CDs/DVDs
Nick Hasted
Lana Del Rey has turned pop’s volume down, returning hushed intimacy to the music’s heart. Her collaborator Jack Antonoff was also heavily involved in Taylor Swift’s Folklore reinvention, but Del Rey’s idea of Americana remains very different. Its emotional thread is again pulled tight by mid-20th century, glamorous iconography, and fame and love met with equal, glassy passion.Del Rey has found a new way to be post-modern, decades after the condition became too total to be mentioned. She is authentically artificial, honestly romantic, a self-conscious construct lit with her voice’s sensual Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Indie rock has taken a commercial back seat, even if the music press still hasn’t quite caught up. Sure, there have been hit-makers, and bands that sell out stadiums, but overall, indie’s tide is very slowly retreating. Like any genre, it will always be about, like westerns in Hollywood, a classic formula, but the take-up of technologies far beyond the electric guitar renders it a retro curio. Like metal, it offers invigorating rejigs, rendered fresh by each new generation revelling in the classic singer/guitar/bass/drums chemistry. Black Honey from Brighton are just such a case, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ted Barnes is an outsider by design. Not in the sense of being wilfully awkward or outré – the music on his first solo album in almost 13 years years is gentle, harmonically rich, extremely accessible – but in that he has sidestepped standard career paths, and seems to be all the better for it. As guitarist for Beth Orton for a decade and member of the band Clayhill, he certainly had more than a glimpse of what music industry life entailed, hard touring included, but he chose to get off the treadmill and focus on composing for films, music libraries and acrobatics shows. And his music is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in Paris in the summer: Charade was the last word in old Hollywood’s glamorous cool. It was almost the last word for Grant, feeling if not looking his age. Its tricksy, trapdoor plot, with a baffled Hepburn hunted for a MacGuffin of $250,000 in wartime bullion she doesn’t know she owns, was also a 1963 encore for Grant’s Fifties Hitchcock thrillers (sans Hitchcock), combining To Catch a Thief’s breezy French locations with North by Northwest’s innocent on the run. Released just after JFK’s assassination (requiring the word’s overdubbing with “elimination”, since Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Deep England is Gazelle Twin’s reimagining, with the help of ambient drone choir NYX, of her 2018 Pastoral album. Based on their live reworking of the album from 2019, it is like the musical soundtrack to wandering through an unfamiliar English forest under the influence of magic mushrooms. For where Pastoral was angular and harsh, Deep England is haunting and trippy and is really something special. One thing it isn’t, though, is hippy dippy.Opening with the sound of church bells, “Glory” brings in recorders, ambient electronic drone and a female choir of pagan plainsong like a hallucinatory Read more ...
graham.rickson
Released in 1967, Viy (Вий) was the first horror film to be produced in the USSR. Based on a novella by Gogol that draws from a multitude of folkloric tropes, Viy is more disquieting than chilling, though several sequences still unnerve. Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov are credited as directors, but screenwriter and art director Aleksandr Ptushko was the film’s guiding spirit. Underappreciated in the West, Ptushko was a pioneer in the field of stop-motion animation; start looking for examples of his work on YouTube and you’ll see some astounding clips. Think of him as a Soviet-era Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Last month Willie Nelson wowed us with a new album. Now comes Loretta Lynn, a year older (89 next month) with her 50th studio outing. It must be something in that proud Cherokee blood they share.Born in poverty, married at 13. Four children and several miscarriages by 21, twins a decade later. A grandmother at 34. And of course, the hard-drinking, unfaithful husband to whom she was married for 50 years... Lynn’s story is a country classic, and like Dolly Parton she’s told it memorably in song, the hard-scrabble Kentucky childhood laid bare in “Coal Miner’s Daughter”, the song which would Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
What a very beautiful thing this is. From the off, this second album marks itself out as something most unusual. A piano-based instrumental opener ("Moon Rise") is reprised half way through the album ("All Shall Be Well" and "Paris") and at the close ("Moon: An End") – these masterful exercises in capturing the depth of loss would be enough in themselves. But there’s so much more. And the Anchoress heads in all kinds of directions to make sense of that big, nasty inevitability that lurks for us all.In some ways it’s desperately unfashionable (there’s something of the Seventies in here; in the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Somewhere in dance culture or other, the Eighties revival has now been going on more than twice as long as the actual Eighties did. Starting around 1998, it reached an initial peak in the early 2000s as the dayglo-fashion led electroclash, but though the eye of the press moved away, it never really died away. European or Europhile fusions of electropop and industrial, taking in more obscure styles like coldwave, new beat and EBM (electronic body music), have been current and fully functional on one dancefloor or another ever since. It’s squarely into this milieu that Louisa Pillott – “ Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Charles Lloyd is too graciously, fully alive to set in iconic aspic, his latest golden era still in mid-flow aged 82, when his surviving sax peers, Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter, can no longer blow. The worlds he’s passed through beyond jazz indicate his broad curiosity and importance. Lloyd knew Elvis when he was a truck-driver, dropped in on Dylan and The Band’s basement sessions, played with Howlin’ Wolf and the Beach Boys. He was on Fillmore rock bills before Miles, breaking down jazz’s walls.This third album with his occasional, Americana-leaning outfit the Marvels accordingly Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Man’s strange relationship with other species haunts this freaky simian horror film from Psycho II director Richard Franklin. Terence Stamp is Dr Phillips, an archetypal, lab-coated mad scientist, grumpily testing the limits of ape intelligence, and Elisabeth Shue zoology student Jane, unwisely offering help at his remote Gothic mansion, where the most developed ape, Link, is his besuited butler and begrudging factotum.There’s something of The Island of Dr Moreau in Phillips’ arrogant, eventually overthrown genetic tyranny. “He’s missed the bus by a lousy 1%!” he rails at the apes’ shortfall Read more ...
Guy Oddy
What the Rose of Avalanche were to the mid-'80s Sisters of Mercy and Singapore Sling are to the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Underground Youth have, bit by bit, become to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ sound. An undoubtedly fine band to be sure, but don’t they wear their influences heavily? Just as Cave did in the early '80s, the Underground Youth have even decamped to Berlin. So, maybe it’s just something that they put in the water over there.However, while Craig Dyer’s mob’s last disc, Montage Images of Lust and Fear, had something of the Bad Seeds’ early albums, their latest has a more refined Read more ...