CDs/DVDs
joe.muggs
Londoner Shabaka Hutchings's other main groups, The Comet Is Coming and Sons Of Kemet, are pretty modernist. They incorporate dub, post-rock, post punk and rhythm patterns that recall London pirate radio sounds into the playing of his ensembles, with thrillingly adrenalised and / or cosmic results. This ensemble, though – convened in South Africa with with trumpeter Mandla Mlangeni – is altogether more true to a strictly jazz lineage. It's true, in fact, to a very specific jazz lineage: “The New Thing”, the explicitly spiritual, often fiercely political music exemplified by John and Alice Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Fans of Deap Vally’s raunchy, riff-driven rock are likely to be somewhat confused, and even disappointed with the band’s collaboration with psychedelic pranksters The Flaming Lips. Less of a full-blown partnership, it feels more like Wayne Coyne’s mob have merely taken on a female vocalist to recreate their recent-ish album with Miley Cyrus, Miley Cyrus and her Dead Petz - albeit a version that is bit more experimental.For while Deap Lips is certainly not feeble, it is as far away from such showstoppers as “Bad for My Body” and “Smile More” as could be and seems something of a lost Read more ...
graham.rickson
There’s a scarily prescient scene at the start of Henry Cass’s 1950 black comedy Last Holiday, a village surgery’s waiting room crammed with coughers and wheezers. Poor George Bird (Alec Guinness) is a tad under the weather too, but being mistakenly diagnosed with the fatal Lampington's Disease by an overworked GP proves to be a life-changer.Bird gleefully resigns from his job selling farming machinery, cashes in his savings, buys a second-hand Saville Row suit and heads off to an upmarket seaside hotel to enjoy his final few weeks in comfort. Under threat of death, Bird at last feels alive. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
From Tom Cruise soundtrack hit singer to self-described “pansexual, polyamorous, gender-fluid dyke”, and from LA country-punks Lone Justice to a Blakean songwriter in thrall to London’s phantom spirits, Maria McKee’s 13-year musical absence has ended in personally spectacular fashion.La Vita Nuova’s title is from Dante, and its new life is traced in this song-suite’s pursuit of a muse-lover, partly intended to be McKee’s younger, idealistic self. The mix of strings, brass and electric guitars also honours her late brother, Love’s co-founder Bryan MacLean, and there is an LA swagger to an Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The new Boomtown Rats album – their first for 36 years! – is both preposterous and rather wonderful. This is as it should be. The Irish band surfed the so-called “New Wave” after punk rock to brief chart-topping stardom. They had some cracking songs (“Rat Trap” is a gem), but were reviled by the era’s Year Zero arbiters of taste. This was because they were clearly a Stones-ish R&B unit who’d jumped the bandwagon, the outrageous mugging of frontman Bob Geldof sealing the deal. That, however, is all ancient history and they return with a set that’s as goofy as it is contagious, clearly Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“I’m not your fucking friend,” intones Baxter Dury as recent single “I’m Not Your Dog” begins. As opening salvos go, it’s right up there with the best of them, full of sneering hostility and fiery intent. As an introduction, it’s a writer’s hook – pushing us away while drawing us in.If 2017’s Prince of Tears was an exercise in autobiographical confessional, The Night Chancers feels like Dury’s first, full-blown novel. The songs here boast a keen-eyed observation that creates a tableau into which his sharply drawn characters dive and thrive.That’s not to say it’s not grounded in personal Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Moby is perhaps better known these days for his two ultra-candid biographies, Porcelain and Then It Fell Apart, than he is for his massive album successes of two decades ago. His memoirs are compulsive, unique windows into the screwed up life of an intellectually inquisitive, punk rock-spirited, rave nerd who accidentally, briefly experienced superstardom. But he’s also fired out a series of dynamic, varied albums over the last decade, including music the match of anything in his back catalogue (“Almost Home”, featuring Damien Jurado, from 2013, is one of this century’s loveliest songs). Read more ...
mark.kidel
King Hu is the original master of wuxia or martial arts films – visual feasts of balletic conflict and near-slapstick humour – and this 1979 film is one of his best, though perhaps less well-known than Dragon Inn (1967), A Touch of Zen (1971) and Legend of the Mountain (1979). The director's trailblazing and stylish work inspired the later renaissance of wuxia films, with Ang Lee’s masterful Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers (2004)The action, overflowing with complex and unfolding intrigue, takes place in 16th century Ming dynasty China, in a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Paul Heaton’s career-spanning compilation The Last King of Pop depicted him crowned and enthroned like a Salford Solomon Burke, or self-aware Michael Jackson. The unique kingdom he has staked out through The Housemartins and The Beautiful South is peopled by the unglamorous and unhip, and secretes bile in bumptiously bouncing, infectious melodies. The return of latter-day South singer Jacqui Abbott for four albums now has commercially shored up his career, and helped define Heaton’s happily married, mostly sober, Greater Manchester-residing middle-age. But though he pays tribute to this Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders contains many mysteries, the main one being exactly how such a strange and subversive film could have been released in 1970, so soon after the Prague Spring. That the author on whose 1935 novel the film was based was a loyal member of the Communist Party helped, avant-garde poet Vítězslav Nezval even heading the Czechoslovak government’s Film Unit in the 1950s. Splashes of blood seen dripping onto daisies signal the start of 13-year old Valerie’s transition to adulthood; what follows is a deeply peculiar, visually sumptuous fantasy.That we’re Read more ...
howard.male
Inevitably expectations were high, given that this Chicago experimental rock band are one of my favourite groups of the 21st century, and this is their first album for seven years. And at first it’s hard to know what to make of Echo Mine. There are only three traditionally structured songs (and one of those comes in two versions), while the surrounded tracks are largely meandering minimalist instrumentals of various shades and angularity. But then I discover that this is music for a dance piece by Robyn Mineko Williams inspired by the Chicago dancer Claire Bataille (who sadly died lost her Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Fire and Rain”. Who doesn’t recall James Taylor’s first number one 50 years ago! Born in Carolina and a “graduate” of the 1960s Greenwich Village music scene, Sweet Baby James has given the world some enduring songs and been part of some of music’s greatest scenes. American Standard is his 19th album, his first in five years, and it’s a refreshing dip into the Great American Songbook – “songs I grew up with that I remember really well, that were part of the family record collection”. As indeed they were for many of us.This is classy comfort food which will appeal to those familiar with both Read more ...