CDs/DVDs
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There’s a line in “No Home”, the staggering centrepiece of Lady Dan’s debut album, that perhaps sums up the project. “Wolves will never be my masters again,” the artist, real name Tyler Dozier, sings as the strings swell, in a voice like the wilderness. “Men will never be my owners again.”The distinctive minor-key arpeggiated riff that punctuates the track was, says Dozier, “originally supposed to be a worship song”. Dozier grew up up in Dothan, Alabama – a city named for the biblical location where Joseph’s brothers threw him into a well before selling him into slavery – in a strict Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Catch Us If You Can, the 1965 road movie starring Barbara Ferris and the eponymous drummer and guiding force of the Dave Clark Five, proved a more trenchant satire of capitalism in the embryonic Swinging ‘60s than did the box-office smash it was piggybacking, the previous year’s A Hard Day’s Night.John Boorman’s feature debut was as inventively directed as Richard Lester’s Beatles vehicle, but it couldn’t hope to be as iconic or as financially successful. Instead of the Fab Four at their wittiest and most anarchically Goons-ish, it had Clark playing Steve, a dour, cynical stuntman who Read more ...
Guy Oddy
If there’s someone who could claim to have proved Arnold Schoenberg’s pithy phrase “If it is art, it is not for all” it was Alan Vega. His and Martin Rev’s abrasive synth-punk duo, Suicide were famously detested by fans of the Clash, one of whom even threw an axe at him on stage when they supported Strummer’s more straightforward punk rockers in the late 70s. Yet, he was also worshipped by the Sisters of Mercy, Andy Weatherall and, somewhat surprisingly, Bruce Springsteen, among plenty of others. In fact, Suicide may even rival the Velvet Underground as largely ignored prophets of a new way Read more ...
Russ Coffey
A trend's been emerging, of late, for ageing rockers to actually sound younger on each new record. We last saw it with AC/DC's Power Up (2020), an infectious blend of carefree swagger and blistering solos. Now it's the turn of Cheap Trick to recapture some teen spirit. In Another World may not quite see the Illinois quartet at their classic best, but they clearly had a ball making it.Their new LP mixes crunching rock riffs with their trademark power-pop. Occasionally, the songs have a political edge – like the band's cover of John Lennon's politician-bashing " Read more ...
joe.muggs
The career of Raf Rundell has had one of the most satisfying trajectories of any in UK music – a steady process of self-realisation, from record label staff via DJing and artist management, through being a serial studio collaborator, to becoming a fully fledged artist in his own right. For a musician to only now, in his late 40s, be releasing his second full album might seem odd, but there’s something very natural about the way it’s all happened, which is expressed in the confidence of his sound which only continues to mature like fine wine.At the heart of this record sits the single “Always Read more ...
Liz Thomson
At 85, Peggy Seeger has lived in Britain for most of her life, arriving in 1956 as a Radcliffe dropout at the invitation of folklorist Alan Lomax, who had plans for a British equivalent of the Weavers. That didn’t work out, but the visit brought her together with Ewan MacColl, folk singer, song collector, actor and left-wing firebrand. They wouldn’t marry for years, but they were soon singing together and living together, criss-crossing the country, kids in tow, playing clubs, collecting songs from communities of fishermen, miners, navvies and gypsies, and preserving a history that would soon Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This debut feature from the young Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili is exceptional in many ways. It stands out not only for its hypnotic quality as a film that feels like that of an already formed auteur, as well as for the complex psychological portrait of its central female character, but also, rather more paradoxically, for the environment from which it has emerged.Always distinctive, the cinema of the small Caucasian nation of Georgia has usually been distinguished by its vivid local colour, but there’s nothing like that here: though it’s set in the director’s homeland – Read more ...
mark.kidel
Ballaké Sissoko is one of the greatest musicians in Africa – a kora player of extraordinary quality, strongly rooted in the Manding and family traditions that have nourished him. He’s also a born collaborator, with a sense of adventure that has resulted in very fruitful performances and recordings with musicians from his own culture as well as others from further afield.His relationship with the French label No Format has been immensely fruitful, not least the two now classic albums with the French cellist Vincent Ségal – Chamber Music (2009) and Musique de Nuit (2015). His latest release Read more ...
graham.rickson
Released in 1970, David Greene’s I Start Counting is as much an examination of childhood innocence as a psychological thriller. Fans of 1960s architecture will also find plenty to enjoy - never has Bracknell looked so good on film, with starring roles given to the town’s Point Royal flats and St Joseph’s Church. Adapted from Audrey Erskine Lindop’s novel, the plot reads like a Home Counties retread of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. Here, 15-year-old Wynne (Jenny Agutter, in an early starring role), has a crush on her older stepbrother George (Bryan Marshall), who she comes to suspect of being Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Now we are at the beginning of lockdown’s end and the gradual loosening of the pandemic’s grip on pretty well every aspect of our lives, what is perhaps one of the warmest and most uplifting of albums recorded under Covid conditions comes in the shape of Rhiannon Giddens and her partner, Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi’s fine new album They’re Calling Me Home.The title track opens the set, and it feels like it’s sung in prospect of returning to life after lockdown, albeit under the shadow of the toll of death the pandemic has wrought. Alice Gerrard’s song is a classic leave- Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who hasn’t spent more time alone with their thoughts than they otherwise would have liked over the past 12 months. Manchester musician Caoilfhionn Rose has been confined a little longer: forced to take a year off from music after she became ill on tour in Denmark, her second album documents a physical, emotional and spiritual healing. A sonic and lyrical tapestry that is part inward-looking, part looking to the natural world for comfort, Truly offers a musical balm to a world getting ready to step outside again.The root of that universality is Rose’s Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Glasvegas deal in hyper-emotion, personal dramas playing out in Spectoresque caverns of sound. Their signature songs, “Daddy’s Gone” and “I’m Gonna Get Stabbed”, wrung wrenching feeling from singer Jamie Allan, melodramatic blood and heat pulsing through his Glasgow tragedies, which pierced the sky and hearts from a root of dour realism. It was a place Springsteen and Strummer had been before, dirtied by the fuzz of The Jesus and Mary Chain, and elevated by worship of early Elvis.Making this fourth album was, though, more prosaically wearing. Godspeed’s studio was Allan’s spare room, making Read more ...