CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
Death Grips are a self-proclaimed “conceptual art exhibition anchored by sound and vision” who are forever threatening to split up, but don’t let that put you off. Year of the Snitch, their sixth album in as many years, is an experimental hip hop diamond in a world that really doesn’t need any more fake macho rappers or self-obsessed multi-millionaires, propped up by auto-tuned backing singers. With a sound that frequently suggests My Bloody Valentine going toe to toe with Run the Jewels, Death Grips are throwing out anything but smooth and mainstream grooves backed by gangster-fantasy rhymes Read more ...
Barney Harsent
With Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys seemingly hitting the best form of an already outstanding career, the bar has been pretty high for any other Furries looking to leap into pastures new. Not that this should unduly worry Gulp – SFA bassist Guto Pryce and bandmates Lindsey Leven and Gid Goundrey – their 2014 debut, Season Sun, was a gorgeous summer haze of an album, all dreams and driftwood. After a four-year gap, however, could they replicate the success? The short answer is yes. Yes, they can. But that seems a little perfunctory, so I suppose I’d better drill down on detail. Much Read more ...
joe.muggs
In basic creative terms of the ingredients that make it up, this is not a bad record. Hip hop production is in extraordinary period right now, and the six tracks on this EP have the best production that money can buy: woozy, narcotic, digitally surreal, vast in scale, perfect for heatwave listening as they boom and slither their way along, every one built around microscopic but lethally memorably bleeping hooks. “Tokyo Snow Trip” and “Kawasaki” in particular are extraordinary.The lyrics, too, in theory at least, work on this instant level: they're about money, stripping, weed, swagger, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Men in a wilderness, uneasy interaction with the locals, a horse… German director Valeska Grisebach’s third feature Western certainly does not lack the staples of genre that her title suggests. But there’s a vulnerable heart to this tale of cross-cultural bonding, with accompanying ruminations about changing human landscapes and fate, that moves it far beyond the expected.We first meet her protagonists, a group of German construction workers, at their dour backwater home base as they’re preparing for the next job, and sense something of the group’s dynamics. But the assignment ahead isn’t at Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A sight every music fan should see and hear once is The Proclaimers playing Scotland. Around 18 years ago I saw them play a giant marquee at the T In The Park Festival. It was like a rally, a roaring wall of joyful fanaticism (on which note, their autumn 2018 tour there sold out 30,000 tickets in 20 minutes!). If it was a rally, though, it was a righteous, tending-to-socialism one for The Proclaimers have a strand of activism in their blood. On their latest album, this is writ large.The title track sets the stage at the start, a two-and-a-half minute classic, one of their best, with punk Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In recent years there’s been an explosion in feminised self-empowerment anthems, perhaps best epitomised by Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” (This is my fight song/Take back my life song/Prove I'm alright song). For those in need of a masculine equivalent, Dee Snider’s latest album may prove a tonic. A word of warning, though: where the feminine self-empowerment anthem can sometimes veer into the trite and solipsistic, this male version is simply a preening strut of preposterous bravado. Once that’s understood, however, there’s much to enjoy.Dee Snider was, for decades, the singer with face- Read more ...
peter.quinn
This gloriously feel-good album offers irresistibly catchy hooks, a myriad of musical influences handled with an unruffled ease, plus a communicative power that thrills at every turn.Penned by the orchestra's MD and co-founder, multi-instrumentalist Paul Booth, album opener "Cross Channel" typifies the band's all-inclusive aesthetic, careening as it does between darbuka-fuelled rhythms and Afro-Cuban grooves of enormous heft, with pianist Alex Wilson's left hand driving the music to its inexorable climax. As evidenced by the freewheeling dialogue between Jonathan Mayer's sitar and Jason Yarde Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It starts with countdown to cacophony. A well-indicated pathway to absolute and total sensory overload. It’s calculated, clear and concise. The succinctly titled “Intro” hits like a sucker punch you never saw coming because it was never on the cards. The next thing that Sweden’s Echo Ladies presents is Kick-era INXS-level compression on “Almost Happy”, a track that answers the age-old question we’ve all struggled with – what would Peter Hook have sounded like with the Sisters of Mercy? This debut from Matilda Bogren, Joar Andersén and Mattis Andersson is awash with distorted synths, Read more ...
joe.muggs
He's known for his myriad collaborations – Public Image Ltd, Primal Scream, The Orb, The Edge, Can, all the way through to recent work with singers PJ Higgins and Hollie Cook – but Jah Wobble really deserves attention in his own right. A cosmic Cockney of immense erudition, he has created some extraordinary fusions of global sounds, ambient, electronica, post-punk and more. Perhaps the ideal illustration of his modus operandi is the incredible footage of him performing “Visions of You” with Sinead O'Connor and his band The Invaders Of The Heart, or maybe even better the interview Read more ...
graham.rickson
That this Peter Rabbit took more money in the UK than Disney's sublime Coco is a tad depressing. I know I’m no longer a member of the film’s target demographic, but I can imagine many under-tens being underwhelmed by Will Gluck’s family comedy. We live in a golden age of children’s cinema, the recent Paddington sequel showing that it’s possible to update canonical source material with wit and affection.Tonally, Peter Rabbit is a mess, an unsavoury stew of mean-spirited slapstick held together with the flimsiest of plots. And maybe I’m being over sensitive, but aren’t many of the gags Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As far as All Saints aficionados will be concerned, 17 years after they originally split they’ve pulled the dream team back together. Not only is regular “fifth member”, producer/songwriter K-Gee Gordon on board, but for two songs so is producer William Orbit, the man who, back in the day, polished “Pure Shores” and “Black Coffee” into their final chart-topping form. More to the point, Melanie Blatt, Shaznay Lewis and the Appleton sisters sound like they’re having a top time, bubbling with a joyousness which saturates their music.In the latter half of the Nineties All Saints were second only Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In spirit if not musical style, Musikk! shares chromosomes with late-Sixties ESP-label mavericks like Cro Magnon and Octopus, as well as The Residents of Meet the Residents, early This Heat and the Rock in Opposition collective. Sun Ra is in there too. The non-linear third album from Norway’s Skadedyr skips through jazz, traditional music, atonal scrapings and wind instrument burblings – all during the same piece. Musikk! defies conventions.It is, though, a focused suite of six disciplined compositions which range between just over a minute and close to 12 minutes. The key track is “Festen” Read more ...