CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
Back in the mid-80s, a group of lads from Worcestershire, who’d previously been known as the Cravats, were putting an exceedingly strange spin on the post-punk sounds of the time.“The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes” and “Mummy You’re a Wreck” may not have earned the Very Things great riches, but they certainly created more than a few ripples among the listeners of John Peel’s radio show and further afield – even encouraging Channel 4 to commission a very peculiar film for The Tube.Forty years later and vocalist, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Robin Dallaway, percussionist Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Ne pleure pas, Jeannette” is a version of the 15th-century French song "La pernette se lève." It tells the story of Jeannette, whose parents want her to marry into the gentry or royalty. She, however, is in love with Pierre. He is in prison. She vows to be hanged at the same time he is. In France, “Ne pleure pas, Jeannette” is a nursery rhyme. Versions have been recorded by Les Compagnons De La Chanson and French children’s TV favourite Dorothée.“Aux marches du palais” is also French and has been sung by (again) Les Compagnons De La Chanson, Marie Laforêt, Nana Mouskouri, Yves Montand and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ever since their 2013 album Now What?! hard rock veterans Deep Purple have been on a roll, both creatively and commercially. They’ve seemed a revitalised force. An album of covers aside, their output since has also sold/streamed multitudes. Not bad for a unit that’s been going for 56 years, with a stable line-up for well over 30. Their latest album is more enjoyable and feistier than cynics might imagine. It’s business as usual, of course, but Deep Purple wear their heritage with aplomb.Deep Purple, at their best, have always combined widdly guitars and hefty riffs with a pop sensibility, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
With a title track that sounds like the theme tune of the best TV series of your life – only it doesn’t exist yet – and some star guest jazz players joining the core trio of Dave Stapleton, Deri Roberts, and Elliot Bennett, Slowly Rolling Camera mark their 10th year with a luxuriously immersive sixth studio release on Edition Records.Silver Shadow evokes an analogue film world of reels and projections, a monochrome noir with great lighting, referenced on the vinyl album’s sleeve. Its eight compact tracks, only one breaking the five-minute mark, are described as film montages, ones Read more ...
joe.muggs
Two of the biggest trends in 21st century pop culture today have been “poptimism” – broadly, the idea that pop as such is as serious and worthy of analysis as any other artform – and a kind of everything-everywhere-all-at-once telescoping of past influences into a grab bag of total availability. The former tendency has rather clotted into received wisdom (fuelled by click addiction) that bigger is better and Taylor Swift therefore deserves more critical attention than anyone else. The latter – though it has led to plenty of interesting lanes of subcultural scholarship – is often derided for Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
Indie rock duo the Raveonettes add an ethereal touch to 10 popular songs in their latest album, made up entirely of covers. Sing…, which features renditions of tracks by Gram Parsons, the Everly Brothers, the Cramps, Buddy Holly, and the Velvet Underground, is a soothing dream pop delight.The sweetly curated track list displays the dreamy vibe of the “Love in a Trashcan” singers well. Choices including the Hollies’ “Wishing” and the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” complement the soft 1960s feel perfectly with their innocently romantic lyrics, but the reassuring simplicity of opening track “ Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Orange Goblin have been flying the flag for exuberant biker rock for the best part of a generation. Yet, somewhat incredibly, their latest and 10th album, Science Not Fiction may come to be viewed as a career high for these hard rock lifers.Coming on like the soundtrack to a thundering berserker raid, Orange Goblin’s incendiary riffing and boisterous grooves tip a hat to iconic rockers like Motörhead or Venom at their most rabble rousing with man mountain and vocalist Ben Ward leading the charge. Indeed, while Science Not Fiction may not be especially original or inventive, it’s seriously Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Paint a Room is idiosyncratic, but it is an absolute joy. Accessible too. Permeated with a summery vibe, its 10 songs glisten like the surface of lake catching the setting sun’s rays. There’s a lightness, a buoyancy which instantly fascinates.Chris Cohen has fashioned an album which is jazzy yet cleaves to a sensibility placing it as a distant cousin to Allah Las at their best or the wispier side of early Tame Impala. There are flutes, brass, sax, coconut shell-type persuasion, guitars treated to sound watery and Cohen’s lazy, just-verging on off-key voice. Swooning album opener “Damage” Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Voice and piano. The combination can have a simplicity, a conversational freedom, a rightness about it, as it does here. “My Ideal” (Dot Time), with its eleven songs from the early days of jazz up to the 1950s, is already being placed alongside classic duo albums by Ella Fitzgerald with Ellis Larkins, or the great pairing of Tony Bennett and Bill Evans, and it is indeed a very fine and uplifting album.The sixth track of the album, its centrepiece, “Ain’t That Love”, shows off the intimate vibe of the duo particularly well. Vocalist Catherine Russell and pianist Sean Mason clearly know the Ray Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the world of popular music, tangential connections to success are profile-raising. They offer an immediate connection to an artist. It is beholden on me, then, despite not knowing it when I first enjoyed this album, to mention that rising Grammy Award-winning Americana star Molly Tuttle appears. She is guitarist-vocalist Sullivan Tuttle’s sister. It speaks to the solid pleasures of City of Glass by Santa Cruz quartet AJ Lee & Blue Summit that the song in question, “I Can’t Find You at All”, written by the Tuttles' dad Jack, is not outstandingly ahead of the restSinging mandolin-player Read more ...
graham.rickson
There’s a lot to unpick in Zoltán Fabri’s 1956 film Merry-Go-Round (Körhinta). Take leading man Imre Soós’s disarming resemblance to a young Peter O’Toole, and a central love story which plays out like a Hungarian take on Romeo and Juliet with some post-war agrarian politics thrown in for good measure.Fábri keeps his narrative and thematic plates spinning brilliantly: Soós’s charismatic co-operative farmer Máté falls for Mari (a luminous Mari Törőcsik in her debut film appearance), whose father István is a stubborn private smallholder looking to expand his empire. Fábri captures a society on Read more ...
joe.muggs
Joe Goddard’s torrent of creativity rarely fails to amaze. As well as eight albums as a crucial part of Hot Chip, he has made two in the 2 Bears duo with Raf Rundell, one as Hard Feelings with Amy Douglas, and there’s been various other collaborations besides (A Pulse Train, Extra Credit, Greco-Roman Soundsystem, Lightbox Of Magic Unknowledge), not to mention dozens of remixes and a none too shabby DJ career too. Through all of this there’s been a strong musical personality, circling around palpable love of the dancefloor and its communities, and use of synthesisers to conjure feelings of Read more ...