CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
Charli XCX has been making scrambled eggs of pop for a decade. She’s written songs for/with artists including, but far from limited to, Lady Gaga, Iggy Azalea, Giorgio Moroder, Selina Gomez, BTS, David Guetta, Ty Dolla $ign, Blondie, Gwen Stefani, Raye, BTS, Camila Cabello, Benga, Caroline Polachek, Haim, and James Blunt. And then there’s her own albums. Six of them, including this one. But she’s not yet a full star. At least that’s what she reckons. And that’s what her enjoyably abrasive new album is about.The aforementioned abrasiveness is sonic. XCX’s lyrics are thoughtful, a navigation of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Heavy Soul, the ninth studio album by British blues-rock singer-guitarist Joanne Shaw Taylor, is her first in two years, its 10 songs already released as singles. Produced by Kevin Shirley, whose credits include Aerosmith, Iron Maiden and Joe Bonamassa, whose indie label she joined a couple of years back with The Blues Album, its musical line-up features the fine talents of Doug Lancio, Anton Fig, Allison Presswood, Jimmy Wallace, and Rob McNelly.Recorded in Nashville, the album features both JST originals and covers, including a faithful and fabulous version of “All the Way from America”, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
At 91, Willie Nelson is about to tour the US with The Outlaws, AKA Minnesota youngster Bob Dylan, 83, the even younger Robert Plant, 75, with Alison Krauss, a mere 52, and 72-year old John Mellencamp (plus a trio of 21st century artists in Celisse, Southern Avenue and Britney Spencer). Willie’s setlist contains songs that are older than some of those artistes, but you can bet a silver dollar that one or two from his excellent new album, The Border, will stray out onto the stage with him and his fabled guitar, Trigger.There’s a wonderful and affecting song here about dreaming of being Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
While some tracks on Marina Allen’s third album are country accented and a pedal steel is used a few times, it’s impossible to categorise Eight Pointed Star as Americana. Its sixth track, “Easy”, has the closeted atmosphere of The Velvet Underground’s third album. Next up, the driving “Love Comes Back” has a dash of former Go-Between Robert Forster about it.However, the nods towards a previously uncharted rootsiness do confirm a change in emphasis for the US singer-songwriter. Eight Pointed Star lacks the jazziness of Allen’s last album, 2022’s Centrifics. The very precise arrangements from Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s a whole generation of singers who’ve risen to considerable fame on the back of the return of home-grown commercial dance music to the charts since the early 2010s. Various Jesses and Ellas, Nathans and Calums have flooded daytime radio with decent enough, often TV talent show-winning, more or less generic vocals.They all seem perfectly nice, but it can be hard to pick them apart, and – as highlighted by Raye’s recent label wranglings, and the You Know My Voice podcast from Kelli-Leigh – there does seem to be a fast-track route to solo success afforded to certain categories of artist Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Hot on the heels of his Olivier Award-winning musical Standing at the Sky's Edge, comes In This City They Call You Love, the 10th solo album from Richard Hawley, proud son of Sheffield, and it’s a peach. With echoes of early Elvis (the slow numbers, like “Can’t Help Falling in Love”) and Roy Orbison, it feels almost instantly familiar. You sink into it as if into the arms of an old friend, or a comfy sofa – at least once you’re past the faintly menacing opening track, “Two for His Heels”.For me at least, the songs that really grab you are the slow, moody ballads, among which “Hear Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Natasha Khan’s musical career has always explored the artier end of pop. Her latest album, her sixth and first in five years, is more akin to the soundtrack work she did with Swiss composer Dominik Scherrer on BBC spook-thriller Requiem in 2018 than her Bat For Lashes albums.There are not many actual songs. Instead, lots of “pieces”, most of them between two and three minutes long. Ethereal in tone, enjoyment depends on an ability to roll with gossamer fairy waftings. Instead, this writer grew bored.The album is titled in honour of Khan’s daughter and she terms these sonic snapshots “song Read more ...
graham.rickson
It’s interesting to discover that sound wasn’t the norm in Japanese cinema until the mid-1930s: the huge cost of investing in pricey new studio technology and equipping scores of rural cinemas with amplification proving prohibitive.Yasujirō Ozu began his directorial career began in 1927 but didn’t make a sound film until 1937, and 1932’s I Was Born, But… is notable for the paucity of surtitles, Ozu telling an emotionally complex story brilliantly using mostly visuals alone. What initially looks like a light comedy about squabbling children becomes something much weightier: in Ozu’s words, “I Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Any Richard Thompson appearance comes with a hallmark guaranteeing quality produce – be that an album or a stage show. Indeed, Thompson's 75th birthday concert will land on 8 June at the Royal Albert Hall, with a dazzling range of musical guests to rival the same venue’s epic 70th birthday bash five years ago. Meanwhile, it’s been six years since his last album, 13 Rivers, an album he described on its release as “coming to me as a surprise in a dark time”.Dark times, you say? All rivers meet their end when they meet the sea, and Ship to Shore, featuring the same line-up of players in Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Brooklyn-based composer and bandleader Jihye Lee’s story really does take quite some telling. Having been an indie pop singer in her native Korea, she enrolled in 2011 as a Vocal Studies student at Berklee in Boston, also hoping to develop her composing skills. And then came the "coup de foudre". The sound of a large jazz ensemble completely transfixed her: “I looked through the window and saw a bunch of people just blowing their horns, and it was just so energetic and so enthusiastic and so lush…that was the moment when I knew large ensemble is for me.”And she has never looked back. She won Read more ...
Tom Carr
If there is one positive of the past decade, it must be the growing openness with mental health and wellbeing. Whether in the films we watch or music we listen to, there is much less of a stigma in addressing anxiety, depression, and mental health issues in general.For most of their career, pop-rock duo Twenty One Pilots, have focussed on these themes through frontman-vocalist Tyler Joseph’s rapped/sung/sometimes screamed lyrics over Josh Dun’s powerful drumming. Since 2015’s Blurryface, they have woven these into a conceptual arc that has run through their preceding albums (2018’s Trench and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Isobel Campbell has maintained a consistent career on the fringes of popular music for three decades. She's made a home in the area where indie, folk, rock and BBC 6Music merge. Aside from her 1990s involvement with Belle and Sebastian, she’s best-known for her trio of albums with the late Mark Lanegan, her gracefulness and crafted precision working well against his gruff world weariness. Following that, she was scuppered for a while by legal label entanglements, but since 2020 has been up and at ‘em again, following her own path. The best word for her latest album is “shimmering”; 13 head- Read more ...