CDs/DVDs
Asya Draganova
The title of Cavalcade, or a “dramatic procession”, could not describe better the contents of black midi’s new release. This cavalcade of an album moves between fast and noisy tracks like the singles “John L” and “Chondromalacia Patella” to the soulful “Marlene Dietrich”, the slowly building psychedelic repetition in “Diamond Stuff”, and the nearly 10-minute closing opus “Ascending Forth”. In fact, black midi’s record pulls together a collage of musical, literary and historic references that may initially appear somewhat random – a place where acoustic and electric guitars, a violin, a jazzy Read more ...
mark.kidel
Mdou Moctar is often dubbed as the “Hendrix of the desert”. He is not the first West African musician to be linked with African-American guitar stars. Just as you can hear echoes of John Lee Hooker in Ali Farka Toure, and Taj Mahal could collaborate seamlessly with Toumani Diabate, the young musicians emerging brutally into a world of international mining robbery and fundamentalist terror, naturally find inspiration in music from over the ocean. As with so much in music, the influences flow both way, or, from another point of view, there is an epigenetic kinship resounding through shared DNA. Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If there's one songwriting technique Twenty One Pilots' Tyler Joseph has perfected over the years, it's the art of combining upbeat melodies with angst-ridden lyrics for maximum emotional impact. It’s evident throughout his band's work (and never more so than on 2015's multi-platinum Blurryface); Scaled and Icy simply takes the formula and pushes the "upbeat" to the limit. In a recent interview, Joseph describes his latest tunes as "shiny and colourful" with lyrics that "address some pretty heavy things". Rather than being worn down by life's setbacks, though, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gary Numan says that his new album “looks at climate change from the planet’s point of view… it feels betrayed, hurt and ravaged… it is now fighting back.” Intruder is, then, a bleak, apocalyptic concept album. Given his last album explored similar terrain and that gothic dystopian wordplay has been central to his work for a decade, this isn’t new territory. Then again, his Eighties fans shouldn’t quibble. His chart-topping classics are riddled with po-faced Ballardian sci-fi so, arguably, it’s simply what Numan does.Where Intruder is different is the sound. Numan’s recent work often placed Read more ...
joe.muggs
Lambchop leader Kurt Wagner has suggested that the title of this album is semi literal: that he wanted to write “something akin” to classic, Great American Songbook show tunes, rather than his usual country-tinged style. If so, it’s for a rather gloomy sort of a show. At the beginning, it does suggest you’re going to get some high drama: the rather Leonard Cohen-ish “A Chef’s Kiss” would certainly fit in a middle of a musical in the “how did I get here, where will I go?” bit where the protagonist is alone in the spotlight on a blank stage. But where you might expect such a number to pick up Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Chris Petit's Radio On, his 1979 debut as writer-director, should be regarded as the first British psychogeography film. Though its protagonist, Robert B (David Beames), a DJ for the United Biscuits Network, drives from London to Bristol in his two-tone Rover to investigate why his brother has killed himself, his journey extends beyond his half-hearted sleuthing and carries him into as many liminal spaces in his psyche as the real ones in which he lingers during his journey. Unfolding over a few wintry days centred on Saturday, 10 March 1979, Radio On is often painted as bleak, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A complete fully translated and transcribed Obsidian Rock Audio Anthology chronicling the ancient spiritual technologies and exploits of prehistoric, post-revolutionary afro bionics and sacred texts from The Great Book On Arcanum by Supernal 5th Dimension Bound 3rd Dynasty young Kushites from Azania.”So runs the text on the back of the sleeve of the second album from Johannesburg’s Blk Jks, the belated follow-up to their 2009 debut After Humans. Helping them build from this inscrutable manifesto are guests including guitarists Vieux Farka Touré and Madala Kunene, vocalist Ali Magassa Read more ...
mark.kidel
Martin Ritt’s 1965 classy screen adaptation of John Le Carré’s bestseller The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is an antidote to the full-colour hi-jinx of the Bond franchise that ruled over the spy movie genre in the 1960s. By the time Paul Dehn, an ex-spook himself, and the screenwriter of Goldfinger (1964), took over as the main scriptwriter for the film, the public was ready for something a good deal less glamorous, and a hero who was a serial failure rather than a seductive superman.This is perhaps one of Richard Burton’s greatest moments in film – as the desperate and melancholy agent Alec Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
With all eyes on her in 2018, Jorja Smith’s debut was surprisingly level-headed and mature, filled with the introspection and storytelling of someone twice her age. This new, slender eight-track project feels like a stepping stone in her career rather than a follow up to her acclaimed debut. That being said, it’s a fine collection of songs which finds Jorja in a more world-weary and sombre head space than ever before.The second single “Gone” is an example of Jorja’s evolving storytelling. Backdropped by an elegant beat by Rahki, it’s a song about loss which makes use of narrative positions in Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“The Changingman” came to sound a little rich in the years after it introduced Stanley Road, as Weller settled into a style which grew atrophied enough to define “Dadrock”. The alias fits these days, though, as the man who pulled the plug on The Jam with a brace of Surrey soul anthems then blew up The Style Council with a house album again exemplifies the Mod aesthetic. Productively sober since 2010, he’s looking sharp in every sense, alert and precise, and turning his Black Barn studio into a pop artisan’s workshop, producing crafted English pop almost round the clock.Fat Pop (Volume 1) is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Anxiety, injustice and desperate disorder are the themes of these six disparate noirs. In one, The Dark Past, Lee J. Cobb’s psychiatrist draws a crude diagram of the brain with a line dividing the conscious and unconscious, and these films visit the choppy depths under the surface calm of suburban Cold War America, its terrors in the night.Venturing beyond the obvious classics, Columbia Noir #3 shows the range and intensity of Hollywood’s response to the post-war malaise. Often blighted by the House Un-American Activities Committee’s anti-communist witch-hunts, and increasingly shot in real Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
From her indie roots to the Grammy-winning angular art-rock of her self-titled 2014 album and the new wave glam of MASSEDUCTION, St Vincent has refused to allow her work to be pigeonholed. Her latest pivot draws from the grit and glamour of early 1970s New York: pay phones and back-street movie theatres, smoking in bars, cheap vinyl records, never writing your screenplay, last night’s high heels in a dirty subway car.It works. It always works because, however radical the so-called reinvention, hers is a collection of interests and inspirations you can imagine in the same space: just behind Read more ...