CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
On Brian Christinzio’s sixth album as BC Camplight, he wants listeners to know about his recent experiences and their effect on him. Herewith, a mostly unembroidered account of how he sees things. When allusiveness arrives, the metaphors are easy to interpret. The last three tracks are titled “Going Out on a Low Note”, “I'm Ugly” and “The Mourning”.The Last Rotation of Earth follows-up 2020’s Shortly After Takeoff. That also drew from his then-recent past: being removed by immigration authorities from his adopted home of Manchester – he’s from Philadelphia; his father’s death, and the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
New Orleans “is not a music business city, it’s a music culture city,” says David Shaw of The Revivalists, one of the interviewees in Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story.This documentary sets out to describe that multiracial culture and heritage through the particular prism of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, known as “Jazz Fest”, which is held on the last weekend in April and the first weekend in May. It had a celebratory fiftieth anniversary edition in 2019 before being forced to close for two years by the pandemic.The film does a good job of explaining the festival’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Some rock bands base their career around being musically fluid, an ever-changing what-will-they-do-next? conundrum. Others, such as, famously, Motörhead and The Ramones, simply go on doing their thing, honing it, repeating ad infinitum, with an almost zen devotion. The results, at their best, are vigorously on-point.It’s not only rock bands, though. Some of those swept up in the 1990s rave-olution also knuckled down, stuck to the cause, purposefully focused. One such is Steve Mac and his new album combines aspects of old and contemporary production to salute the history and ongoing potency of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Aaron Jerome has always cut his own path through British music. After a few jazzy, groovy experiments under his own name in the 00s, he came dramatically to prominence at the end of that decade as SBTRKT. He was always associated with the post-dubstep moment where the UK bass subcultures of dubstep and grime folded back into house and techno, launching big names like Hessle Audio and Disclosure – but in fact he didn’t quite fit there.There was always something a bit restless about his music. As a British Asian producer coming to fame working with a Black singer (Sampha) yet making music that Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Those kooky ex-child-actors from Long Island are back again, all flares and mullets. And they’ve got something to tempt us. What kind of musical cake might you expect to savour if you mixed a little bit Simon and Garfunkel, a soupçon of Fleet Foxes, a dash of Bread, the occasional smattering of the Everly Brothers, a twist of Beach Boys and a dollop of the Carpenters? A Lemon (Drizzle) Twigs cake, that’s what. And it’s a bit sickly sweet.Deeply unfashionable as that concoction might sound, it doesn’t quite close the cool/not-cool circle as they’d probably hoped. The trouble is that it simply Read more ...
graham.rickson
I can still (just) remember Saturday morning cinema being a thing, only because my big brother was old enough to attend weekly sessions at the local ABC and I was too young to go. He would presumably have watched several of the films in this latest BFI collection, all produced by the Children’s Film Foundation.This state institution produced 55-minute features designed for Saturday screenings from 1950 up until the late 1980s, when dwindling audiences and the popularity of Tiswas rendered it obsolete. Funding came from the Eady Levy, a 5% tax on box office receipts intended to support Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Reuniting with Russ Titelman, the producer of her eponymous 1979 debut and its follow-up 1981’s Pirates, Rickie Lee Jones approaches the great American songbook as if she was reuniting with an old flame, the thrill of it smouldering and concentrating itself in 10 elegant, soulful jazz-blues performances. These Pieces of Treasure open with the shimmering vibes of “Just in Time”, takes in a very different realisation of “Nature Boy”, a languid version of “One for My Baby” that burns the midnight oil, and closes up shop with a walk on “The Sunny Side of the Street” and “It’s All in the Game Read more ...
peter.quinn
The seed for this wonderful third album on ACT from the Vancouver-born vocalist, pianist and songwriter Laila Biali was first sown in 2013 when, in advance of a gig in the Canadian port city of Hamilton, she opened up the floor and asked fans what songs they’d like to hear her sing. Cue a deluge of requests.A trio of these suggestions – beautiful reharmonisations of Coldplay’s “Yellow” and David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”, plus a ruminative take on Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today” – ended up on Biali’s impressive 12-song, self-titled ACT debut released in 2018, for which she Read more ...
joe.muggs
“If you’re going to do it, do it well” goes a chanted refrain in the opening title track here. And it’s words Jessie Ware clearly lives by – she is not someone who has time to do anything rubbish. From featuring on the cream of post-dubstep electronic dance production circa 2010 (SBTRKT, Joker, Disclosure), through creating a gorgeously brooding Eighties flavoured hinterland on her Mercury Prize nominated debut album Devotion, all the way to creating one of the brightest rays of sunshine during the Covid weirdness of 2020 with a magical video for her Rotary Connection indebted single “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Damned could have been bigger contenders. As anyone who’s seen Wes Orshoski’s feature film biog, Don’t You Wish We Were Dead, will know, their career has been blighted by chaos, line-up changes, catastrophic business decisions and just plain bad luck. What they have never been short of is songs. From “Smash It Up” to “New Rose” to “Stranger on the Town”, their golden years were littered with corkers. Their new album, their 12th, assembles a dozen songs that, while not in the league of the aforementioned, showcase rock’n’roll songwriting chops intact, exuding melodic charm and lyrical Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s 25 years since Lonnie Liston Smith last released an album. But this a man who earned his musical stripes with Miles Davis and Pharaoh Sanders, pretty much invented Jazz Funk with the Cosmic Echoes in the 1970s and then helped to reboot hip-hop with Guru and Digable Planets in the 1990s – and so, you pretty much take what you’re given and are thankful for it when dealing with such a musical titan.JID017, an album produced in collaboration with A Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammed and film score composer Adrian Younge for their long-running label Jazz Is Dead, is a smooth mix of Read more ...
graham.rickson
The ne plus ultra of donkey films remains Robert Bresson’s heartbreaking Au hazard Balthazar (1966). Veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, premiered at last year’s Cannes Festival, is a very loose variant, Skolimowski revealing in a booklet interview with David Thompson that Balthazar “was the only film at which I really shed a tear at the end”.Watching the earlier film after seeing EO highlights how very different the two films are. Bresson’s donkey is seen very much through the eyes of the humans who variously love and abuse him, while Skolimowski shows us a confusing, often Read more ...