CDs/DVDs
Barney Harsent
Radiate Like This is the first album in six years from American indie rock outfit Warpaint. The wait is, in part at least, down to Covid, which took hold just after they’d finished early recording sessions, forcing the band – like the rest of the world – into a solitary stasis of sorts.This resulted in time to tinker – space to iron out the creases and finesse the folds as band members Emily Kokal, Jenny Lee Lindberg, Stella Mozgawa and Theresa Wayman recorded their parts in isolation, building the songs slowly, carefully, layer by layer.The result is really quite beautiful. Read more ...
Liz Thomson
All power to Willie Nelson – marking his 89th birthday this week with a new album, A Beautiful Time. He and Trigger have been making music together for more than half a century, Nelson releasing his first album in 1962. From his pen have come some of the most powerful, poignant and enduring country songs ever written and he’s not done yet. How many of today’s artists, from whatever genre, will survive even half as long?Produced by Nelson’s old pal and long-time partner Buddy Cannon, who co-write six of the 14 songs, the album’s line-up includes the distinctive sounds of Jim "Moose" Brown on Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Drummer/vibraphonist Ches Smith’s previous release on the Pyroclastic label could not be more different from this one.Last year's Path of Seven Colors was well received: it was the Guardian’s 2021 jazz album of the year. That disc was an exploration of the Haïtian Vodou tradition through the prism of the contemporary New York jazz scene. We heard lots of busy pattering from a trio of tanbou drums, contrasted with the protean energy of saxophone hero Miguel Zenón bursting forth. Lovely stuff.In Interpret It Well we are in a very different place: these pieces tend to emerge from the Read more ...
mark.kidel
François Truffaut’s Nouvelle Vague masterpiece revolves around an endlessly mutating love triangle, set in a world that encompasses the hedonism of the Belle Époque, the horror of the First World War, and the book burning that ushered in the Nazi period in Germany. The film is a triumph of humanity as well as a deep and touching reflection on friendship, love and marriage.Jules et Jim marked an era, not least because the two male protagonists, the Austrian actor Oskar Werner as Jules and Henry Serre as Jim, are more sentimental than Catherine, the near-psychopathic and yet overwhelmingly Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Trombone Shorty has been described as “part Jimi Hendrix, part James Brown and all New Orleans”. I can’t vouch for the New Orleans part of this description, but on the evidence of this album, part Lenny Kravitz and part Bobby Brown might be closer to the mark.While Trombone Shorty has put out 12 albums in the last 20 years as a bandleader, his main day job is a sideman for numerous other acts, from Harry Connick Jr to Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. Hence, Lifted is actually his first solo album in five years.Within its grooves, there is funk, soul and even some psychedelic rock. Mostly, though, there Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Incanting, declaiming, and growling, as if actual singing might prettify the Fontaines DC’s post-punk dirges, Grian Chatten has never sounded more aggrieved than he does on the Irish combo’s third album. Disarmingly, he also sounds younger on Skinty Fia than he did on the group’s brash debut, Dogrel (2019), and its startlingly seasoned follow-up, A Hero’s Death (2020). It’s as if the man can no longer shield the boy. There’s a logical reason for this, and it applies not just to the frontman but to the Fontaines as a collective and the places they find themselves in, musically Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Jono McCleery has one of those voices that once heard, demands your attention, an instrument of richness and depth, and one that has earned him many fans. The likes of Vashti Bunyan and Tom Robinson helped to crowdfund his recording debut back in 2008, Darkest Light; he steered himself through London’s eclectic electro-acoustic underground music scene alongside the likes of Jamie Woon and the Portico Quartet, and released four more folktronic-textured releases with Ninja Tune.His sixth album, on the Berlin-based Ninety Days Records, was recorded in early 2021, over five days in Rotterdam Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Contrary to the title’s implication, there initially seems to be little movement in Arch of Motion. A note is held on an organ. Then another note comes in and is also held. Chords build up gradually. Maybe one or two ascending or descending notes come and go. And that seems to be it.But when Track Five arrives, the mood brightens and the sonic pallete becomes more broad. The drone on “Mending (Light Pressure)” might be an analogue synth. Next, “Conversation” adds a breathy wordless voice – celestial, wraith-like. After this, the crepuscular “Inhale” features what seem to be actual words. In Read more ...
Liz Thomson
There aren’t too many musicians, male or female, who made it into Rolling Stone's list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time”, and "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". Indeed, the former was overwhelmingly male, the latter included only two women, Joni Mitchell (discuss), and Bonnie Raitt.Raitt deserves the tsunami of accolades that have come her way, including 10 album- and performance-related Grammys, and another for Lifetime Achievement. She is a singular figure in what is still, after so many decades, a man’s world. (Janis Ian is another phenomenal guitarist whose contribution Read more ...
mark.kidel
Many groundbreaking cinema classics remain frozen in a particular zeitgeist, but François Truffaut’s first feature, from the early days of the French New Wave, is not one of them. Released in 1959, The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups) is so adventurous in style, without ever being pretentious, the coming-of age story it vividly tells so engaging, and the performance of Jean-Pierre Léaud so thrilling, that it remains fresh and relevant to this day.Léaud, a mixture of cocksure arrogance and touching vulnerability, already evident in his impressive and touching screen test (which is among the extras on Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Covid pandemic’s various lockdowns may have been a living hell for some, but there were also plenty of people who thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to distance themselves from society. One of those to thrive during this time was Jason Pierce, band leader and the only constant member of psychedelic space rockers Spiritualized.However, while the last Spiritualized album And Nothing Hurt was pretty much a solo affair, Everything Was Beautiful sees the pendulum swing to the other extreme. For, while Pearce may have played 16 different instruments during its recording – which took place in 11 Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Returning with their first new music in almost a decade, EDM supergroup Swedish House Mafia (the producer-DJ trio Steve Angello, Axwell and Sebastian Ingros) deliver their debut album with a sense of vaulting ambition and anything-is-possible belief. In their own words, Paradise Again is a “sonic adventure” to a “new world, a world of free thoughts, limitless ideas and space for progression.”There are, if we’re being generous, two ideas on Paradise Again. The first is one that anyone familiar with their oeuvre will already be well acquainted with: big, showy, glitter-gun production that Read more ...