CDs/DVDs
Matthew Wright
Andreya Triana’s second solo album has been five years in the making, and with a title like Giants, it’s presumably intended to make an impression. As you’d expect from the time it’s spent gestating, this is a mature and nuanced release, certainly worth the wait, but it’s too diverse to pigeon-hole into an instant marketing hit. Its strengths – fine lyrics with a social conscience, a diversity of styles all executed successfully, and above all, Triana’s bronzed and supple dynamic vocals – repay repeated listening, and it takes some time for the album’s quality to sink in.You need listen Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dion: Recorded Live at the Bitter End August 1971By 1971, when he was playing the Bitter End in New York’s Greenwich Village, Dion DiMucci had already experienced the equivalent of two separate stints as a pop star. In 1961, he began a run of hits with the swaggering “Runaround Sue”. From then and into 1963 he racked up other classics such as “The Wanderer”, “Ruby Baby”, Donna the Prima Donna” and “Drip Drop”. The arrival of The Beatles in the US charts in early 1964 put paid to his run of hits. Times had changed. But in late 1968 he was back in the Top Ten with a heartfelt version of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Olivia Chaney’s reputation as a singular folk singer and songwriter has been bubbling on and off the radar for some years now. There were EPs in 2010 and 2013, and she featured on the excellent Peter Bellamy tribute, 2011’s Oak Ash and Thorn, and she has toured solo, as well as worked with Alasdair Roberts. She was part of a beautiful and impromptu vocal trio with Lisa Knapp and Nancy Wallace for the recent Bobstock celebrations for Bob Copper, and in 2013 was nominated for the Horizon Award and Best Original Song in the BBC Folk Awards, for the title track to her long-awaited debut album on Read more ...
joe.muggs
Few would have predicted it back when they were gooning around in over-tight Adidas t-shirts, but with the benefit of hindsight it makes sense that Blur should have the most convincing longevity of the Britpop generation. Why? Because more than any of their contemporaries, and despite all the personality clashes and narcotic breakdowns, they were genuinely a band. Yes, Damon Albarn was the leader, but he never eclipsed the other three in the way that Jarvis or the Gallaghers did. Even the raging bellend Alex James, though musically more or less pointless, was gravitationally part of the Blur Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Model for Murder sits at the polite end of Fifties British exploitation B-pictures, a stiff, washed-out world of bloodless Mayfair murder, and sexless fashion world intrigue. Strip Tease Murder, a still more salaciously titled, Soho-set near-contemporary of this 1959 curio is also released this month, getting its hands grubbier with some actual, heavily censor-snipped stripping. But in this imaginary Mayfair, the looming Sixties of kitchen-sink cinema, blazingly colourful pop music and clothes, Psycho and Peeping Tom are still unimaginable.The pot-boiler plot finds merchant seaman David ( Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There’s a certain sound - one that I’d describe as “pastoral folk”, without ever being certain of what that means - that has always struck me as quintessentially English. Jenny Lysander’s debut album is one that ticks many of those boxes: sparse arrangements, ageless vocals, even a song called “Lavender Philosophy”, which is about as pastoral as it gets without involving grazing animals. To immerse oneself, dreamily, in Northern Folk is to feel as you did the first time you heard Laura Marling and wonder how one so young could create something so wise and so timeless (at 21, Lysander is just Read more ...
peter.quinn
From fulsome, modally inflected string lines (“Sintra”) to the funkiest of New Orleans brass grooves (“Atchafalaya”), this first major label album from Grammy-winning, NYC-based collective Snarky Puppy, paired here with Holland's crack Metropole Orkest under their principal conductor Jules Buckley, is a brilliantly arranged and artfully executed tour de force.Penned by Snarky Puppy bassist and bandleader, Michael League, while on tour with the band, each of the album's six movements was inspired by a different forest he has spent time in, from the swamps of Louisiana and giant redwoods Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although understated, Still Life asks some profound questions. What happens to those who are alone after they die? How should they be treated? Do their memories matter? Once life ends, is it OK to throw common decency out of the window?To any right-minded person, the answers are obvious. But for the boss of Eddie Marsan’s John May, none of them matter when life is over. The dead are dead: they don’t care. Mister May, as he is often referred to in the film, works for a south London local authority. He's in charge of dealing with the affairs of the deceased who have no obvious relatives or have Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In his recent theartsdesk interview, Squarepusher (or Tom Jenkinson to his mum) stated: “A subtle wave of conservatism has washed gently across electronic music over the last five years. One of the things the new record smashes against is that.” On this he really isn’t kidding, and Damogen Furies is unlikely to be heard as mood music to your shopping experience in any high street stores in the foreseeable future. Hardcore rave sounds bump up against abrasive electro and abstract funk in a powerful tempest that is far from chilled out.Opening track “Stor Eiglass” suggests an imaginary remix of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bert Jansch: Bert JanschNorth Villas is a short street parallel to Camden Road, the main artery linking Camden Town to Holloway in north London. It’s off Camden Square, where Amy Winehouse lived and died. In August 1964, Bill Leader began recording what would become Bert Jansch’s debut album in his home at 5 North Villas. The first-floor flat had two living rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. Leader would set up his tape recorder in the same room as who he was recording and monitor what was being caught on tape through headphones.At the same time as Leader was using his home as a recording Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
To let you understand the spontaneous grin that burst across my face when I first heard Foil Deer probably needs a little context: I studied, and now have a job involving, corporate law. Still, there’s no getting away from the fact that the powerful feminist themes and dirty, grungy guitar work form only part of the reason that Massachusetts indie rockers Speedy Ortiz’s third album is such a fantastic listen: frontwoman and songwriter Sadie Dupuis’ wordplay has never been stronger. The line that made my day, since you ask, was “we were the law school rejects so we quarrelled at the bar Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Mike Rosenberg kept the name "Passenger" for his solo folk-pop project even when the rest of the band left in 2009, even though, for a one-man outfit, the concept of being a passenger is a curious one. (Who’s driving then?) For the most part, this 16-song, two-CD release continues the gentle-sounding but hard-hitting storytelling of last year’s Whispers. That album didn’t make too many waves (the hit single “Let Her Go” made up for that) but confirmed Rosenberg’s reputation among folk-pop connoisseurs – happy for Ed Sheeran and James Blunt to be spoiled by raving attention – for grit and Read more ...