CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
The French have developed an international reputation for a certain smooth style of electronic music. It’s the place where disco and house collide with something more urbane and far less sweaty. Daft Punk provided a defining moment with their 2013 album Random Access Memories, but the sound referred to is touched upon all the way from the louche downtempo of Air to more recent yacht rock sumptuousness from Papooz. And now L’Impératrice arrive to join the party.The toast of Parisian hipsters for a while, L’Impératrice (The Empress) now release their debut album and it’s sleek as an invitation Read more ...
Barney Harsent
And then there were two... again. Following on from the Original Line-Up tour, Bananarama are back to the core duo of Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward for their first album in 10 years. If it is true that co-founding member Siobhan Fahey’s 1988 departure was due, in part, to the pop chops of 1987’s Stock Aitken and Waterman-produced Wow!, it might be just as well that she didn’t stick around this time. In Stereo is VERY pop.When it works best, the album manages to fuse this tendency with the kind of grown-up disco savvy you’d expect from former SAW labelmate Kylie. The heavily previewed “Dance Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Fat White Family’s second album, 2016’s Songs for Our Mothers, caused something of a stir in indie circles and even generated a fair amount of radio play with its wide-eyed exuberance and chaotic motorik sounds. However, after the musical madness of three years ago, comes the sonic crash of Serfs Up! Bonkers psychedelic sounds are now firmly out of the window for Peckham’s Lias and Nathan Saoudi and their musical confederates. In their place come an electronics-heavy, purposely unpolished dirge with half-heard, reedy vocals.This is even more disappointing given the promising song titles, such Read more ...
joe.muggs
Impressively, this collaboration of three of pop's hardest grafters feels like a real group endeavour. Certainly, the multi-quintillion-selling Australian songwriter Sia's piercing tones and melodic style are the most recognisable thing here, but they weave around Hackney-raised Simon Cowell protege Labrinth's more understated voice and globally ubiquitous DJ/producer Diplo's military-grade Latin / dancehall / hip hop derived beats to create impressive coherence. It's not the trip-out the group name might suggest, but it's certainly got its share of odd twists, dizzying quick shifts and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Chemical Brothers just keep on coming. No Geography could as well be called No Surrender. It’s the sound of two men approaching 50 but still keenly attuned to making feet move on the dancefloor. Partly made using old synths relegated to a dusty corner since the duo’s defining first couple of albums, the pair’s ninth (tenth, if you count the sountrack to the 2011 film Hanna) is segued into a flowing whole and, as intended, sweeps the listener off on its beat-driven magic carpet ride.Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons’ initial success came on the back of gigantic hip hop drum-fuelled party tunes Read more ...
Owen Richards
Reviewing the soundtrack for a film you’ve not seen is a tricky act. It’s like reviewing a book based on its pictures – you’re missing the context of the music’s purpose. But then, not all soundtracks are created equal, and Wild Rose is one designed to stand on its own two feet. The film stars Jessie Buckley as aspiring country star Rose-Lynn Harlan, recently released from prison and struggling to balance her responsibilities with her dreams. Hell, the only thing that doesn’t tick every country cliché is the Scottish location.The album features a combination of familiar covers and original Read more ...
howard.male
Like Dylan when he went electric, and Waits when he went Beefheartian, Mark Kozelek (aka Sun Kil Moon) divided his fans when he moved from jangly elegiac rock of standard proportions to expansive, digressive prose enquiries into the crumbling state of a nation, and the crumbling state of the man just trying to negotiate it all. But my advice to dissenters is to surrender rather than resist. No, Kozelek hasn’t "lost it". If anything he’s found it, and found it in abundance. So on to specifics. In this instance his partners in crime are Donny McCaslin (sax) and Jim White (drums). McCaslin Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a remarkable lightness to the way Norah Jones has glid through her career. She once told theartsdesk that even in her early 20s, faced with the global hyper success of Come Away With Me, “I think I was smart enough to know at the time that it was money in the bank: ‘You can do what you want now, so do it.’” And what she wanted, fantastically, was essentially to be the musician she already was only more so: steadily getting deeper into country melancholy, lounge jazz dreaming and other romantically-lit hinterlands of the American psyche. And now, 17 years on, well Read more ...
graham.rickson
Finnish horror is a niche genre if ever there was one. Erik Blomberg’s directorial debut The White Reindeer is a seminal example, a beguiling, unsettling little film that’s two parts local colour to one part metaphysical thriller. Blomberg cut his teeth making documentaries (one of which is included as an extra in Eureka’s reissue) and if you’re curious to know about rural folk culture in 1950s Lapland, start here. Though set in what was then the present day, you sense that we’re watching a way of life that hasn’t changed in centuries. That Blomberg used a mostly non-professional cast and a Read more ...
mark.kidel
Circa Waves, the guitar-band from Liverpool, go over a storm at festivals and large venues. With simplicity, tightness and concentrated energy, they know how to play with the tension that can build between soft and hard, the yin and the yang of rock forms that continue to sound fresh because they're delivered with a sense of fun and the joy of making party music with catchy lyrics.This is their third album, and they live up to the promise they offered back in 2013, when they first burst on the scene with punchy and uncomplicated power pop, crafted to please, little jewels of songwriting, with Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's kind of vertiginous to realise that the revivalism of acid jazz was way closer to its 1960s and '70s source material than we are to it now. But the patterns that were laid down by the DJ sessions of Gilles Peterson and people like him back in the 1980s abide. Jazz fusion, spiritual jazz, hard bop, obscure soundtracks, Blue Note records: all have continued to demonstrate their immediacy on dancefloors. And recently, a generation of prolific and prodigious musicians have come to prominence whose interest in jazz is not as some musty, dusty memory of the past, but as part of London's club Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you,” Al Roberts (Tom Neal) says in Detour (1945), as if his native pessimism and self-destructive choices had nothing to do with his inexorable descent into hell.Edgar G Ulmer’s minimalist film noir classic, which has been beautifully restored for this Criterion Collection release, tells a rancid tale. Roberts himself narrates it in an increasingly feverish voiceover. Early on, one of the flashbacks to his memories that comprise most of the movie, shows him as a talented pianist backing his singer girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake) in a Read more ...