CDs/DVDs
Markie Robson-Scott
Mark Jenkin’s black and white masterpiece about clashes between incomers and locals in a Cornish fishing village was made on a 1976 clockwork Bolex camera that doesn’t record sound – all that’s added later, including the actors’ voices – and hand-processed by him in an old rewind tank in his studio in Newlyn. The award-winning result is timeless (he did start writing it 20 years ago), hypnotic and extraordinary – huge, hyper-real close-ups and grainy 16mm film stock popping with sparkles and flashes, plus an excellent cast and a powerful story-line.Fisherman Martin (Edward Rowe) has no boat, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Folk music has always thrived in times of adversity and danger and in times when (to coin a phrase) “nothing is real”. All the above apply now and folk music, its roots in the dirt of our septic isle, speaks to us eloquently as balm, warning, and call to action. As ice caps melt and seas rise, as coasts and woodland succumb to the exigencies of commerce rendering homeless their inhabitants, folk music offers a reality check in an era of corporate self-interest.Sam Lee’s name has been on everyone’s lips, in America as well as in Britain, since his 2012 recording debut with Ground of Its Own, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The first album from the Boston-bred songwriter Squirrel Flower opens and closes with autobiographical songs. “I-80” opens with the artist - real name Ella O’Connor Williams - giving up on lyrics, poetry and, later, giving up on love, its rootless melody channelling the road west to Iowa where Williams went to college before building to a relentless crescendo. By the album’s closer, and title track, though, Williams has embraced poetry again: the “swimming” lyric is a reference to her being born still in the remains of the amniotic sac, the shimmering heat of the hottest day of the summer of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Since first getting together at the fag end of the 20th century, Black Lips have largely played the role of garage rockers with a hint of country and western about them. The songs on their latest album, however, turns their schtick somewhat on its head. For Sing In A World That’s Falling Apart is the band’s most explicitly country album to date, albeit one that possesses more than a dash of garage rock swagger. This is all the more emphasised by an album cover that features the five-piece looking something like a 2020 update of the Beverly Hillbillies.Any shift in their style, however, has Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dennis Hopper’s first starring role, in Night Tide from 1961, as a naïve but curious young sailor bewitched by a siren, offers a strange mirror to his role as the evil Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). If anything, he offers a preview of the bemused Jeffrey Beaumont played by Kyle McLachlan in Lynch's masterpiece. Curtis Harrington made dark and wonderful work as an independent film maker, not least in Night Tide, now released in a 4K version, along with a very well-curated collection of eight of his short films, many of them as interesting in their own way as the more Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Remembrance of clubs past motivates Neil Tennant at 65. The melancholy and wit which gave ambiguity and amused bite to the Pet Shop Boy’s pop pomp has matured naturally into distanced reflections on hedonism. Recorded partly in Berlin’s iconic Hansa studio, Hotspot's vintage synths add a mechanistic clank and tactile detail to their music’s glide, the Hi-NRG pulse which so entranced them in the 1980s now part of a Proustian rather than active E rush. Having ceded their place at pop’s heart at the century’s start, they now burnish memories and paint characters like old masters.Ray Davies, for Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The middle-aged rap master of provocation has survived into an era of hair-trigger outrage. The wearily dignified response of parents of the Manchester Arena bomber’s victims to an Eminem lyric briefly assuming the killer’s identity has already defused a strictly local scandal, which pales beside his gigs’ picketing in his early 2000s folk-devil prime. What may now appear a tatty grab for headlines is merely the standard MO of a man who also drags John Wayne Gacy, Sharon Tate, multiple other mass American murders and “a Saudi attack when the town collapse” into his new album’s bloody Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Bombay Bicycle Club have a knack for quasi-prophetic titles. Their fourth album, So Long, See You Tomorrow, released in February 2014, turned out to be their last, at least for a while. For when the accompanying tour concluded at London’s Earls Court – the final event before the wrecking ball deprived London of another iconic venue – the band decided they’d had enough.They’d come together at school in north London and “after ten years of doing this we thought it was time for all of us to try something else”. Bassist Ed Nash released a solo album, singer-guitarist Jack Steadman immersed Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What a lovely surprise. A debut album with its own sensibility that’s come out of the blue. Aoife Nessa Frances is from Dublin and the terrific Land of No Junction – the title comes from a mistaken hearing of Llandudno Junction – signals the arrival of a major new talent.This Land of No Junction borders on zones traversed by Kevin Ayers, Cate Le Bon, The Eighteenth Day of May, the pre-Sandy Denny Fairport Convention, Bridget St John, Stereolab, Sumie, Trimdon Grange Explosion and Wendy and Bonnie.Highlights are many, but the nine-track album can be characterised. “Libra” is brilliant, a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Cakemaker is Ofir Raul Graizer’s debut feature, and the film must somehow reflect the parabola of the Israeli-born director's life: it’s set between Berlin and Jerusalem, the two cities apparently closest to him, and one of its main subjects – alongside weightier themes such as grief and loss – is food, especially the rich experience of cooking. (Graizer’s biography records how he studied film, as well as – a phrase you don't expect to find in such contexts – “trained in kitchens as a cook and will soon publish his own Middle Eastern cookbook”.) The result is independent cinema at Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Selva is the sophomore album from Uruguay’s arch tripsters, Las Cobras. More ethereal and even less direct than its predecessor, Temporal, it is a disc of dark and dreamlike psychedelia that brings to mind the possibilities of the Jesus and Mary Chain, at their most woozy but by no means passive, collaborating with Mazzy Star. Fuzzy bass, somewhat less than sunny electronics and otherworldly vocals duetting over a spaced-out drum machine don’t so much propel Las Cobras’ songs but guide them through a sinister and unsettling atmosphere that is distinctly shaded by the dark.“You wanna go for a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
According to Gabrielle Aplin, the delicate piano ballad which closes, and provides the name of, her first album in over four years was written as a letter to herself; and one penned at a particularly turbulent point in her life. “It’s not easy for me, but I know that I’m close,” she sings, as if willing the emotion into being.Dear Happy – which arrives on Aplin’s own Never Fade label following her 2017 split from Parlophone – is full of little moments like this: of resilience, reflection and recovery, providing a consistent through-line on a record which ranges from bubblegum pop and electro- Read more ...