CDs/DVDs
peter.quinn
With beautiful playing from the Norwegian Radio Orchestra conducted by Ingar Berby, sumptuous arrangements which hint at everything from the great jazz orchestrator Gil Evans to the haunting "night music" of Béla Bartók, and – at its heart – the wonderfully singing quality of Nils Petter Molvær’s trumpet playing, these symphonic reimaginings present a remarkable conspectus of the Norwegian musician’s work.The trilling strings and ominous bass drum thuds of album opener “Maja” (otherwise known as “Little Indian” from Molvær’s 2002 album NP3) serve as an arresting prelude before the crystalline Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Canberra band Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers continue the recent tradition of Australian indie bands having unwieldy comedy names. However, their music, as laid out on their debut album, has higher aspirations, bridging their scuzzy punkin’ roots and a larger sound, loosely somewhere between The Breeders and Foo Fighters, yet very much their own thing.Sometimes they sail too far into mainstream rock for this writer but, overall, they win the day. The best of I Love You tends towards either catchy new wavey power pop guitar or snarling, sneering numbers vehemently raging at mistreatment in Read more ...
mark.kidel
Targets (1968), Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature is generally regarded as a great film. And yet, it came out of a mixture of false starts and opportunism. Could it be that its unique quality, the elements which make it stand out in the history of cinema, owed as much as anything else to the randomness that accompanied the movie’s creation?Bodganovich, a cinephile and writer for the magazine Esquire, had come to the attention of Roger Corman, the genius of low-budget horror and sleaze. After assisting him on a feature, Corman asked the eager young man to make a film with Boris Karloff, who Read more ...
mark.kidel
Sufjan Stevens, so we’ve heard, has just been struck down with a rare and immobilising disease – the Guillain-Barré syndrome. With characteristic courage and faith, he has thrown himself into physical rehabilitation. That he should be so reduced and challenged with suffering resonates perhaps with the extraordinary vulnerability that distinguishes his work – a unique avalanche of remarkable albums, generous and brave collaborations.Stevens is among the mean of his generation who find strength in opening their hearts, singing in a high register close to falsetto, and risking the pain that Read more ...
Tom Carr
Towering drums, seering and furious guitars, vocals that are powerful and often throat-scorching; metal, hard rock, and all their intertwining sub-genres are by far the ones that fit most naturally for this writer. It may be a surprise then to be reviewing Ed Sheeran’s latest. But it’s also impossible to deny when a melody catches just right, and races round and round for days on end.In addition, this is Sheeran’s first full length record not graced with a maths symbol as its name. Instead, Sheeran took inspiration from Elgar's Enigma Variations, a series of 14 musical portraits of the Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Jorja Smith said she named her new album Falling or Flying to describe the uncertainty she’s felt about her career following the success of her debut, the Mercury Prize nominated Lost & Found. Would her career fall to earth or keep flying higher still?For an outsider, the answer seems obvious. Her output since her debut has been confident and measured, releasing a handful of excellent singles and an elegant mini album which has only reinforced her as a mature, fully formed artist. But following up a debut is tricky, and self-doubt can grip anyone. Falling is a second album where you can Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The music of Daniel Lopatin – AKA Oneohtrix Point Never – exists at the sonic/electronic vanguard. Were the likes of avant-gardists such as Iannis Xenakis, George Antheil and Edgard Varese around today, maybe even Stockhausen, they might dig what he’s up to.Unlike them, though, Lopatin places post-modernism at the centre of things. His latest album is, for want of a more technical phrase, completely out there. If you want to hear music unlike anything else, it’s a one-stop shop.Lopatin has said of the new album that it’s a “speculative autobiography” which “imagines what might have been Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Steven Wilson has merged various genres – metal, shoegaze, pop, dance, jazz – in his solo career without shrugging off the prog label he considers reductive. He hasn’t exactly jettisoned it with his seventh album The Harmony Codex, a collection of songs driven by programming and guitarwork that narrows the distance between the solo artist and the Porcupine Tree band leader.Wilson’s unaffected singing – very English, understatedly yearning – is the strongest connective tissue, but the new album shares beats, cadences, and mood shifts with his cult combo’s 2022 comeback LP Closure/ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Gregory’s Girl stands alongside Kes as one of the few films offering a realistic depiction of state school life. Director Bill Forsyth’s surreal flourishes delight without getting in the way: think of the penguin waddling along the corridors, or the young lad glimpsed smoking a pipe in the boys’ toilets.That Gregory’s Girl exists at all feels like a happy accident; Forsyth’s background was in making low-key documentaries on Scottish subjects and his friendship with John Baraldi, founder of the Glasgow Youth Theatre, prompted him to write the script. When a BFI funding application was rejected Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
It felt inevitable that Doja Cat would turn her back on being a popstar. The Californian rapper’s career has been shaped by her ambivalent relationship to fame and earlier this year she went as far as denouncing her previous albums as “mediocre pop”. She regularly gets into spats online, recently telling one of her own fan accounts that they should “delete the entire account and rethink everything.”It was refreshing to see a popstar challenge the toxic aspects of modern fan culture so head on. But the dismissal of her own music felt a bit harsh. Doja Cat’s blend of disco-revival and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Animal Collective have been putting out albums of off-kilter and whimsical psychedelic pop, in various guises, for over 20 years. And while their 12th album together doesn’t exactly rock the boat and bring on a major stylistic change, it’s not really business as usual either.Isn’t It Now? has been produced by the Grammy Award-winning Russell Elevado, who can more usually be found at the controls for the likes of D’Angelo, the Roots or Kamasi Washington. He hasn’t turned the Baltimore four-piece into a group of hip-hop soul-jazzers though nor have they seized the moment to make a desperate Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Two years after the release of her rather flaccid Disco album and five since her somewhat inadvisable foray into country-ish music, 2023 has seen something of a return to form for Kylie Minogue. First there was this summer’s all-conquering single, “Padam Padam” – which even managed to persuade some national radio stations to rethink their policies on which tracks should be played on heavy rotation. Now comes her new album, Tension, which is marinated in Nineties House and Electro grooves and more than confirms that its lead single was no flash in the pan.In fact, album opener, “Padam Padam”, Read more ...