CDs/DVDs
Katie Colombus
I honestly never thought I'd add a Cher song to my painstakingly curated Christmas Spotify playlist. But after listening to the ultimate diva's new album entitled simply, Christmas, as we decorate the tree (much to my children's chagrin – they'd much rather it be Sia's Every Day Is Christmas), "DJ Play A Christmas Song" slides its way onto the end like a Baileys on ice.It's a kitsch, disco-synth dancefloor banger with a rampant, bauble-swinging beat, in which Cher merrily belts out "I want to be dancing all night long" that is sure to melt away all seasonal affective blues. " Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The cat in the hat with the mellifluous voice delivers his Christmas Wish for the festive season, his first Christmas album, and it sounds more or less as you would imagine it – tasteful, discreet, soulful, reined in, but richly expressive, and celebrating the spirit of a sharing, caring Christmas.It comes with some fine orchestral settings arranged by album producer Troy Miller, recording with the Kingdom Orchestra at Abbey Road, while Porter and his excellent band – pianist Chip Crawford, bassist Jahmal Nichols, drummer Emmanuel Harrold, saxophonist Tivon Pennicott and Ondre Pivec on Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Boxing Day release of Michael Mann’s first feature in eight years, Ferrari, finally follows up Blackhat, a Chris Hemsworth-starring cyber-thriller dismissed on its 2015 release in a manner he hadn’t experienced since The Keep (1983). This two-disc, 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray Arrow release reveals many memorable virtues, alongside surprising inertia and superficiality.Blackhat applies Mann’s great film intelligence and capacity for research to early cyber-crime, gleaning the apocalyptic consequences of malignant zeroes and ones. Rendering a keyboard transparent so he can shoot its hammering Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Down memory lane, taking us back some six decades to the Buffalo Springfield, the latest Neil Young album's almost 50 minutes of continuous music, each song segueing into the next.“Songs from my life, recently recorded, create a music montage with no beginnings or endings,” Young has stated. “The feeling is captured, not in pieces, but as a whole piece, designed to be listened to that way… This music presentation defies shuffling, digital organisation, separation. Only for listening. That says it all.”Well, that’s the idea at least. Getting up from the sofa to move the tone arm was always a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The realisation that Shirley Hurt is the name assumed by Canada’s Sophia Ruby Katz for recording helps explain why her debut album is so oblique. As well as the cloaked identity, what seem initially to be direct songs cleaving to familiar musical forms have winding structures which don’t end up where they seem to be heading. Similarly, the lyrics are tough to parse.Take “Problem Child.” Beginning in a vaguely Rickie Lee Jones manner, its jazzy undertone is bolstered by minimal, shuffling drums. Then, there’s some equally muted and unexpected “Do you Know the Way to San Jose” trumpet-like Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Ghost Woman’s 2022 self-titled album and this January’s swift follow-up Anne, If were both fairly laidback and spaced out affairs, with echoes of Beak’s free form motorik grooves and the Byrds’ pastoral psychedelia. Now that multi-instrumentalist Evan Üschenko has recruited the forceful percussion of Ille van Dessel to gang, however, their third album in 18 months, Hindsight Is 50/50 presents a considerably heavier prospect.In fact, with the duo seemingly taking pointers from Spacemen 3’s superlative monster trip soundtracks on the head-spinning trance of “Alright Alright”, it might well be Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A deathless trend in pop is taking great songs, slowing them down, doing orchestral versions, or rendering them raw acoustic. This, ostensibly, reveals their genius and/or brings them a new audience. Rarely, it can work, as on Johnny Cash’s final albums, but usually it simply renders sonic perfection as bland, naff slop. Such is the case with Trevor Horn’s latest.Horn is a great and visionary pop producer. He’s also performed in bands, notably his breakthrough group Buggles and prog behemoths Yes. In 2019 he released Reimagines the Eighties, which featured star singers on hits of the relevant Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Some 28 years in gestation, Peter Gabriel’s eighth studio album of wholly original songs – his first since 2002’s Up – will delight his fans and top the charts. Gabriel’s best instrument remains his voice, that husky marvel, which is at its most resonantly tender, vulnerable, and intimate here.Gabriel has always been a humanitarian, earth-friendly artist, but on my initial listenings to I/O – overly tasteful and scarcely risk-taking in its immaculate production, songwriting, and autumnal sentiments, a clear sign of mellowing – I missed the bite and foreboding that shaped much of the music on Read more ...
Graham Fuller
British anti-war films inspired by “the war that” failed “to end all wars” include Oh! What a Lovely War, The Return of the Soldier, A Month in the Country, Regeneration, Mrs Dalloway, The Trench, Testament of Youth, the different versions of Journey’s End, and Terence Davies’s haunting swansong Benediction. For simplicity of form and style in rendering the pity of war – and the war waged by officers on their men – none improves on King and Country (1964).Joseph Losey’s desolating film, which stars Dirk Bogarde and Tom Courtenay at the peak of their powers, is set in a rat-infested British Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After leaving Midlake while recording their fourth album, Tim Smith said he was pursuing music under the name Harp. That was in 2012. Smith had been the Denton, Texas-based band’s singer and main songwriter. Without him, Midlake pushed on and issued 2013’s still-stunning Antiphon album.A decade later Smith is releasing Albion, his first record as Harp. During the interregnum, his only known musical activities were appearing on the 2017 and 2021 albums by Lost Horizons, a project driven by former Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde. Harp, Midlake and Lost Horizons are all on Bella Union, Raymonde’s Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Two weeks ago, Welsh harpist Catrin Finch and Irish fiddler, violinist and Hardanger fiddle player Aoife Ni Bhriain entranced their audience at the Union Chapel in North London, playing from their new album, Double You, as part of the London Jazz Festival, with guest singer Angeline Morrison joining them at the end of a glorious 90-minute set of dazzling instrumental duets.Double You clocks in at a more compact 45 minutes, its recordings the template upon which they build and soar on stage as a duo, and as soloists, opening up each tune to the epic end of the scale, improvising in the moment Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Listening to the best of what they’ve created since their post-2005 reformation, it would take a staunch anti-Take That churl to hold fast to the punk-rockin’ claim the “man band” are, musically, just talentless piffle. “Shine”, “Patience”, “Hey Boy”, “The Flood” and others are evidence to the contrary.But it’s understandable why the (now) trio are so divisive. For those old enough, they’re manufactured tween-fangirl pap (from the era that gave us rave, grunge and Britpop rising). To those younger, they’re softy nan music. Their latest album contains a few memorable tunes but slips, Read more ...