CDs/DVDs
Graham Fuller
Last year’s Brad Pitt vehicle Bullet Train was an affable action comedy except in those parts – including the dreadful coda – when it was an insufferably smirky one. Freighted with more thrills, intelligence, gravitas, and social commentary, 1975’s The Bullet Train, released in a 2K restoration on a Eureka Classics Blu-ray, is the better movie.Director and co-writer Jun'ya Satô’s main character is HIkari 109, a button-nosed 0-series (first-generation) Shinkansen express travelling the 1100 km between Tokyo and Hakata, a trip that then took seven hours. Seeking a $5 million pay-off, criminals Read more ...
Guy Oddy
GoGo Penguin’s new album, Everything is Going to be OK, is so named, not because the band are in possession of an hopeful crystal ball which predicts an imminent end to the UK’s present social and economic problems or of Vladimir Putin’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine, but is a somewhat more humdrum statement about the easy listening neo-jazz trio and their future.This reflects the Manchester band’s optimism now that they have a new drummer, a new record label and, apparently, a “more sonically liberated” sound. Quite why Chris Illingworth, Nick Blacka and Jon Scott have decided to celebrate Read more ...
Cheri Amour
This is technically Leslie Feist’s first release since 2018’s Pleasure. But that doesn't mean the Canadian songwriter has been resting on her laurels.In the five-year period, she’s stepped into the role of solo parenthood by adopting her daughter Tihui, relocated to Toronto, and launched a chart-topping podcast series, Pleasure Studies. All this during a global pandemic that’s thrown the art industry into a bin fire.Accolades and adoption process aside, something else was percolating in the ether though. During the first lockdown, the musician found herself more productive than ever. As she Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I admit I’ve never really seen the point of Ellie Goulding as a pop star. What is it that identifies her? What aspect defines her music? What sets her apart from the pack? Since I believe femme-led pop music is the defining pop of this century so far, surely I should be onside? My contrarian side honestly willed her fifth album to persuade. But it does not. It is, instead, everything about femme-centric 21st century pop that its critics deride. It is vapid, lacking character and substance.You may suggest that, as someone who’s clearly not a fan of Goulding, I’m not the ideal to review this, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Popular musicians “going classical” can work well. Look at Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, at Richard Reed Parry and Colin Stetson from Arcade Fire, or at the late Jóhann Jóhannsson who had a successful career as indie and electronic musician in Iceland before becoming a globally beloved orchestral composer. Of course the boundaries are flimsy anyway these days, with the likes of Max Richter, Nils Frahm and Anna Meredith existing comfortably with one foot in the concert hall and one in the gig venue. Crucially, each of these artists has been able to negotiate their own position among all this, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Anyone who’s heard even a smidgin of Reg Meuross’s music will know what a wonderful writer he is, homing in on often painful aspects of our shared history and retelling it in powerful and poignant songs that make any half-sentient listener want to explore further – both the history and his music.The weekend before lockdown, Meuross played a concert at Green Note in Camden Town, sharing the small stage with David Massengill, another extraordinary writer. Among the songs he sang that day – to a packed audience that had not yet heard of social distancing – was “The Boundary Stone,” a song about Read more ...
Saskia Baron
"We’re not just a dance band, we’ve got things to say.” Pauline Black, lead singer with The Selecter, succinctly pins down what made the era of 2-Tone Records so important to the British music scene at the end of the 1970s.A consortium of bands reworked Jamaican ska, calypso and reggae beats and imbued them with punk energy and their own socially conscious lyrics. In an era when the National Front stirred up racial hatred, the 2-Tone philosophy was all about mixing up young people with a multicultural agenda – two-tone in every way. And as well as black and white musicians up on stage Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On Domestic Sphere, Josephine Foster’s guitar and voice are joined by clacking crickets, a flock of sheep and wailing cats recorded in La Janda in southern Spain. There are also Colorado and Tennessee's birds and frogs. Foster’s great-grandmother is here too, her singing recorded around 1970: the voice from the past enters proceedings suddenly but not jarringly on the album’s ninth track “Reminiscence”.For Foster, this domestic sphere appears to be a figurative space which is spiritual as well as physical. Domestic Sphere ends with the suitably titled “Sanctuary” but the preceding tracks Read more ...
Nick Hasted
May 1968. As France’s Fifth Republic shook, radical director Jean-Denis Bonan divided his time in the Paris streets between filming protests and the fictional hunt for a cross-dressing serial killer. A Woman Kills lay unfinished and forgotten till 2010, a rough-edged film maudit from a tumultuous time.Hélène Picard, “a runaway…[with] a penchant for homosexuality and violence”, is executed for the serial murder of prostitutes, yet the killings by a woman seem to continue. Her executioner Louis Guilbeau (Claude Merlin) meanwhile creepily romances beautiful policewoman Solange (Solange Pradel, Read more ...
Cheri Amour
Maybe you’ve heard the Native American parable about the two wolves. An old Cherokee’s grandson is grappling with internal tensions; self-hatred and self-aggrandising. For Phoebe Bridgers, one-third of indie supergroup boygenius (usually styled with no initial capital letter), this analogy sits at the heart of album standout ‘Not Strong Enough’. In it, the trio, completed by Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, let out the divine line “Always an angel / Never a god,” adding a wry smile to the delivery.Subverting male hero worship is one of the (many) things that’s so refreshingly brilliant about a Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s something charmingly unassuming and humble about The Zombies. Nowadays their 1968 second album Odyssey and Oracle regularly figures in all time greatest albums lists, but it was a flop at the time and its reputation grew through a gradually snowballing cult status, and the band split soon after its release. Most of their existence, in fact, has been in this century, with Rod Argent and Colin Blundstone reviving the name in 2004 and staunchly putting in the legwork on the revival rock circuit ever since. If you ever see them talk, even now at knocking on 80, they are just seemingly Read more ...
Guy Oddy
1982 is only A Certain Ratio’s third album this century but it’s one that’s brimming with funky vibes that are more than enough to get anyone on their feet and dancing with a big smile – not that it doesn’t have plenty to say about the state of things in 2023 too. In fact, 1982 builds upon the band’s recent resurgence to such an extent that you might imagine that A Certain Ratio were a new act, not one that has been around for pushing 50 years.Not ones to stand still, the present line-up of Martin Moscrop, Donald Johnson and Jes Kerr have brought neo-soul singer Ellen Beth Abdi on board and, Read more ...