CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
Grandiloquent indie-synth-pop outfit Bastille have been around for over a decade. Three of their four albums have been chart-toppers (the other one still made Top 5 and went Gold). They are no flash in the pan.Head honcho Dan Smith now presents a fifth album, &, that, he says, “feels like someone talking to you, rather than turning up the volume”. Returning to his pre-success solo incarnation, he’s trying a style of music mainly associated with thoughtful 1970s American singer-songwriters. Thing is, he just can’t help laying on the over-production.In the manner of, say, Al Stewart, Smith Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Amy Taylor’s lyrics on Amyl and the Sniffers’ previous discs could hardly be described as demure – especially with song titles like “Don’t Need a Cunt (Like You to Love Me)”. So, it’s encouraging to hear that the band hasn’t decided to censor themselves in any way as they hurtle towards what promises to be their big breakout with Cartoon Darkness.In fact, the lairy “You’re a dumb cunt / You’re an arsehole”, which are the opening lines of the sharp and punky first track, “Jerkin”, couldn’t be more of a statement of intent from the Melbourne four-piece. That’s not to say that Amyl and the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The missing element is magic, the swooning sense of the romantic, spiritual and supernal which Michael Powell’s partnership with Emeric Pressburger found in the British and especially English soul, sharpened by Hungarian Pressburger’s fascinated love for his exile’s home.These five minor, pre-Archers films don’t fairly define Powell’s role – his elemental, important The Edge of the World (1937) also predates British cinema’s equivalent of Lennon meeting McCartney. Mostly made as subsidised, cheap native “quota quickies”, they show an apprentice director’s vigorous cinematic fluency and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tess Parks’ fourth solo album is suffused with otherness. When lyrics are direct, they are destabilised by the etiolated, freeze-dried voice delivering them. “Sometimes it feels like everyone should be dancing, maybe I should be dancing,” she sings during “Koalas.” It does not sound as if Parks has the energy to dance.After a while, acclimatisation arrives and penetrating the album’s miasma-like atmosphere becomes possible. Nods to Mazzy Star and the solo Syd Barrett are evident (especially with “Koala”). There are also hints of early Chapterhouse, Recurring-era Spacemen 3, Nico and Judee Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If there’s a rough-hewn tinge to Laura Marling’s eighth album, then there’s a wildly valid reason for it. It was written shortly after the folk singer-songwriter had her daughter, and was recorded in a home studio with the baby ever present – either in between naps, or with her bobbing around in the bouncy chair while Marling strummed and sang.It’s a drumless record with an acoustic softness, written quickly and produced roughly which gives an authenticity and low maintenance feel that is welcome in the slickly filtered instaworld we all currently inhabit. Later set to strings by Rob Moose Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s a real bind for Kylie Minogue. Her core audience want disco pop, people like me slag her off if she branches out from disco pop and goes country, she does disco pop well… but it’s really, really hard to do disco pop relentlessly well all the time.She’s done much, much better at it than pretty much anyone else on the planet: her creative longevity and continued cultural relevance has been truly something to behold, she’s proved that being a pop princess isn’t only about providing low-camp fizz and sensation in the moment (not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course) but can Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Just before the five-minute point, a Mellotron’s distinctive string sound is heard. Three minutes earlier, a guitar evokes Robert Fripp’s characteristic shimmer. Uniting these might result in King Crimson but, instead, these are just two elements of “I Cover the Mountain Top,” the wild, 22-minute opening track of Catching Fire, a studio-quality live album recorded on 20 January 2017 at Oslo’s Nasjonal Jazzscene.At the show, a union of prodigious Norwegians, Elephant9 were collaborating with guitarist Terje Rypdal. As it has been since Nikolai Hængsle (bass), Torstein Lofthus (drums) and Ståle Read more ...
joe.muggs
Londoner Ayman Rostom has been around the block and then some. For some 25 years he’s been a hip hop producer as Dr Zygote, for the past decade he’s made wiry and weird house music as The Maghreban – both of these aliases are still, it seems, fully functioning. Before that still he made jungle and drum’n’bass in the initial 90s boom. And now he’s got a new alias to write, as you may guess by the album title, some very sad songs.There has always been a deep strand of outsiderdom, of being the odd one out, of not doing things in the typically correct order, to his music. So it’s no wonder that Read more ...
graham.rickson
František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1966) has been voted the best Czech film ever made, a visionary 13th century epic whose expense prompted its director to shoot the shorter, lower-budget The Valley of the Bees (Údolí včel) back-to-back with it.Recycling Marketa Lazarová’s lavish sets and costumes proved impossible, though both films share a vivid sense of time and place. Zdeněk Liška again provided a stark, haunting score, though large stretches of The Valley of the Bees are devoid of both music and dialogue. We first meet Petr Čepek’s Ondřej as a taciturn adolescent, incurring his Read more ...
Guy Oddy
MC5 were the original proto-punkers who led the charge against wafty hippy music in the late Sixties and early Seventies. They were touted by Lemmy as the blueprint for Motörhead’s early sound and their initial release Kick Out the Jams arguably deserves the title of greatest live rock album ever recorded.However, they fell apart after only three long-players in a mess of hard drugs and bad business decisions. That might have been that, save for the odd heritage tour from the Nineties onwards, which featured fewer and fewer of the original members as their health failed, sometimes fatally. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Sweet Release opens up a landscape of redemption by riding the rails of a classic blues, the title track talking of messages of peace and songs of sweet release, wrapping itself around a typically lean and potent riff conjured by guitarist Justin Adams.On this sweet release, he’s reunited with singer, tamburello frame drummer and violinist Mauro Durante, leader of the potent southern Italian band Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, a band renowned for the furious, transformative music of Pizzica Tarantata, which in folklore has the power to cure the bite of the legendary Taranta through Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Immanuel Wilkins’s third Blue Note Album – Blues Blood – has a big concept behind it. According to the album blurb, we are offered “a multimedia performance about the legacies of our ancestors and the bloodlines connecting us...”. It features “distinctive voices tapping into different aspects of heritage”… and "meals are cooked onstage during the live performance.” The basic idea behind it is that the healing properties of music can be applied to dealing with historic trauma.The album is the result of a commission from and a residency at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, an Read more ...