CDs/DVDs
Ellie Roberts
Tireless rockers Guided By Voices confidently play with sound throughout Universe Room, their eighteenth album in 10 years. Experimental in nature, it consists of 17 short tracks that take you through a non-cohesive sonic journey. It’s fun to listen to but it has obvious highlights.Opening track “Driving Time” introduces the concept of Universe Room with a chaotic mix of instruments and unidentified sounds against descriptive lyrics. The varied approach continues throughout and includes instrumental tracks, Beatles-esque Pop moments, spacey, progressive Rock, and an overarching commitment to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Weeknd is a global megastar, one of the biggest music sensations of the age. Last year, his compilation, The Highlights, was the second best-selling album in the world, and he has 27 songs with over a billion streams on Spotify, which is a record. His latest album is the third part of a trilogy which started, back in 2020 with After Hours. Unfortunately, where that, and its sequel, Dawn FM, were vibrant, contagious, catchy electronic pop, Hurry Up Tomorrow, is morose, lacking tunes and, boy, does it go on and on.There’s a fair bit worth listening to but, at almost an hour-and-a-half long Read more ...
joe.muggs
When you’ve achieved the truly sublime, trying to recapture it can be bittersweet. Cymande, for the mere three years they existed in the early 1970s, were one of the very best bands on the planet: a unique mixture of Rasta spirituality and African-inspired percussion with Curtis Mayfield conscious funk plus a particularly British melancholy and melodic hooks for days. It got them a brief flush of fame in the US, but nothing at home and they broke up disillusioned, before being gradually revivified by getting sampled by the biggest names in hip hop.Since the 1990s, they have reformed in Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Somewhat astoundingly, The Purple Bird is Will Oldham’s album number 21 using his Bonnie “Prince” Billy alias. A fine set of alt country tunes, recorded in Nashville and largely co-written with producer David Ferguson, it also happily suggests that he’s nowhere near the end of his creative journey.Despite many of these tunes being previewed during his headline set at last summer’s Supersonic Festival, this album is not one that has much in common with the likes of Melt Banana, Gazelle Twin or many of the other noise terrorists and experimentalists that normally show their faces there. But Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
If I’d listened to this blind, I would have absolutely no idea who it was by. This isn’t the voice I remember on those Spandau backing tracks. In fact, it’s a sound straight from mid-80s soft rock. If that makes you feel queasy, step away now.Apparently Gary, like the rest of us, has been having a bit of a rough time. The pandemic, doomscrolling the news, the sudden realisation he hadn’t properly mourned his parents – all of this built up to an episode of anxiety and self-doubt. You’d expect the man that written some of the most popular pop songs of all time (selling more than 25 million Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Nine billion streams a year. That’s the sheer scale on which the music of Ludovico Einaudi reaches audiences. The Italian, who will be 70 this November, is courteous and genial in person – I interviewed him in Montreal a couple of years ago – but is also, patently, a superstar.In his new, 13-track album, The Summer Portraits (Decca Records), he has nostalgic and personal stories to tell. The annual break from school in the Sixties would stretch out from early June right into the beginning of September, so “Punta Bianca” captures the kind of dolcefarniente, spaciousness one might expect. Read more ...
Katie Colombus
It would be really easy to get hung up on the definition for this album. Is it a new sexuality term? A holiday genre of technopop? A planet that will align with the others on January 29th?English singer Tahliah Debrett Barnett, aka FKA Twig, describes via X, that "eusexua is a practice, eusexua is a state of being, eusexua is the pinnacle of human experience".Conceptually, this is certainly an album that seeks a transcendental state of purity and perfection, through almost psychedelic experimentation in electronica, pop and progressive house via tinkling, abstract vocals and a mellifluous Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is Tunng’s ninth album, their first in five years, and marks their 20th anniversary by consciously going full circle to the gentle sound sculpture and folk melody of their earliest work. It is also thrown into fascinating relief by arriving just as the world is reeling from the loss of David Lynch.Their aesthetic has rarely if ever been compared to his – perhaps because they are so firmly rooted in a very English pastoral, while he has always been about wide-horizons Americana – but in fact listening to this record as social media is flooded with his pronouncements and creations, it Read more ...
John Carvill
The blurb that accompanies this Criterion Blu-ray calls Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which co-stars John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as scuzzy, low-ranking gangsters on the run from their bosses, “an unsung masterpiece of American cinema”. For once, that doesn’t feel like hyperbole.The film opens with Nicky (Cassavetes) holed up in a flophouse hotel, itching with paranoia and convinced his mob bosses have a hit out on him. He calls his fellow gangster and lifelong best friend Mikey (Falk), but then refuses to open the hotel room door and let him in. It’s a metaphor for the whole story, the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s been five years since the last studio album by the inestimable Mary Chapin Carpenter, the lyrical and intimate The Dirt and the Stars, recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Bath, the second of two projects with producer Ethan Johns released towards the end of the first lockdown. One of the delights of that grim period was Carpenter’s weekly livestreams from her Virginia farmhouse, Angus the Golden Retriever a frequent on-screen presence. While they were never curated and released on CD, she did record a live album at Wolf Trap, a 26-song solo set with no audience Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Lovell sisters Rebecca and Megan can be heard supporting Ringo Starr on his new album of country songs, while at the same time their seventh album hits the shelves, and with some heft and punch, too, on the raw strength of the scuzzy guitar-led opener, “Mockingbird”. As raw-edged guitar ballads with big choruses go, it’s a strong opening account for a duo who have delivered fine albums stirring together a pungent one-pot meal of Southern rock, electric blues and Americana. Their last, 2022’s Blood Harmony, won a 2024 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album (2018’s Venom & Faith Read more ...
joe.muggs
Of the big UK indie bands of the 00s wave, Bloc Party were always the most austerely art-rockish. Where Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons, Franz Ferdinand all to some degree or other had a dose of the vaudevillian and a bit of party “woohoo!”, BP adhered way more to the seriousness, alienation and introspection of their post-punk inspirations.This certainly didn’t do them any harm in the first instance – they were, frankly, huge – but maybe stopped them having quite so much crossover appeal, and you’re less likely to hear them now on Noughties nostalgia shows on mainstream radio and suchlike.It did, Read more ...