CDs/DVDs
Owen Richards
Producer extraordinaire Mark Ronson has set his sights on soundtracking the summer once again, with his latest collaborative collection of pop gems. It's a seductive album, packed with enough hooks to conquer the charts for the next few months.The lead singles set the tone for the album's raison d'être: bittersweet pop. "Nothing Breaks Like a Heart" with Miley Cyrus is an immediate standout dancefloor filler, country sensibilities thrown through nightclub drama. The Lykke Li-led "Late Night Feelings" doubles down on this mood, evoking a night time drive through Miami. Its magic lies in a Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Willie’s new album opens with the singer calling out to all the tired old horses saved from the knackers and put out to pasture. It’s not just something he does in song, but in life. It’s co-written with Sonny Throckmorton, an old mucker of the Zen cowboy who lives next to Nelson’s Luck studio in Texas – and next door, too, to the stud of 60 or so retired horses saved by Nelson from the slaughterhouse and given a retirement home on his ranch. It’s hard not to love a man for that kind of act of kindness to the world’s beasts of burden, and the song’s a good-un, too, sweet, tender, and direct. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If contemplated without a context, Loops in the Secret Society initially appears to be a bold 68-minute, double-album fusion of Hawkwind’s hum and whir, Krautrock insistence, spacey electronica and folky otherness. Jane Weaver’s voice is disembodied, as if in a trance. As one track bleeds into another, ambient linking pieces instil the feeling this is more a lengthy mood piece rather than a series of individual compositions. If the soundtrack were needed to a flickering silent film about artificial creatures escaping from underworld bondage and emerging into the daylight, this is it.However, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Madonna is the queen of reinvention and Madame X, her 14th studio album, marks another new brilliant, bonkers chapter in her 37-year career. The 13-track CD (15 on the deluxe version) was inspired by a recent spell living in Lisbon, where she clearly imbibed the Portuguese diaspora's music. Madame X is stuffed with influences, with African drumbeats and Latin grooves to New York club sounds and big ballads, taking in a bit of Cape Verde batuque and Puerto Rican reggaeton too.It's a mixed bag: there are some bangers including “Come Alive”, which is made for live performance and will fill the Read more ...
Asya Draganova
Four years after their debut album, the American supergroup the Hollywood Vampires has reached a new musical level with Rise while maintaining a distinct enthusiasm for playing in a classic rock’n’roll style. The combination of the characters and talents of iconic eccentric Alice Cooper, Hollywood celebrity Johnny Depp and Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry has produced an energetic record, where the fun of making music together is audible and contagious. In contrast to the previous album, which was dedicated to reinventing tracks loved by generations of fans, however, Rise is dominated by Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Revisiting Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career for the first time since I saw it in its year of release, 1979, is a mixed experience. I was close in age to its heroine and it was one of the first mainstream feature films I’d ever seen directed by a woman. At the time, it seemed incredibly exciting and inspiring and while the film is still impressive and enjoyable, it’s somewhat less radical than I remembered. The film’s glorious costumes, ornate interiors and repetitive piano score threaten to obliterate its relatively subtle feminist message: I remembered it as more Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Nothing can quite prepare you for Western Stars, Springsteen's homage to classic artists like Glen Cambell and Burt Bacharach. It's not just the presence of horns and strings. What really leaves you open-mouthed is the voice. Gone is the trademark sand and grit, and in its place, we get an effortless-yet-weary, country croon.It's all a far cry from the Boss's work with the E Street Band. The musical arrangements hark straight back to a golden age of orchestral pop and songs like "Wichita Lineman". Melodies swoop, and strings rise. There are sad muted horns and tinkles of electric piano. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Here’s a strange thing: sit in a quiet room reading through the poems that make up Kate Tempest’s third album and her swirling collage of words drags you in. It’s an opaque concept work, mingling themes of a broken Britain, teetering on the brink of socio-political disaster, with the gritty, urban search for love in a time where sex is served up like fast food. However, listen to the album and the sheer density of gloom, against moody musical backdrops, eventually becomes just morose.Tempest’s journey has taken her from festival-friendly band Sound of Rum, with whom she made feisty music you Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This debut feature from Mark Gillis is a film of real anger and considerable tenderness. The anger is both at the general situation it depicts, and reveals itself in the particular when his protagonist Micky Mason (Martin Herdman) repeatedly has to restrain himself from acts of violence – a punch thrown, a brick through a windscreen – that would tip him over the edge. For a crucial few seconds he manages to hold himself back, but we sense the desperate effort involved.Sink is an East London film, its location defined by close proximity to the towers of the City, their insistent presence Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Anyone familiar with Calexico and Iron & Wine will be unsurprised by Years to Burn. The 32-minute album (one track of which is a short instrumental) showcases lilting, mid-paced, reflective, country tinged and acoustic-bedded songs fleshed out with piano and Mexican-styled brass. The strongest are those where the up-front vocal blend conjures Simon & Garfunkel (“Midnight Sun”) and CSNY (“The Bitter Suite”). Furthermore, the mostly Spanish-language “The Bitter Suite” is the album’s most striking track. A portmanteau composition, it resonates with the impressionistic approach Read more ...
joe.muggs
Sadness abounds in Avicii's posthumous third album. In context, even the plaintive single syllable of the title is full of pathos. It reminds of the real person, the Swede Tim Bergling who as a teenager discovered he had an unerring ability to hit the commercial sweet spot with his dance productions, and rocketed to global giga-fame. There, in the heart of the seething spectacle of pyrotechnics, screaming crowds, private jets and oafish “EDM” culture was sad, lost Tim: socially awkward, unsure of his own abilities, worked relentlessly by a voracious industry and eventually drinking himself to Read more ...
peter.quinn
On one level it’s a paean to stylistic pluralism, on another it’s a love letter to his wife. First and foremost, though, Taller sees Jamie Cullum staking out new ground as a singer-songwriter, adeptly aided by his long-time collaborator and friend – the conductor, arranger, multi-instrumentalist and producer, Troy Miller.Propelled by a tight horn chart, strings, Miller’s crisp backbeat, plus a backing chorus that includes the stellar vocal talents of Brendan Reilly, LaDonna Harley Peters, Sharlene Hector, Sumudu Jayatilka, Xan Blacq and more, the title track’s compelling drop-out point at the Read more ...