CDs/DVDs
joe.muggs
A “back to basics” album is a risky thing. When an act has expanded into big, lavish or experimental production, it’s not a simple act to strip that away. Trying to go back to the intimacy or spontaneity of early work can feel forced: they may find they’ve become reliant on the possibilities of studio craft, or simply evolved into a different kind of artist. U2’s recent horrorshow of a catalogue-reworking album, for example, shows just how laboured such an exercise can be. And for those who’ve thrived on electronic sound it can even seem like a betrayal to step into Jools Holland-friendly Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Writer-director Pat Jackson’s Western Approaches (1944), a Technicolor tour de force partly shot in turbulent seas by Jack Cardiff, is a stirring World War II story documentary that demonstrates the bravery, resilience, selflessness, and collective spirit of men of the British Merchant Navy during the Battle of the Atlantic. The merchantman Jason having been torpedoed by a U-boat, its 22 survivors (including one seriously wounded) struggles towards Ireland’s west coast – 18 days away if the rate of 60 miles in 24 hours is maintained, though neither its rations nor its radio will hold out Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Summer Glass” is The Greater Wings’ fourth track. A synthesiser pulse evoking water dripping from eaves unites with glistening harp arpeggios and muted strings. The voice weaving through this is distant, shrouded in fog. Lyrics are about “being ready to travel again,” wanting “to be whole enough to risk again.” Atmospherically, there are intimations of the intense 1969 Jerry Yester and Judy Henske LP Farewell Aldebaran and Beach House at their most oblique.The new album by the Buffalo, New York-born Julie Byrne initially seems weightless. The delivery is light, nothing bludgeons, textures Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Dartmoor-born folk star Seth Lakeman has an illustrious album catalogue behind him, and this is the general release of a limited-edition vinyl released earlier this year for Record Store Day.Lakeman’s songs embrace traditional folk, pop music and plenty of folk rock – often all at the same time – and he’s long had a knack for a memorably catchy hook and for encapsulating a narrative in a handful of verses, as much on classics like the Mercury nominated “Kitty Jay” as on this album's opener, “The Giant”. He’s recently been seen supporting Van Morrison on The Man’s superb Moving On Skiffle set Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Richard Jobson may be the only original member left standing in first wave Scottish post-punkers, the Skids’ line up. But almost 45 years on from the release of their debut album, Sacred to Dance, the band is again pumping out anthemic rockers in the same vein as when they first started out.Original guitarist, Stuart Adamson is sadly long gone but Bruce Watson from Adamson’s post-Skids group, Big Country, has picked up the torch from his former band mate. “Open Your Eyes” and “Tidal Wave” particularly see him standing confidently in Adamson’s shoes, banging out the riffs and lending his voice Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Barb Jungr has made a speciality – some might even say her own art form – out of taking well-known songs, and discovering far more subtlety and meaning in them than people ever knew they had. As she explains in the notes accompanying My Marquee: “ I love well-constructed songs with lyrics that, however apparently simple, can yield other levels of interpretation and subtlety.” One writer has called what she finds in these songs “confessional depth”.That is certainly a part of the story. She has interpreted Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Sting, The Beatles, Appalachian folk songs... One thing I Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s an odalisque to arouse envy in Titian, Boucher, Ingres, or Manet.Filtered amber, white, and blue lights successively bathe Brigitte Bardot, crowned by that golden cloud, as she asks Michel Piccoli, her co-star and screen husband in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (1963, Contempt), to evaluate her naked body’s flawless components while she inventories them post-coitally – feet, ankles, knees, thighs, behind, breasts, nipples, shoulders, arms, face, mouth, eyes, nose, ears.In assessing her economic power as a sexual commodity, however, Bardot (playing ex-typist Camille Javal but also herself) Read more ...
Liz Thomson
2020 was a cruel year for everybody but in addition to the horrors of Covid which included the loss of her compadre John Prine to the virus, Lucinda Williams endured damage to her Nashville home in a tornado and then, in November 2020, she suffered a stroke, which left her with impaired motor skills on her left side. Playing the guitar was no longer as natural as breathing and that would in turn make songwriting difficult. She needed a cane to walk. But within a year, she was road-ready and back in front of an audience though not (yet) playing guitar.So Stories from a Rock ‘n’ Roll Heart is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The cover versions on Dream From The Deep Well include “I Know Who is Sick,” most familiar from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Maken interpretation, and “Down by the Glenside,” which The Dubliners incorporated into their repertoire. The first opens the album, the second closes it. Between, amongst the original compositions, there is also an adaptation of Tim Buckley’s “I Must Have Been Blind.”Taking these as a way in to the fourth studio album from the UK-born but Irish singer-songwriter Brigid Mae Power is an understandable path to follow, but after Dream From The Deep Well concludes it Read more ...
Cheri Amour
Whether it’s the newly platinum tresses or the bubblegum production shimmer that make up Maisie Peters’ sophomore record, The Good Witch has a definite nod to The Wizard of Oz’s Glinda. Unlike that Good Witch of the North though, Peters’ career didn’t just pop off like a bubble. Still only 23 years old, Peters has actually been crafting songs for over a decade now.The West Sussex-born songwriter tested her craft in her teens busking on the streets of Brighton. Her stardust didn’t go unnoticed with chart-topper and MBE Ed Sheeran (perhaps, the Wizard of this story) signing Peters to his label Read more ...
joe.muggs
There are whole books to be written – indeed, hopefully being written – on how hip hop has interacted with dance music culture in North America over the past decade plus. From the overblown mania of rap megastars jumping on David Guetta tracks in the heat of the EDM explosion at the start of the 2010s, to the far more sophisticated fusions done brilliantly by Beyoncé and slightly less so by Drake on big albums last year, it’s created some of the most ubiquitous sounds globally. And in the thick of the raves and festivals, Black American vernacular forms like trap, drill, New Jersey club and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Pinned eyes stare from a frozen husk of a face as a clubber comes down, cradled high over London on a window-cleaner’s perch. Director WIZ’s 18-minute video for Flowered Up’s rave epic “Weekender” (1992) takes you on the E’d up odyssey of Little Joe (Lee Whitlock), from skinning up at work through clubland peaks to chilly aftermath.This BFI release pairs this perfect marriage of music, film and moment’s 2K remaster with Chloé Raunet’s new documentary I Am Weekender. Here Jeremy Deller dubs Weekender “the first meditation on rave culture”, Lynne Ramsay, who similarly caught clubbing’s hazy Read more ...