CDs/DVDs
Matthew Wright
It’s an extraordinary story about a ordinary-seeming guy. No one can accuse the industry of promoting pretty blond teens this time. Rory Graham, the emerging blues-tinged soul star from the deep south – Sussex, of course, or the Uck Delta, perhaps – has built his reputation from the ground up, working as a carer, initially, as he developed the Rag’n’Bone Man persona.He’s now 32, but even before Rag’n’Bone Man, he learned music by doing it: rapping, MCing in jungle clubs, and singing at blues festivals his dad (who has a big collection of Muddy Waters and BB King) took him to. With a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the extras on the DVD release of The Wailing, South Korean director Na Hong-Jin says, “Every genre of film has its own strengths and weaknesses. By combining many genres you could say that I was able to build and emphasise the strengths, while diminishing the weaknesses.” And indeed, over its monumental 156 minutes, The Wailing attempts to meld comedy, an overt homage to The Exorcist, zombie movie tropes and social commentary. Unfortunately, the different stylistic elements play off against each other instead of melding into a cohesive whole, making The Wailing lack consistent tension.The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
So where’s Devlin been? Last heard of four years ago, he was hot property on the back of two critically acclaimed, commercially successful albums. He was Dagenham’s own Eminem, the only white guy in the grime crossover A-league, yet it’s peers such as Skepta, Wiley, and Wretch 32 who are now the big names. So what happened?“I’ve been away for a while,” he spits on the opening title track, “’Cause shit weren’t sweet like Tate & Lyle, I held it together with a faker’s smile.” He parted ways with “men that I thought were tight” (the new album’s not on Island, like the last two), and ended up Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Elbow fans will remember how 2014's The Take Off and Landing of Everything took the band's existing sound and twisted it a fraction. The result was a piece of work that, above all, felt powerfully uneasy. Not simply because of the personal heartache it expressed but also the impression of an entire world out of kilter. How interesting then that, now half the world feels unsettled, Elbow return with an uplifting album full of heart.Little Fictions was written around the time of Guy Garvey's marriage, and it's this sense of personal contentment that dominates the album. "You Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It has Brian De Palma’s greatest shock ending since Carrie, and an Alec Guinness-worth of John Lithgow psychopaths – yet 1992’s Raising Cain is rarely remembered among the director’s best works. I last came across it midway through, late at night on TV, unsure of quite what I was seeing, and sent reeling to sleep. Watching from the start hardly steadies the Chinese-box dream-sequences and vertiginous violence, as nice child psychologist Dr. Carter Nix (Lithgow) tries to survive his relationship with nasty twin brother Cain (Lithgow), cruel Norwegian dad Dr. Nix (Lithgow) and adulterous wife Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Henrik Björnsson has been laying down nihilistic and scuzzy rock’n’roll sounds with Singapore Sling since 2000, and with Kill Kill Kill (Songs About Nothing) there is a sense that he has long given up chasing radio-friendly commercial success. However, while song titles like “Fuck Everything” and “Surrounded by Cunts” may predominate, the tunes are nothing like the toy-throwing tantrums that they imply. Fuzzy and echo-drenched psychedelia powers this set of 10 haunting and claustrophobic tunes that bring to mind prime time Jesus and Mary Chain, and it’s one fine ride.The subterranean gothic Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The heartbreak of poor, rural America has an urgent topicality for the first time in decades. Wisely, country singer Courtney Marie Andrews has left her views on the Mexican wall unspoken, but on the other staples of folkloric woe she proves to be unexpectedly eloquent. Still only in her mid-twenties, this is technically Andrews’ sixth album, though her first in the limelight. It’s a gem.Musically, the sound is conventional, perhaps self-consciously so, with giddy portions of pedal steel, glistening close-harmony backing vocals, and Andrews' own bubblegum drawl. The album’s Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If there's one thing I've learned from Nashville the TV show it's that the best musical collaborations can birth the most beautiful love stories.Johnnyswim is the real life version of boy (Abner Ramirez) meets girl (Amanda Sudano) in Nashville Tennessee, who got together to collaborate back in 2005. They made beautiful music together, and ended up in love.Their heady mix of American folk-pop, with soul and blues influences, comes together to make a sound that Callie Khouri would be proud of. They sing of summertime romances, being each other's lighthouse, getting it right on the first try, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Victor Erice is one of the great Spanish directors of the last century, though much less prolific than his compatriots Buñuel and Almodóvar. There are three key films, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Quince Tree Sun and El Sur (The South). All three are characterised by an intense attention to the act of seeing, the mystery of presence and the power of the imagination. They are slow, beautiful films – every frame a delight – that benefit a great deal from being seen on a large screen or in the cinema. The lighting of interiors is often dramatic, conjuring an introverted and Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Recorded more or less live at those venerable studios with a great big sound, Rockfield and Real World, Eliza Carthy’s Big Machine is a monster of an album, big, brassy, and bendy. She has a monster of a group with her too, the 12-piece Wayward band, among them Sam Sweeney, Lucy Farrell, Saul Rose, Beth Porter, and Barnaby Stradling. There are big choruses, big songs and plenty of freewheeling brass, spiky guitars, strings and sharp contrasts in these bold settings of Broadside Ballads from Manchester’s Chetham Library, songs such as “Devil in the Woman”, about domestic violence, the album Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brit singer Rose Elinor Dougall is best known for her various associations with Mark Ronson and her time in the polka-dotted girl band The Pipettes. Ten years into her solo career she’s well-liked by much indie-centric music media but has yet to carve herself out a recognisable larger profile. Her second album, co-created with London producer Oli Bayston – AKA Boxed In – is sweet-natured, an electro-poppy extension of her 2010 debut, but, unfortunately, lacks real impact.Stellular has the trappings; it’s lushly produced, roves around a variety of 1980s musical tics, and is riven with Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
This is a story of an adorable dachshund and her cross-country travels, divided into four parts. So far so cute, but as this is a Todd Solondz movie, it doesn’t stay that way. Kids, avert your eyes. The dog’s first home – and the most impressive part of the film – is with lonely young Remi (Keaton Nigel Cooke) who’s recovering from cancer. He names her Weiner-Dog and they bond (the first shot of Remi is of him lying on bright green grass in a pose straight out of Boyhood, though similarities end there). But control-freak dad (Tracy Letts) is an owner from hell, even though it was he Read more ...