CDs/DVDs
peter.quinn
While some albums cram in more fillers than a Christmas stocking, Thought You Knew, the second recording from the London-based group led by the 2016 Jazz FM Vocalist of the Year Lauren Kinsella and multi-instrumentalist Chris Hyson, is all about restraint and depth of feeling.“The Therapist” ushers you gently into the album’s delicate sound-world, underpinned by guitarist Nick Costley-White’s rippling chordal work. “Under the Tree” acts like an instrumental postscript – a dancing, minimalist contrapuntal web which skilfully interweaves layers of percussion, acoustic guitar and sumptuous synth Read more ...
Barney Harsent
A little over two years ago, The Arts Desk reviewed Hipnotik Tradisi, Black Merlin’s extraordinary first offering for Island of the Gods’ Island Explorer series. The idea is simple. Take an artist, invite them to Bali, let them soak up (and, crucially, record) the sounds, and see what happens when they process the results in a studio setting. As a business model for commercial growth, it’s unlikely to win The Apprentice, but as a clarion call to auteurs, it’s almost irresistible.There’s a danger though, of course. The first hint of clumsy execution and this could look very like a land grab – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This album has been about in virtual form since last autumn but now receives physical release. In more ways than one. Since theartsdesk didn’t review it back then, its reappearance on CD and vinyl gives us an excuse to now. After all, Swedish musician Karin Dreijer – once of The Knife – is fascinating, an artist who pushes at the boundaries. She revived her Fever Ray persona last year amidst videos revelling in sci-fi weirdness and orgiastic BDSM imagery. Plunge is the musical life statement that follows.Five years ago Dreijer divorced, shaking off the “Andersson” that once double- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Director Alex Barrett’s wordless London Symphony is a conscious throwback to the silent "city symphonies" of the 1920s, specifically Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 Berlin - Symphony of a Great City. You’re also reminded of Terence Davies’s Of Time and the City and Patrick Keillor’s discursive Robinson trilogy, though these feature narrators.Mostly monochrome and made in close collaboration with composer James McWilliam, London Symphony grew out of a silent short about Hungerford Bridge. Just a little longer than an hour, it’s divided into four themed movements, in Barrett’s words “an optimistic Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Dreamweapon’s second album, SOL, is a spaced-out trip of oceanic psychedelia that calls on the listener to pay full attention and sink into their potent motoric vibes. Free of any hippy-dippy fluffiness, Dreamweapon may be experts in laying down the drone but they are also locked firmly into the groove.Dreamweapon are a trio from Porto who have named themselves after the title of a Spacemen 3 bootleg – and it’s not some ironic joke. João Campos Costa, Edgar Moreira and 10.000 Russos’ bassist, Andre Couto have created SOL from four improvised compositions that are by turns thoughtful and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A trio from Halifax with a collective age of 56, Orielles aren’t shy about revealing their musical enthusiasms. References to A Certain Ratio. ESG, Happy Mondays, the Housemartins, Orange Juice, the Pastels and the Soup Dragons pepper their interviews. The band’s first rehearsal was dedicated to mastering The Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks”. Much of the music they cite was made before they were born.The connections with the past go further than preferred musical flavours. The father of bassist/vocalist Esmé Hand-Halford and her drummer sister Sidonie was in the indie band the Train Set, who were Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not 1982 any more, but there’s still some disagreement between Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford about whether Rick Deckard was or was not a replicant. Thirty-five years on, Dennis Villeneuve’s belated sequel to Blade Runner may trigger another insoluble debate: is Blade Runner 2049 the real thing or not? A mythic masterpiece in the key of orange, or a snoozathon bloated with soulless self-regard? Maybe it’s neither. Or both? Its release as a home entertainment will give legs to the Socratic dialogue.A fiery ambient amber is the prevailing hue of the great outdoors in post-apocaltypic Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Young Echo is a sprawling Bristolian collective, comprised of individual musicians Jabu, Vessel, Kahn, Neek, Ishan Sound, Ossia, Manonmars, Bogues, Rider Shafique, chester giles [sic] and Jasmine, who combine and re-combine in various permutations like Bandulu, FuckPunk, O$VMV$M, Gorgon Sound and ASDA. But here, for the second time in album format, they've put everything together under the one name and allowed it to blur together into something that is, frankly, very, very Bristol indeed. Slow, slow, beats with deep, deep bass, murmured rapping and poetry, plaintive melodic vocals, and a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Joan Wasser - aka Joan as Police Woman - has a reputation as one of the coolest women in rock. Look beyond the strong-female image, though, and you'll find a soul plagued by sensitivity and pain. That's the basis of Damned Devotion. It's a heartbreak hotel of an album. And down in the bar, they are playing sleazy electro-pop and Seventies soul.Or to put it another way, the new album mixes the styles of her previous three. Languid, smoky vocals sit on top of arrangements that are so sparse, it's almost disarming. Apparently, the songwriting process began with Wasser Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There are two types of people - those who are fans of Belle & Sebastian and those who are too ashamed to admit such plebbishness regarding musical tastes, that they won’t admit to not being fans of the Glaswegian band.Unfortunately I fall into the latter camp. I wish I got this band, I really do. I wish I was one of those cool-kid superfans. So I’m trying my darndest with this triplicate mini-album release – a hark back to their 1997 album of the same order.“Sweet Dew Lee” hearteningly opens with a duet that promises the filmic soundscapes of earlier albums, but ends up being try-hard Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The spiky, angular traditional songs that made up Stick in the Wheel's first album From Here were stripped of any varnish and any trappings of nostalgia to become direct, upfront, yanked from the parlour into the street, and out of the past into the turbulence of the present. They were songs that had things to say and ears to listen, and the album won them the fRoots and Mojo Folk Album of the Year and four nominations in the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.Since then, Stick in the Wheel have toured with the likes of Dublin’s brilliant young band Lankum, released the fascinating From Here: English Read more ...
graham.rickson
Watching what remains of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (L’Enfer) serves to remind us just how good his earlier work was. Inferno marked the beginning of the end, its shambolic production beginning Clouzot’s descent into obscurity. But Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s documentary is a treat, the film’s tragicomic history interspersed with archive footage and new dramatisations of key scenes. The hugely anticipated Inferno was started in 1964, four years after Clouzot’s previous film, the Brigitte Bardo-starrer La vérité, which had been a huge box-office success. What was potentially Read more ...