CDs/DVDs
Barney Harsent
Over the last decade or so, there have been a couple of noticeable trends in broad-based, popular music that have segued from mild irritation to disfiguring infection. The first is the fey cover version, the awful balladification of perfectly good songs with the sole purpose of shifting units of plastic crap come Christmas. The second is the idea that club music would be a more profound experience were you to bolt on a full orchestra. This has resulted in the emergence of a kind of rave Glyndebourne for aspirational arseholes who did a pill once in 1994 – a night they Read more ...
Ellie Porter
You’ve got to hand it to Backstreet Boys. Who would have thought that 23 years after their first, self-titled album, the finger-clicking fivesome would be the best-selling boy band in the world? They’ve survived the departure of one of their members for a couple of albums, endured personal tragedy, formed a supergroup with New Kids on the Block, comfortably outlived rivals NSync, smashed records with a residency in Las Vegas and recently announced a massive world tour. Now on their 10th album, Nick, Howie, AJ, Kevin and Brian are most definitely a going concern – but is their new record DNA Read more ...
graham.rickson
Keda’s already in trouble for not living up to his father’s expectations. And then there’s an unfortunate clash with an angry bison which sends him careering down a steep cliff face and left for dead. Welcome to Upper Paleolithic Europe. Albert Hughes’s Alpha doesn’t contain many narrative surprises; its plot involving a lost boy struggling against the odds to get back home is straightforward in the extreme.Keda’s essential decency is signalled early on via chiselled cheekbones and glossy hair. Kodi Smit-McPhee succeeds brilliantly in bringing him to life, which can’t be easy when he speaks Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Russian trio Gnoomes have created small waves over the last couple of years with their woozy psychedelia. One of its defining factors is the way the band have utilised Soviet-era synthesizers. During the Cold War it wasn’t only weaponry and the space race that defined the endless competitiveness between the United States and the USSR; the technologies of sound were also an area of rivalry. For those seeking to make strange and wonderful analogue electronica using kit many miles away from brand names such as Korg and Moog, then, there are rich pickings. One such is Gnoomes drummer Pavel Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The disappearance of a band for a while calls for a re-set. A reminder, perhaps, of why you fell for them in the first place. "[10 Good Reasons for Modern Drugs]", the four minutes of minor-key chaos that opens the new album from The Twilight Sad, is exactly that reminder: a title written by a computer programme, a sound like an air raid siren, and James Graham’s raw, tender, aching voice, screaming “I see the cracks all start to show” in a tone at once unhinged and pure.It Won/t Be Like This All The Time arrives with its own mythology, the band’s staggeringly intimate records and live Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Why You So Crazy is a woozy, disorientating and spaced-out affair with a similar understated production to the Dandy Warhols last album, 2016’s Distortland. Long gone is the brash, anthemic guitar glam-pop of the turn of the century. In those days, the Dandys gobbled horse-size pills, wouldn’t touch you if you were the last junky on Earth, and just wanted to be Bohemian like you. They were hipsters, before that became a term of abuse, with songs littered with tongue-in-cheek humour and Courtney Taylor-Taylor’s snarky barbs. However, the Dandy Warhols certainly haven’t settled down into middle Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Well this is a treat. Darren Morrissey and Greg Marshall, London-based Dubliners who began their musical life in the fair city as front men of Deshonos, repeat the trick they worked with We Rise (2017), returning to their 2014 debut album And So It Began Again and re-recording an all-acoustic version.Called (not too surprisingly) And So It Began Again… Acoustically, the album was recorded as-live in the studio – two guitars, two voices plus some overdubbed oohs and aahs. And three bonus tracks: “Plastic Jack” and “Martha” which didn’t make the final cut of the 2017 original, plus an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Its Dali-esque sleeve image captures Goes West perfectly. Over its 10 instrumental tracks, the music drifts inwards from outside as if introducing the endless open space of an intensely lit desert. There’s a sadness-tinged reflectiveness too; one which could bring on tears and induce a need to look heavenwards for support.Goes West is the fourth solo album from William Tyler, the guitarist in Lambchop and Silver Jews. He’s set his electric guitar aside for this acoustic-bedded set. A full band accompanies him and Bill Frisell guests on the final cut, “Our Lady of the Desert”. John Fahey Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s not often that music of this kind gets a release outside of Morocco, and Arc Music and the producer/musicians must be applauded for curating such an intense, inside view on the ecstatic release of Sufi music across the kingdom, often drawn from a simple street or domestic setting. Jebda mixes the voices and music of six professional singers and players with an array of street musicians brought together by producer Abdesselam Damoussi, who encountered them en route through the Jemaa el Fna of Marrakech to his 15th-century riyad and studio, fitted out with Neumann microphones to record Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
If you’ve ever had an argument with a neighbour, watch Under the Tree and take notes. This mesmerising story of a dispute over a tree blocking the sun in a next-door garden is based, says Icelandic director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson, on an actual domestic conflict, though surely one with less cataclysmic consequences. But trees are relatively rare in Iceland and the summer is short, so too much shade is no laughing matter.Although billed as a suburban satire, the film is much darker and more complex than that, with death, loss, sex and broken relationships examined with a dispassionate wit Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s more than 10 years since Katie Doherty, a new-minted music grad championed by the Sage-based Folkworks collective, was named Newcomer of the Year and released Bridges, her debut album. And Then is only her second – which is not to suggest she’s been resting on her laurels. In the intervening years she’s worked as a musical director for the RSC among other stage companies and has appeared alongside Ray Davies and the McGarrigles – and, as “Tiny Little Shoes” suggests, she has had a baby. The album comes elegantly packaged, a gatefold with pull-out lyrics and credits, and the CD contained Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Monzen Nakacho is an old and distinguished part of Tokyo that’s renowned for its nightlife. It’s also the moniker that Worthing musician Gary Short has given himself for his 21st century keyboard wizard persona. Short’s output has been called “giallo synthwave” because it owes a certain something to the music of 1970s Italian horror films, most especially prog band Goblin’s synth-driven soundtracks to the movies of Dario Argento. With his second album, however, he has upped the ante and moved well beyond his influences.Almost entirely instrumental, except for light vocoder vocals layered into Read more ...