CDs/DVDs
Album: Gary Kemp - This DestinationMonday, 27 January 2025![]() If I’d listened to this blind, I would have absolutely no idea who it was by. This isn’t the voice I remember on those Spandau backing tracks. In fact, it’s a sound straight from mid-80s soft rock. If that makes you feel queasy, step away now.... Read more... |
Album: Ludovico Einaudi - The Summer PortraitsFriday, 24 January 2025![]() Nine billion streams a year. That’s the sheer scale on which the music of Ludovico Einaudi reaches audiences. The Italian, who will be 70 this November, is courteous and genial in person – I interviewed him in Montreal a couple of years ago – but is... Read more... |
Album: FKA Twigs - EusexuaThursday, 23 January 2025![]() It would be really easy to get hung up on the definition for this album. Is it a new sexuality term? A holiday genre of technopop? A planet that will align with the others on January 29th?English singer Tahliah Debrett Barnett, aka FKA Twig,... Read more... |
Album: Tunng - Love You All Over AgainWednesday, 22 January 2025![]() This is Tunng’s ninth album, their first in five years, and marks their 20th anniversary by consciously going full circle to the gentle sound sculpture and folk melody of their earliest work. It is also thrown into fascinating relief by... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Mikey and NickyTuesday, 21 January 2025![]() The blurb that accompanies this Criterion Blu-ray calls Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which co-stars John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as scuzzy, low-ranking gangsters on the run from their bosses, “an unsung masterpiece of American cinema”. For once,... Read more... |
Album: Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis & Karine Polwart - Looking For the ThreadMonday, 20 January 2025![]() It’s been five years since the last studio album by the inestimable Mary Chapin Carpenter, the lyrical and intimate The Dirt and the Stars, recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Bath, the second of two projects with producer Ethan Johns... Read more... |
Album: Larkin Poe - BloomSaturday, 18 January 2025![]() The Lovell sisters Rebecca and Megan can be heard supporting Ringo Starr on his new album of country songs, while at the same time their seventh album hits the shelves, and with some heft and punch, too, on the raw strength of the scuzzy guitar-led... Read more... |
Album: Kele - The Singing Winds Pt. 3Friday, 17 January 2025![]() Of the big UK indie bands of the 00s wave, Bloc Party were always the most austerely art-rockish. Where Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons, Franz Ferdinand all to some degree or other had a dose of the vaudevillian and a bit of party “woohoo!”, BP adhered way... Read more... |
Album: The Weather Station - HumanhoodThursday, 16 January 2025![]() Four of Humanhood’s 13 tracks are short, impressionistic mood pieces. Between 48 seconds and just-over a minute-and-a-half long, they mostly lack singing. Instrumentation is jazzy, leaning on piano and wind instruments. Drones and white noise evoke... Read more... |
Album: Ethel Cain - PervertsWednesday, 15 January 2025![]() Ethel Cain’s Perverts is a dark and experimental follow-up to her debut album, Preacher’s Daughter. It takes listeners on a haunting journey through unsettling soundscapes that blend elements of drone, slowcore and dark ambient music.Exploring heavy... Read more... |
Album: Moonchild Sanelly - Full MoonMonday, 13 January 2025![]() Rooted in South African electronic styles such as kwaito, amapiano and gqom, the music of Moonchild Sanelly also shows a rich in awareness of US and European hip hop and pop.Initially a product of Durban’s poetry scene, Sanelly, born Sanelisiwe... Read more... |
Album: Lambrini Girls - Who Let the Dogs OutSaturday, 11 January 2025![]() Phoebe Lunny and Lilly Macieira are furious. Livid with the rapist cops, sleazy men, gentrifying landlords, nepo babies and, to be fair, a significant chunk of mainstream society.The Lambrini Girls’ eminently quotable debut album, Who Let the Dogs... Read more... |
