CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
Anyone expecting much the same on Drenge’s new album as from their 2013 self-titled debut may have been somewhat misled by lead track “Favourite Son”. Lively and abrasive, with pounding drums, angry guitars and yelled vocals, it certainly wouldn’t sound out of place alongside “I Wanna Break You In Half” and “Gun Crazy”. With the exception of the Ramones-esque “We Can Do What We Want”, however, this is where the adrenaline-fuelled influence of Drenge’s first album largely ends. The rest of Undertow is predominantly characterised by melodic hard rock sounds that suggest a bit too much self- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fotheringay: Nothing More – The Collected FotheringayComing to the sole Fotheringay album cold undermines received opinion it was a side issue in Sandy Denny’s career: a stepping-stone between leaving Fairport Convention and going solo. The band’s eponymous 1970 album opens with “Nothing More” and “The Sea”, two absolutely fantastic Denny songs performed with affecting and brooding sensitivity. Then the album shifts gear. “The Ballad of Ned Kelly”, written and sung by her partner Trevor Lucas, is a dreary re-write of Dylan’s “You Ain’t Going Nowhere”. Anyone influenced by The Band could Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The rich, knock-off church organ drone that opens Ivy Tripp disorientates from the off, while at the same time telling you all you need to know. It may have been the simplicity and directness of Katie Crutchfield’s lyrical and composition style that drew me into the world of Waxahatchee – Crutchfield’s solo project, a homage to the creek of the same name near her Alabama hometown – but that world itself was never simple. The phrase “ivy tripp”, Crutchfield has said in interviews, sums up a certain late-20s directionlessness, which probably already has its own word in German – but it’s that Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There are certain things that you approach a Brian Wilson album expecting. Melody and harmony of course, but also a certain kind of approach: a fearlessness to experiment. When he finally completed the famously unfinished Smile in 2004, it was a landmark moment (though not, if we’re honest, as satisfying as the old demo versions). Then, while 2008’s That Lucky Old Sun was never going to be Pet Sounds, there was, at least, enough that was engaging about a man revisiting the sounds of his youth to be glad that he’d made it.Sadly, the same can’t be said of No Pier Pressure, a largely Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Julie Christie ushered in the swinging sixties as Liz, the girl whom Billy (Tom Courtenay) loves but isn’t man enough to accompany to London in Billy Liar (1963); director John Schlesinger introduced her swinging her bag as she bounces along a Bradford street. Christie does exactly the same in London when Schlesinger introduces her as the grown-up Diana Scott in Darling (1965), now restored and re-released on DVD and Blu-ray for its 50th anniversary. (The original trailer is the disc’s sole extra.)Schlesinger, screenwriter Frederic Raphael and producer Joseph Janni must have asked, “What Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Morton Valence popped up six years ago and have released nothing but beautifully realised, lyrical, melancholic indie-Americana ever since. That's four albums of it, including this one. Strictly speaking, much of their oeuvre isn’t “indie-Americana” either, as it takes in everything from synth-pop to this album’s whispered disco-funk episode, “The Hawkline Discotheque” – yet there’s always a kernel of country & western desolation at the heart of it. Marinated in perfectly pitched 3.00 am bar-stool pathos, the band is built around the London partnership of songwriter-vocalist Robert Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Rude Boy is a rotten film. Nonetheless it exerts an inexorable draw as it includes live footage of The Clash which is amongst the best of any rock group on stage. The performance of “Safe European Home”, caught on camera in July 1978, is white hot. That is, the performance as seen. The audio track was subsequently modified in a recording studio.Rude Boy is not a documentary. It is a confabulation which didn’t represent The Clash as they saw themselves – which was a crafted persona anyway. The band did not want it released, and even had badges emblazoned "I don’t want Rude Boy Clash film" made Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Flesh Throne Press is the sixth album from heavy doom-rock duo Pombagira. Guitarist and singer Pete and drummer Carolyn Hamilton-Giles’s massive sound is characterised by portentous riffing soaked in reverb, vocals that could easily be mistaken for prime time Ozzy Osbourne, and sluggish but powerful drumming, all basted in early '70s production values. While Flesh Throne Press could, at a stretch, be described as meditative, it’s certainly not unobtrusive background music and needs to be played very loudly indeed.The obvious touchstones for Flesh Throne Press are the sound of classic Black Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Let’s get one thing straight: Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell is not a folk album. Folk, in this case, is a word used as a comfort blanket in an attempt to summarise the Michigan songwriter’s return to simple, acoustic music after the apocalyptic electronica of 2010’s The Age of Adz or the epic, high-concept Illinois. But folk music is a communal thing, predicated on culture and oral tradition. Carrie & Lowell – a sparse, beautiful and gut-wrenching album inspired by the writer’s difficult childhood and coming to terms with the death of his mother – is none of these things.For an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Specials: Specials, More Specials; The Special AKA: In the StudioAfter hearing the three albums credited to The Specials during their formative period with 2 Tone Records it becomes hard to think of them as a single band. Their clanky sounding, Elvis Costello-produced eponymous debut album, issued in October 1979, just about holds together overall, but its successors now sound as though nothing united the different directions they were firing off in. More Specials (October 1980) sits up-tempo cheerlessness alongside a warping of easy listening. In The Studio (June 1984) comes across Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film of Jacques Offenbach’s 1881 opera The Tales of Hoffmann was the Archers duo’s crazily ambitious attempt to create a synaesthetic magical realm abstracted from realism through an immersion in “total art” – music, dance, colour, design – in the austerity Britain of 1951. They triumphed with the magic, though only the individual viewer can say if he or she can “hear” Moira Shearer’s dragonfly dance or “see” soprano Ann Ayars’s aria.The Archers slightly altered and rearranged Jules Barbier’s libretto. Between acts in a Nuremberg performance by the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
How many UK Number One albums have there been since the millennium that emanate truly vicious, caustic energy? How many have a furiousness which sets them completely apart? Royal Blood gave it a good whirl last year and Plan B’s Ill Manors in 2012 had dark, abject drive, but nothing has gone anywhere this monstrous assault of an album. Let’s go further. While Metallica are due kudos, and ignoring The Prodigy’s own output, you’d have to go back to Nirvana’s In Utero in 1993 before you hit a Number One album that’s a sonic match for the raw punk relentlessness of The Day Is My Enemy.Of course, Read more ...