CDs/DVDs
Adam Sweeting
Following in the footsteps of its predecessor lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar (2014), where Robert Plant was also accompanied by his current band the Sensational Space Shifters, Carry Fire has been assembled from ingredients culled from virtually every continent. There are Indian and Arabic drones, spiralling 12-string guitar arabesques which bridge the gap from San Francisco to Katmandu, and drum and percussion patterns from various African locations, alongside shots of blues and folk and a haze of electronica. “Bones of Saints” could almost be called a pop song.Plant no longer positions Read more ...
Matthew Wright
All things considered, there aren’t many criteria by which this album, however cosmopolitan its influences, sensitive and precise its vocals and supple its rhythms, is really the best of the year. I’ve had a few sleepless nights recently over the growing suspicion that, for example, Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN, and several contemporary jazz recordings – to mention only what I’ve been following closely – do more that’s landmark-constructingly novel. It’s unlikely, come 2042, that Cubafonia will feature in one of those vox-pop retrospectives that populate the BBC Two schedules with such Read more ...
joe.muggs
From his days as a session musician in mid-Seventies Tokyo through global mega fame in Yellow Magic Orchestra and on, Ryuichi Sakamoto has always had a Stakhanovite work ethic. And that's still the case, even at the age of 65, and despite the fact he was not long ago given the all-clear from throat cancer. This year, Sakamoto has released the soundtracks to two South Korean movies, The Fortress and Rage, and performed two live commissions: one for Oslo's Ultima festival with dancer Min Tanaka and “fog sculptor” Fujiko Nakaya, and a live improvisation with long-time collaborator Alva Noto at Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Punk-blues veteran Jim Jones has been around since the mid 80s, but this year brought the debut album release by his newest combo, the Righteous Mind, and a record that may come to be regarded as Jones’ defining moment. Super Natural is shot through with gritty rock’n’roll, fuelled with fire and brimstone. Swaggering and sleazy tunes like “Aldecide” and “Boil Yer Blood” are urged on by Jones’ yelps and howls, Malcolm Toon’s screaming guitar, and Phil Martini’s voodoo beat. It’s incendiary stuff that goes straight for the guts with its raw and giddy ambience.2017 was generally a good year for Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I’ve only seen Olivia Chaney perform live a handful of times – once at a Copper Family celebration at Cecil Sharp House, 10,000 Times Adieu, singing unaccompanied with Lisa Knapp and Nancy Wallace, and at the nestcollective’s Unamplifire festival at the Master Shipwright’s Palace in Deptford one chilly St George’s Day. There, she performed solo, at the piano, and her voice and her music was sensational.She sang from her debut album of original songs, The Longest River, but I wish she’d chosen a few from the album she released this year with Portland, Oregon indie rockers the Decembrists. Read more ...
mark.kidel
A new box-set to relish, six French cinema classics by a cult director, along with a wealth of fascinating extras on a seventh DVD. The French film-maker Jean-Pierre Melville belongs to a class of his own: a precursor of the New Wave, an influence on Godard, Louis Malle and others, and a successor to French film noir directors such as Pierre Chenal and Edmond T Gréville.He is most celebrated for stylish thrillers in which archetypal gangsters and lawmen are pitted against each other in a complex duel that unfolds with the tragic predictability of classical Greek drama. These films are often Read more ...
Russ Coffey
2017 was the year I began to feel my age. It started with mild fatigue and soon progressed to general world-weariness. I wasn't the only one feeling worn-out. This year everyone seemed tired and angsty. From Brexit to Harvey Weinstein, hardly a week went by without some section of society becoming upset. The world was in dire need of some old-fashioned peace, love and understanding. I got my dose from Yusuf's The Laughing Apple.I first heard the songs at the album's launch party in London where Yusuf was playing live. On the walls were a selection of photos from the Cat Stevens Read more ...
mark.kidel
“Passion! You gotta have passion!” I still feel the full force of Tricky’s conviction, as I was filming him in 1997, for my film Naked and Famous. He’s right: music works better than words when expressing the deepest emotions.This year has been a passionate one for me – for all kinds of reasons – and music has been a constant companion, from the start of my year in Vienna, writing a review of Eno’s brilliant album Reflection: waves of subtle electronic sound, bound in near-stillness. A subtly condensed passion, evoking – paradoxically – his deep love of the gospel shout.In tracks Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Monterey Pop Festival in California in mid-June 1967 was a key event in the history of festival culture. There had been music festivals before in the US – Newport Folk springs to mind – but Monterey marked the point where the whimsical trend for “renaissance fairs” combined with the rising first blaze of rock music, born of psychedelia, all marinated thoroughly in LSD-flavoured happenings and love-ins. And, of course, it was filmed by DA Pennebaker, making it a visual blueprint, ripe for imitation, influencing countless generations into the idea of festivals as miniature countercultural Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Get Carter’s imitators tried to recapture the laconic violence of a very local gangster film. Get Carter’s makers swapped Newcastle for Malta, and a sunny, absurdist farce which is among British cinema’s unclassifiable one-offs.Writer-director Mike Hodges' intermittently brilliant career has taken several head-scratching turns (see also Flash Gordon). It’s to Michael Caine’s vanity-free credit that, having had the nerve to be unsympathetic hard man Jack Carter, he happily followed Hodges’ muse to become Pulp’s cynical hack writer Mickey King in the director's 1972 film.Righteous anger sours a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At two minutes and 39 seconds, Music For People in Trouble’s “Good Luck Bad Luck” executes an abrupt shift. An examination of whether a liaison would end up as “an empty cup” suddenly stops and the sound of a smoky jazz combo takes over with a melody bearing no relation to what preceded it. The composition unexpectedly passes into entirely different territory after Norway's Susanne Sundfør had been singing to her piano accompaniment, .“Good Luck Bad Luck” was, in part, inspired by Elizabeth Strout’s short story The Piano Player and the music forming the surprising coda conceptualises what Read more ...
Owen Richards
As we reach December, the year of Stephen King comes to a close with this 4K Blu-ray restoration of his very first film adaptation: Carrie. It was the first major success for Brian De Palma, Sissy Spacek and John Travolta, but how does the original high school horror hold up in the 21st century?Carrie is a strange beast – half satiric high school comedy, half intense psycho-horror. It shouldn’t work; how can film jump from domestic abuse to Benny Hill-style tuxedo shopping? But under the visionary eye of De Palma, both halves form a coherent and fulfilling whole.What dates the film most is Read more ...