CDs/DVDs
Barney Harsent
Blues legends Junior Kimbrough and RL Burnside have long provided inspiration for singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney, otherwise known as The Black Keys. They provided source material for the opening tracks of their 2002 debut The Big Come Up, while the 2008 EP Chulahoma: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough wore its influence on its sleeve. Literally.Fast forward nearly 20 years and the band’s latest studio album, their 10th, sees them going back to their roots with a set list that brings together cover versions of blues heavy-hitters by Kimbrough, Burnside and other legendary Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Shabaka Hutchings is a busy man. Not only does he head up the calypso-reggae-hip-hop-jazz mash-up that is Sons of Kemet, there’s also The Comet is Coming and Shabaka and the Ancestors, and plenty else that we don’t hear about, no doubt. His various ensembles aren’t just occasional outings either, and since Sons of Kemet’s exquisite Your Queen is a Reptile album from three years ago, there’s been albums and stand-alone singles from both the other groups. This means that there’s plenty of change afoot and anyone expecting a re-tread of the Mercury-nominated Your Queen is a Reptile on their new Read more ...
Asya Draganova
It seems fitting that Brighton, a city of youth culture and protest, is the starting point for a band like Squid. Their debut album Bright Green Field is a real statement: musically complex, energetic and entirely made up of new material. This record suggests a band that are determined to grow, as Bright Green Field balances the urgency and rawness of youth with elaborate and dark metaphors of social turmoil. Squid’s debut is also on track to become a classic for those who like their intelligently articulated yet angry post-punk and math rock, and more generally for those rock listeners who Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Rory Graham was always stoically familiar with life’s knocks. With a stage-name inspired by Galton and Simpson’s fatalistic family tragicomedy Steptoe and Son, and an underground hip-hop career hinterland in Sussex and London, this big 30-something man with a big voice and vintage soul sound was already richly experienced when his breakthrough anthem, “Human”, confessed he was only that.His debut album Human reinforced the message that a lifetime left plenty of room for mistakes, and moving past them. On a record comfortable with religious language as well as gospel sounds, key track “Grace” Read more ...
John Bungey
If you want to understand the psychic harm that prolonged lockdown can do to a man, then take a listen to Van Morrison's new 28-song set. Actually, you don't need to listen, the song titles say enough: “Where Have All the Rebels Gone?”; “Stop Bitching, Do Something”; “Deadbeat Saturday Night”; “They Own the Media”; “Why Are You on Facebook?”While Sir Van's vast catalogue is revered for transcendent love songs and joyous R&B, it also includes a sub-genre of complaint songs (“They Sold Me Out” on Magic Time or “School of Hard Knocks” on Keep it Simple, for example). With the singer stuck at Read more ...
graham.rickson
Raw opens with a bang, a distant figure on a remote country road stepping out in front of a car, causing it to crash into a tree. What’s really happened isn’t made clear until we’re well into French director Julia Ducournau’s 2016 feature. Part coming-of-age drama, part grisly horror, the film centres on young Justine (Garance Marillier), a fresher at the remote veterinary college once attended by her parents and where her sister Alexia is already a student.The campus is a bleak, brutalist outpost, and Justine’s first days there are dominated by a series of barbaric initiation ceremonies, the Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s funny how the most high tech music can sound very traditional. In the case of producer / instrumentalist / occasional singer Ziúr, it’s the tradition of her hometown of Berlin that is expressed in her whirrs, clangs and mutated voices. Here – as on her previous records with British labels Planet Mu and Objects Limited and Canada’s Infinite machine, and like most of the roster of her new home, Berlin’s PAN – the sound palette is hyper-detailed: glistening, crackling and booming with the kind of abyssal vastness and obsessional detail that only today’s processing power can generate. But Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Enid Bagnold’s 1955 English play The Chalk Garden, a Broadway hit before it opened in the West End, is usually described as a comedy because of Bagnold’s acerbic dialogue and droll appreciation of intricate employer-servant dynamics. If most of the wit was polished out of the 1964 version, directed by Ronald Neame and scored by Malcolm Arnold in a high-blown romantic style, that only served to emphasize the psychological complexity of the relationships between its three strong women characters. No one could accuse Neame's film of modishness. An Anglo-American melodrama produced by Read more ...
mark.kidel
Sufjan Stevens is not only prolific, multi-talented and wide-ranging in his experimentation, but he never fails to make interesting work. He’s undoubtedly one of the giants of American contemporary music. His originality and creative risk-taking have led to him being one of the most underrated artists of his time. His latest album – over two hours of instrumental composition and made during lockdown – is a daring, profound and fiercely personal requiem to his recently-deceased father.Convocations, hot on the heels of Stevens' s previous album The Ascension (2020) is a lengthy suite of both Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Thank you. I think I’ve told you everything. I do have a couple more tunes, but I’ll hold them back for next time – I don’t want to bore you, it’s better that you leave here serene. A nice chord like this. (plays F major first inversion). A good impression. Voilà. Merci.”These were the matter-of-fact and typically considerate parting words with which Martial Solal left the stage at the end of his solo recital at Salle Gaveau in Paris on 23 January 2019, aged 91. It was only announced after the event that the pianist had decided it would be his very last concert. The evening was recorded Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Let’s get this clear from the off, Marianne Faithfull and Warren Ellis’s new album is not an artistic statement on a par with her classic 1979 album Broken English. Nor I suspect, was that ever the aim. Instead, it’s a vanity project that consists of Marianne reciting a collection of work from the English Romantic poets of the early 19th century while Ellis and a few of his famous mates noodle pleasantly in the background. This isn’t to say that it isn’t a perfectly satisfying listen. It’s just not an artistic landmark and is more likely to soundtrack occasional moments in time rather than to Read more ...
graham.rickson
To Sir, With Love is a very loose adaptation of ER Braithwaite’s autobiographical novel. Reflecting on his experiences as a teacher in London’s East End in the late 1940s, Braithwaite’s commentary (one of two provided here) advises us that “as you read the book, that’s how it was. In the movie, they took huge liberties.” These included director James Clavell updating the action to 1967, and doing away with a subplot featuring an interracial relationship. The bare bones are unchanged, with Sidney Poitier’s Mark Thackeray, a highly educated immigrant from British Guiana, taking on a temporary Read more ...