CDs/DVDs
mark.kidel
Girl-wonder Phoebe Bridgers is one of the brightest stars to come out of the ever-renewing pool of creative talent that bubbles away in Southern California. Her new album, following the release last year of the brillant Better Oblivion Community Center (a collaboration with Conor Oberst), is one of those collections of individually crafted jewels that have instant appeal, and yet grow in richness every time you’re drawn, compulsively, to hear them again.The qualities that distinguish Bridgers have to do with her being totally herself and knowing how to write about it with the gift of poetry. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
When “Murder Most Foul” was dropped into an unsuspecting world under lockdown, the surprise was palpable, given that eight years had passed since Tempest, filled by Sinatra covers and seasonal tours. That it was a 16-minute epic that took Dylan’s writing into new areas (including No1 on Billboard) – and this on the verge of his eightieth year – is also astonishing. Mixing the modes of popular verse with his own telling twists of imagery and narrative, “Murder Most Foul” was a widescreen, mythological retelling of the Kennedy assassination wrapped up in a lengthy ‘king list’ of players, songs Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Norah Jones is writing good songs. The 11 of them which appear on Pick Me Up Off the Floor, the seventh solo studio album by the nine-time Grammy-winner, form a very strong album with a convincing and satisfying shape, a journey from hurt and doubt to contentment. It is probably her best album in ten years. That might seem surprising, given that the origins of the album have been described as “a collection of songs left over from sessions [..] some of which ended up on the singles collection, Begin Again.” But spontaneity has always been a strong suit for the Brooklyn-based singer. Her Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Larkin Poe are an American blues-rock band fronted by the Lovell sisters, Rebecca and Megan, both mainstays of the US Americana scene since their teens, at the start of this century. Best known in Europe for their fired-up gigs and festival appearances, their fifth album starts off accessibly yet the immediate thought is that it’s overly derivative. Once it settles into its stride, however, the listener forgets all that, as the band offer up a plethora of solid songs in various riffin' southern styles.The immediate reference point for this writer is Deap Vally, the female Californian duo who Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Jehnny Beth was the formidable and mysterious leader of Savages’ flinty monochrome attack, remoulding stark post-punk into gender-fluid shapes. Retiring the band after two Mercury-nominated albums, and returning to France after more than a decade of self-discovery in London, this solo debut is the product of an intense period of self-reflection, softening the carapace of her English persona to ponder innocence and rustic roots.Beth’s friend PJ Harvey laughingly dismissed her poetry as “terrible”, and even Cillian Murphy’s spoken-word turn can’t redeem some po-faced portentousness, or a chilly Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Was witchhood a vocation in the Middle Ages or, as seems more likely, a charge levelled at sick or troublesome women by superstitious neighbours anxious to be rid of them? One of the merits of the gravely beautiful folk horror film Hagazussa is the way it shows a young Alpine woman of the 15th century committing unspeakable acts not because occult practices run in her family, as the locals believe, but because she is psychotic.The Austrian writer-director Lukas Feigelfeld’s full-length debut begins with the pre-pubescent Albrun (Celina Peter) observing the agonising decline of her middle-aged Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dublin’s Imelda May, who made her name as a superlative performer of high-energy rockabilly in a way that reflected the music’s partly Irish roots, has just released her first poetry recordings: nine punchy, moving, sometimes humourous and well-crafted spoken lyrics, mostly accompanied by subtle yet atmospheric strings.She has a great voice, both sensual and strong. Here, the vocal textures and natural sense of rhythm and pacing serve her well. She had revealed her versatility on her previous album Life Love Flesh Blood (2017) where, in the inspiring hands of master producer T-Bone Burnett, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Swallow Tales is a great album. It took three musicians fewer than five hours on one afternoon in New York studio in March 2019 to make. But there again, it also took them more than 40 years.John Scofield became aware of bassist Steve Swallow in the 1960s when he was a teenager. Swallow was on some of the first albums that the young guitarist owned. Scofield then became his student at Berklee College in Boston, the age difference between them just over 11 years. “He was an established great and I was a rookie,” he recently explained in an interview. Scofield and Swallow first recorded a pair Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Prettiest Curse is the third album by Spain’s indie-foursome Hinds and sees them take a substantial step up from the lo-fi, C86/Pastels’ like sound of their previous discs Leave Me Alone and I Don’t Run. Now they have embraced considerably more expansive production values, as well as additional instruments and a noticeable influence from their native culture, and it’s all for the good. That said, they haven’t moved too far from their influences and throughout the album there is frequently a feeling that things could spin out of control at any moment and come to a premature end. Much like Read more ...
Liz Thomson
As news bulletins compare events in America to 1968, the mental jukebox spins almost inevitably to “Abraham, Martin and John”, first recorded by Dion – the price of a new record contract after he‘d got clean and split from The Belmonts. It’s not the best known version (that’s Marvin Gaye’s) but it made No 4 on the US charts and relaunched Dion’s career.It’s a career that's gone through several phases, like that of his old friend Bob Dylan, who wrote the liner notes to Blues With Friends and with whom he shares a religious period. These past couple of decades Dion’s been rocking with the likes Read more ...
joe.muggs
Will Westerman is not afraid of sounding retro. It's clear his influences are diverse, from jazz fusion to the bedroom proto-house experiments of Arthur Russell. But in their final form, his high gloss production, highly literate songs and fretless bass sound like something out of a creatively leftfield but megabucks studio-produced mid Eighties record: the likes of Talk Talk, Kate Bush, Roxy Music's Avalon and above all The Blue Nile loom large.Westerman's arrangements and DEEK Recordings owner Nathan “Bullion” Jenkins's production does an incredible job of doing what would have required Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
So what exactly is all the fuss about? For those of us from a cinema-deprived area, it’s been a long wait for the homevideo release of this much vaunted "masterpiece". And the trailer gives away so much, there’s probably little to surprise us, right? Very wrong.Hauntingly dark, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's lauded Parasite is neither simply comedy nor drama but something – dare I say? – genre-eschewing. A sinister atmosphere is pervasive throughout the two hours in which we watch plan after plan go wrong for the Kims, a desperate but resourceful Seoul family. It serves to add yet Read more ...