In a desperate decade, mild yearning, not rage, anyway remains this genre’s default. Coldplay even removed the blood from the tracks of their anodyne breakup album, like spilt wine on the carpet.Dig beneath the morass of maudlin vocals, though, and individual artistry persists. Tom Odell’s pop Read more ...
graham.rickson
The first 10 minutes of West 11 are arresting, with a sweeping crane shot over an ungentrified West London and a zoom in through an attic bedsit window. The credits reveal that the screenplay is by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, from a once-influential novel by Laura Del-Rivo. There’s a catchy, moody score by the great Stanley Black. The titles unfold over location footage that brilliantly establishes a sense of time and place; much of the film looks and feels so authentic.This was the young Michael Winner’s breakthrough feature, released in 1963, and this disc’s bonus interview with film Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Amon Tobin has released plenty of music under quite a number of pseudonyms over his 25-year career. Using his given name and aliases like Cujo and Two Fingers he has taken on trip hop, break beat, drum and bass, as well as film and videogame soundtracks. Now though, he’s added yet another identity to the list in Stone Giants for some woozy, psychedelic electronica that purportedly sets out to explore themes of love.While this stated aim isn’t particularly apparent, especially on tracks like the stoned “Stinson Beach” or the off-kilter “The Girl with the Great Ideas (That I Steal)”, West Coast Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
When Marie-Theres Härtel plays the viola, she is an astonishing force of nature. If great string-playing should combine the heavenly and the daemonic, the civilised and the raw, hers certainly does.She has a deep family folk heritage from the Steiermark in Austria (“yodelling was my mother tongue”, she says) but also spent quite a few years among the cohort of elite string players at the Vienna Conservatoire, trudging the streets around the Singerstrasse like Mozart (another viola player), and learning the magical Viennese art of how to function as an inner voice at the heart of any Read more ...
joe.muggs
Emma-Jean Thackray is not lacking in audaciousness. This is, after all, a white woman from Leeds barely into her thirties, raised on bassline house and indie rock, making music whose most obvious comparisons are with some of the most revered (in the most literal sense) black musicians in modern history: Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, J Dilla and more. And what’s more, she suggests this album will “simulate a life-changing psychedelic experience, an hour where we see behind the curtain to a hidden dimension”, packs it full of full-bore, third-eye-open omnitheistic Read more ...
peter.quinn
Album number three from Ivor Novello-winning singer-songwriter Laura Mvula sees her paying singularly personal homage to the music of the 1980s. Change, Chic, Michael Jackson and more are all called to mind at various points, with “Church Girl” seemingly nodding to the US songwriting and production team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, with its textural palate of drum machine (a Roland TR-808, perhaps?), hand claps and shiny synths, plus a final fade to the unadorned beauty of the human voice, a stylistic trait which Mvula uses to exquisite effect here and elsewhere on the album.Whether it’s the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra’s “Some Velvet Morning” is a clichéd indie-rock odd couple touchstone, and after an initial duet on Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” during the latter’s chaotic 2015 Barbican swansong, Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny Beth tried on Lee and Nancy’s threads the next year. Utopian Ashes followed, mutually developing music they recorded with most of Primal Scream and Beth’s main foil outside Savages, Johnny Hostile. What makes this more than pastiche or side-project is the songs, which cut deeply and coherently into adult relationships as they simmer and immolate. It’s an Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It takes a brave musician who thinks that he or she can do a better job than the combined talents of Russian electronica trailblazer Eduard Artemyev and Johann Sebastian Bach. However, Kevin Martin, also known as The Bug and a prime mover for such sonic experimentalists as King Midas Sound, Zonal and Techno Animal, is clearly not someone who lacks either artistic ambition or confidence. For his latest project, Kevin has taken on the task of rescoring Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 celluloid sci-fi opus, Solaris.It’s fair to say that Martin has produced an eerie and dreamlike alternative soundtrack Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Dance like its ’76”, Jack Savoretti (born 1983) sings on “Too Much History”, one of many upbeat synth-driven tracks on his new album Europiana. 1976: a sweltering summer when the charts included “Happy to Be On an Island in the Sun”, a slice of Europop by Demis Roussos, who would shortly become the unseen star of Abigail’s Party.This is Savoretti’s seventh album, conceived in sunny Oxfordshire last year with the singer-songwriter whipping up Mediterranean-style lunches served with lashings of rosé to get the band in the groove in the gaps between lockdowns. It was, he has said, very much Read more ...
John Bungey
With his band King Crimson laid up, the only chance to check out Robert Fripp's guitar prowess lately has been in the Robert & Toyah's Sunday Lunch videos that husband and wife post on YouTube. Their popular weekly assaults on classic rock hits are a game mix of the heroic and the cringeworthy. Toyah Willcox is someone to whom the label “shy and retiring” has never knowingly been attached.Anyway, here's a reminder of what Fripp can do in more serious moments, with his guitar hooked up to a container-load of digital gizmos, including a 76-second delay unit, as he creates his orchestra-like Read more ...