CDs/DVDs
Nick Hasted
Eddie Vedder’s maturing from a mumbling, suspicious victim-star of grunge into a wise elder statesman leading the last convincing big rock band has been heartening. This first Pearl Jam album in seven years rings sonic changes with the machine drums and electro beats of “Dance of the Clairvoyants” and ranges from industrial clank to Byrds jangle elsewhere, switching styles even during songs, as if down-time left them brimming with ideas, half-forgetful of the band they were thought to be. That doesn’t stop them relaxing into windmilling Who guitars on “Never Destination”. Grunge itself barely Read more ...
mark.kidel
Sufjan Stevens is an immensely creative musician – a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and composer. His work ranges from sophisticated dreamy pop that has influenced many, not least Bon Iver to grandiose and sometimes disturbing soundscapes. He grew up with a kind and passionate step-father, Lowell Brams, who inspired in Sufjan a wide-ranging musical curiosity, which is reflected in the stylistic variety of his work.A few years ago step-father and son collaborated on a decidedly weird album, Music for Insomnia: it was as far from easy listening as Stevens’s solo recordings came close Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Waxahatchee’s fifth album wasn’t intended as an escapist fantasy. Written shortly after Katie Crutchfield decided to get sober, Saint Cloud documents a journey towards self-acceptance; one woman’s reckoning with her past and its impact on the people she loves. But it’s a journey that is as literal as it is metaphysical, Crutchfield’s vivid lyrics and wide-open arrangements painting pictures of the places she has seen along the way: Memphis glowing in the sunlight as if on fire; tomatoes sold by the bag on a roadside in Alabama; homesickness on the crowded streets of Tennessee.After evolving, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
After Robert Altman re-established his critical reputation with The Player in 1992, he directed nine more films – including two of his most ambitious multiple-character works, Short-Cuts (1993) and Gosford Park (2001).In terms of notable speaking parts, his Kansas City from 1996 was a comparatively modest undertaking. Yet Altman's evocation of his Missouri hometown in 1934 as a nocturnal maelstrom of political corruption, Mob raids, and shaking jazz joints gave it an epic-intimate quality – like a Thomas Hart Benton canvas come to life. You can really believe you’re there, as the saying Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“No Control” feels like an instant pop classic. It opens with a brief introduction where layers of instrumentation are added in waves. There’s a restraint. Then, three-quarters of minute into what initially seems like a reflective mid-tempo ballad, a soaring chorus with contrapuntal drums and piano hits home. Basia Bulat’s gospel-like incantations reach the stars. Even so, there’s an intimacy.The Fleetwood Mac-esque “Your Girl” is equally arresting. It’s a different sort of song though – linear, with a rhythmic chug. The two are connected as each unites an understanding of dynamics with the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The crass Disneyfication of the Beauty and the Beast tale crumbles in the face of Chained for Life. Starring Jess Weixler and Adam Pearson, writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s Altman-esque US indie – a low-key autumn 2019 release now available on a limited-edition Blu-ray – mordantly satirizes the universal act of judging people by their appearances, along with patronizing attitudes to otherness. Its moments of tenderness, however, are stirring.Weixler (star of the 2007 vagina dentata horror comedy Teeth) plays Mabel, the neurotically woke star of a cheap modern-day “mad scientist” movie whose Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Buried lyrical tremors barely disturb Little Dragon’s blissed electronic R&B, on the former Gothenburg schoolmates’ fifth album. Though forming in 1996, they took another decade to really begin a career which has included collaborations with Gorillaz, DJ Shadow and Outkast’s Big Boi, and co-headlining the Hollywood Bowl with Flying Lotus. The conscious hip-hop and spiritual jazz influences which saw them jam on A Tribe Called Quest and Alice Coltrane tunes as teenagers have now filtered down into modern quiet storm soul, with female vocalist Yukimi Nagano suggesting the androgynous Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Let’s talk about “Blinding Lights”. What a sleek single, like an escapee from the acclaimed soundtrack to the film Drive, a polished riff on mid-Eighties synth-pop, ripe for 21st century dancefloors, one of the songs of the year so far, all topped off with the crystal falsetto of Abel Tesfaye, AKA The Weeknd. Is his new album, then, full of other treats that similarly step sideways from his trademark electro-warped hip Los Angeleno R&B, or is it business as (un)usual? The answer is that it’s a bit of both.The Canadian star has worked with everyone from Kanye West to Ed Sheeran to Kendrick Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The best place to start with Morrissey's new LP is the title track, which begins as a petty dig at the media: "I do not read newspapers/ they are troublemakers", the singer croons indignantly. But then, as the music builds and his anger mounts, Moz loosens up and his emotions flood out. The same dynamic is repeated throughout the entire album, with songs that alternate between mannered electro-pop and stirring, experimental rock. Opener "Jim Jim Falls", falls into the latter category, with pulsating, twitchy electronic noises that lead into sweeping melodies and dark lyrics about Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Perhaps remarkably, given both their careers as pioneers and inspirations in the world of ambient music, but this is the first duo album from brothers Brian and Roger Eno – although fans will treasure their music as a trio with Daniel Lanois on 1983’s marvellous Apollo. Thirty-seven years on, and the ambient topography of Mixing Colours isn’t a million miles from the lunar landing point of that earlier ambient classic, with Roger Eno composing a bouquet of pretty, pollinating keyboard melodies, whose quiet impact subtly changes the air like a late-summer scent, while brother Brian Read more ...
graham.rickson
Humphrey Bogart. John Huston. Gina Lollobrigida. Peter Lorre. Truman Capote! What could possibly go wrong? There’s the screenplay for starters: Capote gets top billing, and I’d long understood that he and Huston together wrote 1953's Beat the Devil on the hoof, script pages being typed up only minutes before they were handed to the cast. Huston adapted a novel by journalist Claude Cockburn, whose late son Alexander later complained that fans of the film “professed to find evidence of Capote’s mastery in every interstice of the dialogue… but his contribution was limited to some concluding Read more ...
Barney Harsent
At a time when stepping outside your front door constitutes risky behaviour, the short, sharp, shocking tales of misspent youth from Queensland pop-punk trio The Chats are a proper tonic."Short" might be an understatement, as it goes. The debut album from singer-bassist Eamon Sandwith, drummer Matt Boggis and guitarist Josh Price’s features 14 songs, none of which tops three minutes. Half of them are well under two. It’s amazing what they can pack into a minute and a half simply by discarding everything extraneous.These songs start at a sprint, throw everything at you and then bugger off – Read more ...