CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
At the start of 2016 shouty Essex bedroom musician Jordan Cardy – AKA Rat Boy – was on all those media tastemaker lists of stars about to imminently explode. Maybe he’s been in major label development hell since. His debut album’s been a long time coming and, commercially, it will possibly need that lost initial momentum. But that’s for the streaming public to decide. In the meantime, SCUM is a bouncy, youthful, over-excited Labrador of a thing, distortion-amped, loud, flicking the Vs, and generally bringing the kind of party where crockery gets smashed.The obvious comparison is Jamie T’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The story of the man (and it usually is a man) who voluntarily disappears has been told and told again. Wakefield is based on an EL Doctorow short story which is itself inspired by a short story by Hawthorne, so it’s a narrative with deep ancestral roots. In this iteration Bryan Cranston plays Howard Wakefield, a New York salaryman who, thanks to a chance train delay one evening, decides on a whim to absent himself from his own life.As this life involves marriage to Jennifer Garner, who has given him two gorgeous twin daughters, this looks like senseless squandering of a winning hand. But as Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The blossoming of modern classical into a serious commercial contender has been an unexpected recent development. Then again, it should come as no surprise that in a world raddled by stuff to hear and look at 24/7, people are turning to music that offers contemplative peace and quiet, that’s all about eyes-closed, non-verbal beauty. For it is the floaty, gentle, soothing styles that are taking off, not a resurgence in Wagnerian opera. The likes of Ludovico Einardi, Max Richter, Joep Beving, Nils Frahm and Jóhann Jóhannsson, often with connections to cinema, are offering rich, mostly keyboard- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Hope Dickson Leach’s debut dissects lives in a wintry English landscape. The catastrophic 2014 floods in the Somerset Levels are the background to the return of Clover (Game of Thrones’ Ellie Kendrick) to a farmyard home which simmers with unspoken secrets. The death of her brother, soon revealed to be a mysterious shotgun suicide, and the oppressive repression of dad Aubrey (David Troughton) are the barriers which need breaching before anyone can start to get healed.The bruised, low West Country sky looks dirty grey, staining the ground below. Country life, too often marginalised in British Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Girl Ray. Man Ray. Geddit? Earl Grey, the debut album from London female three-piece Girl Ray isn’t as freewheeling as the art of the man whose name they rework, but it is strikingly reminiscent of a particular strand of introspective 1980’s British music which balanced thoughtfulness with an awareness of classic reference points.While Girl Ray aren’t making things overtly explicit, there’s the Laura Nyro/Todd Rundgren piano arpeggios opening “Stupid Things”, and an Elizabeth Fraser trill to “Just Like That’s” vocal. The epic 13-minute title track, coloured with electric piano, organ and Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Think of Randy Newman and the image conjured up may be of a lugubrious piano man with a sardonic streak. Or perhaps the composer responsible for countless Pixar soundtracks. But there is more to the bespectacled songsmith than just his witty songs and orchestral themes. There are also his theatrical flourishes. And Dark Matter, Newman's first singer-songwriter LP in a while, starts in just such a cabaret mood"The Great Debate" takes the form of a discussion, weighing up the pros and cons of science and religion in an eight-minute epic complete with gospel choirs and spoken-words. Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s a rather shocking 20 years since the somewhat unfairly maligned second Black Grape album Stupid Stupid Stupid was released, after which the band went into freefall before imploding. To celebrate this anniversary, or more likely because it might raise them a few quid, Shaun Ryder and Kermit have left the rest of the band out in the cold and wandered into the studio with über-producer Youth for an album that, while it doesn’t hit the heights of the best of Black Grape’s output from the ‘90s, is considerably better than might be expected.Laidback, sunny and funky tunes marinated in a fug of Read more ...
David Nice
"Weary Death" – "Destiny", the English-language title, is weak by comparison – settles in a small German town, an impressive simulation constructed on a back lot of the Babelsberg Studio outside Berlin. He buys a plot in the churchyard, builds himself a dwelling with an impenetrable wall around it and casts his blight over a young betrothed couple, hoping that the young woman can conquer him and bring him respite from his wretched duty.This is the gist of Fritz Lang's early (1921) "German folksong in six verses", but its format allows for three stories-within-a-story casting far and wide in Read more ...
joe.muggs
The orchestral-electronic sounds which the Erased Tapes label epitomises exist balanced on a knife-edge of extreme tastefulness. Not quite fitting into either the classical or the club-electronica worlds, the style is closest to film composition – indeed artists like Jóhann Jóhannsson are increasingly bringing the sound right to the heart of the Hollywood establishment – and can be extremely popular: Erased Tapes's Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds are big names, easily filling big halls worldwide. But it's still viewed with some wariness by those self-conscious about their tastes: to some it all Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In media coverage of Woodstock, Santana always seems to be overshadowed by the oft-mentioned cultural significance of Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner”. However, go check their performances, side by side, for pure visceral thrills, and it’s Santana’s amped Latin explosion that comes up trumps. If he hadn’t spent the better part of the Seventies and Eighties turning out tedious jazz-fusion (as Hendrix might well have done, had he lived), Santana would be on many more 21st century posters and T-shirts.1999’s collaborative Supernatural album famously rehabilitated him as a commercial entity and Read more ...
mark.kidel
Many of the best Westerns, that quintessentially American genre, are rooted in a Christian view of the world: the dark forces of Satan pitted against angels, saints and the figure of Christ the Redeemer. In Terror in a Texas Town, Joseph H Lewis's last movie, made in 1956, the conflict between good and evil is laced with strong anti-capitalist undertones, perhaps not surprisingly given that the script was written by the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, with whom Lewis had made his most famous film, Gun Crazy, in 1950. In a small Texas town, a wealthy and ruthless entrepreneur, McNeil, Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Mark E Smith’s wit and the ever-changing, ever-suffering line-up behind him have established The Fall as one of the most seminal post-punk bands in Britain. From their classic 1976 debut Live at the Witch Trials to 2015’s acclaimed Sub-Lingual Tablet, they’ve regularly churned out record after record of blisteringly off-kilter and innovative jams and in true Fall fashion, New Facts Emerge both continues and contradicts this legacy.Following 30 seconds of incoherent slurring, “Fol De Rol” bursts in sounding vaguely reminiscent of Thee Oh Sees’ latest albums, with its glinting guitar lines, Read more ...