CDs/DVDs
Sebastian Scotney
Tony Bennett has just turned 95, so it is no small miracle that this album has happened at all. Apparently he rang up Lady Gaga shortly before his 92nd birthday and said “let’s get this record done before I run out of birthdays.”The good thing about the new album Love for Sale (Streamline) is that it has a unifying theme. All ten tracks on the album – there are 12 on the “de luxe version” – are by Cole Porter. True, Bennett recorded less Cole Porter than Sinatra, but he is such an appealing character, and he can give such wonderful empathy to a lyric, that is perhaps the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Watching this restored print of Nicholas Ray’s delirious Western reminded me of the discovery that those pristine white statues of the Ancient World had once been painted in gaudy colours. When I first saw Johnny Guitar, it was one of those movies that played the repertory and art house cinemas in a battered, faded 16mm print. Seeing it on a modern TV screen in all its original lurid glory, the film is so shockingly garish it’s as if it had been reconfigured in 3-D. Although it did well enough at the box office in 1954, American critics hated it and its producer-director Nicholas Ray, rated Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Catherine Graindorge is a Belgian violinist and composer. Her second album explores the collateral damage of Covid: the dark sounds she produces have a strange beauty but barely surface from a grimness as dense as the mists in fin de siècle paintings of Bruges, the dark "Venice of the North".She was has written for films and the theatre, and it shows: these are soundscapes that evoke moods and images, avoiding the linear forms of narrative. There are drones. There is noise. Her violin, when it is allowed to be heard above the atmospheric din, is played without virtuosic flourishes, but Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There’s a strand of music that a friend of mine once referred to as “Caveman Electronics”, which snakes through the decades, never quite becoming a genre. It’s surfaced in scenes and moments like postpunk and electroclash, you can hear it in bands like Add N to (X) and maverick house/techno producers like Jamal Moss and Funkineven. You can trace it back through Cabaret Voltaire’s breakthrough and Suicide back to “Popcorn”, and even Joe Meek’s productions. It’s not about “lo-fi”, more “differently fi”: a relish in the fine details of distortion, the beautiful geometries of the most rigid Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Amon Tobin is hard to pin down. His music has mutated over the years. He initially fitted in with Ninja Tune’s late-Nineties/early-Noughties roster of post-hip hop stoner breaks, heavily jazzed. But in more recent years, he’s wandered into an area where glitchy soundscaping and avant-classical experiments are laced with warped sampling. Then there’s his industrially heavy Two Fingers crunch-step project. And that’s not even mentioning his extensive video game and film work. Now this. A head-battering, unhinged outing that’s uncategorisable, surprising, highly original, often also gorgeous. Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Neo Jessica Joshua, better known as Nao, has been consistently putting out good – often excellent – music since 2014. Back then she was making off-kilter, funky R&B that felt both retro and futuristic. Since then she’s grown as an artist on both 2016’s For All We Know and 2018’s Saturn. And Then Life Was Beautiful is her third album and the emotional accumulation of the past few years. After burning out and struggling with writer's block, an eye-opening trip to South Africa and becoming a mother were catalysts for a renewed creativity. As a result, these songs feel Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lindsey Buckingham was last in and first out of Fleetwood Mac’s classic line-up (quitting in 1987, and forced out by long ago ex- Steve Nicks in 2018). He was a would-be Brian Wilson in their midst, an unlooked for, maverick auteur whose first hit “Go Your Own Way” helped conquer the world, and confounding follow-up Tusk demanded much more.This is his seventh solo album, and they all exist in the Mac saga’s interstices, even as he strives for a purer, separate art, muddied by the band’s cocaine-clouded excess and soap opera along the way.Lindsey Buckingham was recorded after typical turmoil Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Switching between upstairs and downstairs makes your soul melt, in this first of three Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter films, a savage class satire filmed in the freezing winter of 1963.Hugo (Dirk Bogarde) is the obsequious, insinuating butler who comes to stay with minor, lounging young aristo Tony (James Fox) at his new Chelsea pad. The pricey house is soggy with rot when Hugo arrives, though louche Tony, declaring himself “cosy” with his bed of newspapers and three-bar fire, sees nothing amiss. Hugo’s dubious, papier-mâché provenance as a gentleman’s gentleman is clear from his first Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Public Service Broadcasting’s latest addition in their on-going string of concept albums could reasonably be described as an impressionistic musical portrait of Weimar-era Berlin, even if it steers well clear of anything resembling the decadent jazzy sounds of the time.That said, there’s considerably more to Willgoose and Wrigglesworth’s exploration of mainland Europe’s premier capital city than a history lesson of its inter-war years. For, even if some of the influences on Bright Magic transparently include the films of Walter Ruttmann and Viking Eggeling, the presence of Marlene Dietrich Read more ...
Katie Colombus
For those amongst you who listened obsessively to the soundtrack of Call Me By Your Name, the idea of an album by cult singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens of ‘film music’ will probably fill you with deep joy. Although this isn’t a collection of music made for film.It’s a collaborative project between Stevens and Angelo De Augustine with films as their first point of inspiration. The pair spent a month in upstate New York watching films in the evening, then co-writing corresponding songs the morning after.The ensuing lyric edits, chord re-writes and production are much less about music that would Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Lil Nas X is good at being a pop star. Like, what could pop culture need more than a young, flamboyant, witty gay rapper from the deep south who can top the US country charts then just when it appeared he might not be able to live up to the success of “Old Town Road” lap dance Satan in the video for the Latin-tinged “Call me by Your Name” and storm to mega sales all over again? He is in many ways the culmination of the deconstruction of hip hop machismo, being from a generation that grew up on the dweebiness of Drake, the thoughtfulness of Kendrick Lamar, the camp of Nicki Minaj, the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Phantasmagoria, or A Different Kind of Journey instantly sets its controls for an excursion into the interstellar void between gaseous and solid objects. Opening cut “Intoxication” begins with lightly pulsing bass and a keyboard texture. Shimmering guitar floats over the top. Though more sparse and lacking vocals, it’s as if Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them” were performed by an earlier model of the band which had focussed on reducing performative grandeur as much as possible.There’s another evocation. When “Intoxication’s” treated guitar arrives, it has a Robert Fripp flavour. The King Crimson Read more ...