CDs/DVDs
Katie Colombus
What a conflict of interests. I feel like Jean-Claude Van Damme in that Volvo ad, with the truck on the left hand side being my music editor who was recently name-checked by Lewis Capaldi after describing him as “a constipated Hozier”, and my children on the other who are constantly squawking about the video snippet from “Wish You the Best” shared on Tiktok about the little dog in the bike basket that’s making hoardes of adolescent children sob at the bus stop.Personally, I massively rate Capaldi for being so snort-inducingly dry in his self-deprecating humour, and his honesty about living Read more ...
Tom Carr
In the era of TikTok and Spotify playlists, it’s hard to gauge when an artist will reach the nebulous threshold and become popular. But for those who can ride this game of algorithms – the change can be sudden.Look no further than Sleep Token. The British metal collective whose anonymity and heavy gothic apparel set them apart upon entering the scene. Their unique style, coupled with a metal sound that defies firm genre definitions quickly garnered them a niche following since 2017.With their two albums so far (2019 debut Sundowning and 2021’s This Place Will Become Your Tomb) their Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kesha is one of the 21st century’s most characterful pop stars. She’s regularly stepped out of the boxes people have put her in, musically and otherwise. But, even taking into account truly oddball songs such as “Godzilla” (from 2017’s Rainbow), or projects such as working with Flaming Lips, Gag Order, created with cosmic ultra-producer Rick Rubin, is by far her most out-there work. It’s also the sound of a tormented human being.On her first two albums Kesha personified young American women raucously embracing hedonism, breaking out of the cultural straitjackets that had head-melted Britney, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Paul Simon is an ornery bugger. Full of awkwardness and perversity as a person, seemingly hugely detached, but as an artist capable of as much tenderness and directness as just about anyone out there. Capable of making world-changing artistic statements but queering his pitch with bizarrely, unnecessarily reactionary statements or actions. Really, a very weird man.But thankfully, he’s never gone all the way into cantankerousness. He’s not a Morrissey, so high on his own farts that the perversity becomes his entire persona, and every action and word is layered with provocation and second Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This almost forgotten, naturalistic 1976 road movie lets four young Frenchmen off the leash in a cross-country trip from Lille to Cannes.Car salesman Klouk (Bernard Crombey) is forced by his oppressive boss to ditch a promised weekend with his wife to deliver a rich man’s Chevrolet to his Cote d’Azur mansion. His wife is contemptuously resigned to such defeats. His goofy, probably gay nurse friend Philippe (Xavier Saint-Macary) tags along, and they pick up abrasive Charles (Étienne Chicot) and his dreamy, dependent flatmate Daniel (Patrick Bouchitey, pictured bottom right with Chicot) along Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Life is better together, and the beauteous sounds created by The Milk Carton Kids proves it. Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan got their acts together in 2011, having each pursued solo careers that never quite gelled. Ryan pitched up at a Pattengale gig in Eagle Rock, California, which was home for both of them.They recorded their first album live at Zoey’s Café in Ventura a few months later and would soon be featured in the all-star line-up for Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of Inside Llewyn Davis. Now comes their sixth studio album, their first since The Only Ones, a short Read more ...
graham.rickson
The titular character in Juraj Herz’s Morgiana plays a peripheral though important role, some of the film’s most striking visual flourishes (courtesy of legendary cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera) being her point-of-view shots while she scurries in and around the dusty lodge owned by her mistress Viktoria. Morgiana is actually a very photogenic Siamese cat, the perfect companion to Iva Janžurová’s witch-like Viktoria. Outraged at learning that her late father has left the bulk of his estate to his other daughter Klára, Viktoria takes revenge by dosing her sister with a slow-acting poison. Herz Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Mali’s Tuareg superstars, Tinariwen have been burnishing their assouf desert blues sounds with the echoes of folk and country sounds from the rural USA for some time – most especially on their 2014 Emmaar and more recent Amadjar albums. However, these foreign sounds have never felt more than a bit of decoration before now.Amatssou, an album produced by Daniel Lanois, with pedal steel, banjo and fiddle from Wes Corbett and Fats Kaplin and additional percussion by Amar Chaoui, feels more like a focussed collaboration between two distinct musical genres – even if it was largely put together at a Read more ...
mark.kidel
“Yerimayo Celebration”, which opens Baaba Maal’s brilliant and superbly paced new album, sets the tone: it starts in the mists of time, as it were, drawing deep on the minimal soul of traditional West African music: a plucked ngoni, and a haunting voice. The spirits have been summoned.Then, the song explodes, driven by the rhythmic clatter of the sabar drums, so characteristic of the region, with subtle voice distortions and electronic effects. This is fusion of the ancient and new that works wonderfully.The song celebrates fishermen, the clan from which Baabal Maal comes, rather than from a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s been five years since the release of Malian musician and actor Fatoumata Diawara’s breakout album, Fento, and just short of a year since her magnificent headline appearance on the first day of 2022’s Womad Festival. So, it is with some anticipation that her star-studied follow-up has finally appeared – as expected though, it is an absolute peach. Contributions from Damon Albarn (who also produced half of the tunes here), Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca, Ghanaian rapper M.anifest, Angie Stone and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, to only name a few of her collaborators, result in a set Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
When is the right moment for a musician to step out of the shadows and release an album in her/his own name? Vicente Archer, one of the most in-demand NYC bassists around, has certainly taken his time. In his late forties, and with appearances on over 150 albums by others to his name, he explains: “I wanted to find something that’s more myself.” Short Stories will be released on the Canadian Cellar Live label. Bassist Archer grew up in upstate New York. His first instrument was the guitar, both in a teenage rock band, and sitting as a local jazz gig which happened to include Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In Mark Jenkin’s haunted Cornwall, time warps and bends. He is a child of Nic Roeg’s Seventies masterworks (Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth), whose kaleidoscopic slivering of time expressed an elliptical, sensual mind. Jenkin too has built his own time and space with self-described “seemingly crazy” antique techniques, limiting him to clockwork, 16mm film and post-synch sound.In this follow-up to his debut, Bait, a ship sunk in 1897's flotsam bobs into 1973, premonitory of a new sinking, remembered on a crackling radio report from now. The otherwise Read more ...