CDs/DVDs
Album: Toots & the Maytals - Got to be ToughSaturday, 12 September 2020
Toots Hibbert may have invented the term “reggae” with his 1968 hit “Do the Reggay” but he has never felt boxed in by the genre. During his almost 60-year singing career, he may have recorded some of the greatest ska and reggae tunes of all time,... Read more... |
Album: Ammar 808 - Global Control/ Invisible InvasionFriday, 11 September 2020
Ammar 808, named after the 1980s Roland drum machine TR-808 is the vehicle for Tunisian producer Sofyann Ben Youssef. He has been exploring, notably in Maghreb United (2018), a rich vein of resonance between the music of North Africa and electronic... Read more... |
Album: Doves - The Universal WantWednesday, 09 September 2020
If Doves have a “thing”, it’s that they do “big” with impeccable intimacy. Over ten years and four albums, they consistently displayed exactly the sort of connection that bands like Coldplay and Keane pretend to have. Huge, sweeping scores and broad... Read more... |
Album: Allison Neale - Quietly ThereTuesday, 08 September 2020
Seattle-born Allison Neale’s alto saxophone sound is instantly appealing. Her playing has the light wispy, airy quality from the "cool", "West Coast" school of Paul Desmond. One day last year, she spent just six hours (10am-5pm minus an hour for... Read more... |
Blu-ray: WalkaboutMonday, 07 September 2020
It’s always a timeslip moment, revisiting films first seen in your teens, but never more so than when watching this beautifully restored print of Walkabout. Nicolas Roeg filmed and directed this fever dream of a movie in 1970, after co-directing... Read more... |
Album: Suzanne Vega - An Evening of New York Songs and StoriesSaturday, 05 September 2020
Suzanne Vega sprang to fame 35 years ago, her eponymous debut one of the last albums we bought in vinyl before the advent of that new-fangled format of aluminium aspic. From it came “Marlene on the Wall”, the video an MTV hit. “Luka” and “Tom’s... Read more... |
Album: Rui Ho - Lov3 & L1ghtFriday, 04 September 2020
A new and very strange kind of pop music has bubbled up over the past half-decade plus. It’s internationalist, rooted in both underground electronics and the most populist styles, bound up with playful but sometimes terrifying ultra high definition... Read more... |
The Rolling Stones' Goats Head Soup 2020 - old-time decadence revisitedThursday, 03 September 2020
It’s been a decade, more or less, since The Rolling Stones opened up their From the Vaults series with The Brussels Affair, AKA Bedspring Symphony, taken from the 1973 European tour following the release of Goats Head Soup. It’s one of the most... Read more... |
Album: Declan McKenna - ZerosThursday, 03 September 2020
Declan McKenna covers many bases. He’s a good looking, teen-friendly pop star who first made waves aged only 15, but he’s also a politically engaged lyricist with aspirations in the region of Bowie and Dylan. His best songs, then, combine chewy,... Read more... |
Album: Tricky - Fall to PiecesWednesday, 02 September 2020
Tricky, the bruised, self-proclaimed "mongrel" from Knowle West, South Bristol’s depressed suburb, has created a language of his own: dark and minimalist, with emotions at once raw and blurred.His 14th album treads familiar ground, but his playful... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Show Boat (1936)Tuesday, 01 September 2020
Stretching from the 1880s through the 1920s, Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel Show Boat, about three generations of entertainers aboard a Mississippi steamer, became the 1928 Jerome Kern–Oscar Hammerstein musical, a part-musical 1929 film, next the 1936... Read more... |
Album: Throwing Muses - Sun RacketMonday, 31 August 2020
“If I was a better dreamer, you’d be a dream come true” sings Kristin Hersh over the opening bars of Throwing Muses’ new album, Sun Racket. It sets the tone for a distorted and woozy disc that could easily be the soundtrack to a folk-horror tale set... Read more... |
