CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
Scott Hansen is a man that, in the musical guise of Tycho, finds himself seemingly unable to sit still creatively. Over his previous four albums, Hansen has incrementally filled out his sound, by bringing post-rock guitars, bass and live drums to a downtempo electronic groove, as well as recruiting other musicians into the band. Weather is no different in its desire to bring new sounds and people into the mix. Indeed, it sees Tycho’s further humanisation since 2006’s electronic solo debut, Past Is Prologue, with the addition of Hannah Cottrell’s sophisticated, pop vocals.After more than a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Mirai made animation history when it was included in the Director's Fortnight at Cannes in 2018, the first Japanese anime feature to be so honoured. It went on to be nominated for an Oscar. Director Mamoro Hosoda, who worked at Studio Ghibli before creative differences on Howl’s Moving Castle led him to strike out on his own, has been described as the natural successor to anime master, Hayao Miyazaki. Certainly they share extraordinary artistry and a fascination with children and the fantasies they create. But for me, Mirai lacked the otherworldly enchantment of Studio Ghibli classics like Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“He was an outsider, a purveyor of truth”, Sarah Jane Morris has said of John Martyn, whose rackety life came to a tragically premature conclusion in 2009, when he was just 60. He was a key figure on the British folk scene, and his distinctive fusion of folk and blues quickly led him into the realms of jazz. A brilliant finger-picking guitarist in a style often referred to as folk baroque, Martyn was also an early experimenter with the fuzzbox and other gizmos, and while his own hero was Davey Graham, Martyn’s admirers came from across the musical spectrum and included Mike Harding and David Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Releasing this record must be a daunting process for Steve Clarke. For one, it's his first record as a frontman and main songwriter, after a lifetime as a jobbing bassist and tour manager. For two it's a collaboration with his wife – they've been married a year, and together for five – and isn't shy of expressing the hopes and fears of an evolving relationship. But perhaps most potentially intimidating for Clarke, his wife is Rachel Goswell of Slowdive, one of the most distinctive sounding UK bands of recent decades, so it's inevitable her presence will generate attention and draw comparisons Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Weimar Germany produced some extraordinary cinema, with Pabst, Murnau, Fritz Lang and others creating a language that transformed the medium and is still a core reference today. People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag), a silent film made in 1929, entirely on location – itself unusual at the time – features a team that would make tracks once established in Hollywood. The credits include a story by Curt Siodmak, Billy Wilder as screenwriter, Edgar G Ulmer and Robert Siodmak as directors, and Fred Zinnemann and Eugen Schüfftan as cinematographers.The film tells the story of a group of Read more ...
howard.male
This debut is the best collaboration between a French producer and African musicians since Yves Wernert got together with Malian ngoni player Issa Bagoyogo for a string of masterful fusion albums during the Noughties. But his time around it was the electronica producer Débruit who was blessed by chance to encounter a bunch of inventive musicians in Kinshasa. Although "inventive" hardly covers it, because poverty dictated that KOKOKO! forged their instruments out of plastic water bottles and other garbage and junk. But don't let that put you off. A tight riff played on a one-stringed guitar Read more ...
Barney Harsent
On his last album, 2017’s acclaimed The Possum in the Driveway, singer-songwriter Mark Mulcahy presented a collection that seemed almost anthological – a series of vignettes each with a strong sense of individual identity, sewn together in a pin-perfect patchwork by Mulcahy’s distinctive tones. With The Gus, Mulcahy has taken his narrative approach forward, apparently inspired by the short stories of American writer George Saunders. His renewed focus lends a sharp sense of authorial voice to the album and the result is a more contained and structured piece. Mulcahy’s success Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Eight albums in, you can imagine why a singer-songwriter in the confessional vein of Ingrid Michaelson might be ready to look elsewhere for inspiration - and inspiration for new album Stranger Songs came from a curious place. Each of the album’s 11 tracks (Eleven, get it?) was inspired by Netflix’s Eighties-set sci-fi/horror smash Stranger Things - but don’t expect too radical a departure, because Stranger Songs gets its kicks from the series’ more universal themes of first love, friendship and teenage alienation rather than mysterious laboratories, monsters or The Upside Down.Opening track “ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Al Reinert's For All Mankind isn't quite what it seems. In a famous 1962 speech, President Kennedy spoke of the knowledge to be gained and the new rights to be won on the moon to be "for all people", though the plaque left on the lunar surface by the crew of Apollo 11 states that the voyage was made "for all mankind". Reinert's 1989 film cleverly dubs "mankind" into Kennedy's speech in the film, not that you'd notice. What purports to be footage of a single Apollo voyage is actually a collage assembled from film shot on all six missions, plus a pre-Apollo space walk and a glimpse of the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Don't let the presence of nerds' favourite Madlib on production duties fool you: this is a big bad bastard of a West Coast rap record. It's a cocaine-wholesaling, n-wording, gun-toting, dog-eat-dog-ing, murderous bastard of a rap record, in fact. The narratives are of jail cells, money laundering, betrayal and domination. When talk turns to politics, it's couched in terms of brutal power, paranoia and “puppetmasters”. Madlib's music is constantly oppressive, its crushing bass and dense mesh of samples and found sounds surrounding you like the most potent narcotic smoke, every detail painfully Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Endlessly gigging Northern Irish performer Foy Vance's profile first rocketed after touring with fellow singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran. The pair became pals, Vance went onto support the likes of Elton John, and signed to Sheeran’s Gingerbread Man Records. His fourth album is the first of a themed couple paying tribute to the southern US roots of popular music (the other will hail from Sam Phillips Studios in Memphis). How enjoyable it is depends largely on how the listener feels about what music writer Simon Reynolds terms “retro-mania”.Muscle Shoals Studios in Alabama (and before that FAME Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Anyone who saw Félix Maritaud playing the angry activist Max in Robin Campillo’s Paris ACT UP drama 120 BPM will certainly remember him (main picture). He came to the film as a non-professional, from an arts student background, and builds on that performance to deliver a visceral central role in Sauvage, the feature debut of another French director, Camille Vidal-Naquet. It’s a remarkable achievement for both, a harsh study of life on the street in which Maritaud plays a homeless 22-year-old hustler, Léo – though we don’t hear him called that once in the film, fluidity of names being part of Read more ...