CDs/DVDs
Blu-ray: My Brilliant CareerTuesday, 11 June 2019
Revisiting Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career for the first time since I saw it in its year of release, 1979, is a mixed experience. I was close in age to its heroine and it was one of the first mainstream feature films I’d ever seen... Read more... |
CD: Bruce Springsteen - Western StarsMonday, 10 June 2019
Nothing can quite prepare you for Western Stars, Springsteen's homage to classic artists like Glen Cambell and Burt Bacharach. It's not just the presence of horns and strings. What really leaves you open-mouthed is the voice. Gone is the... Read more... |
CD: Kate Tempest - The Book of Traps and LessonsSunday, 09 June 2019
Here’s a strange thing: sit in a quiet room reading through the poems that make up Kate Tempest’s third album and her swirling collage of words drags you in. It’s an opaque concept work, mingling themes of a broken Britain, teetering on the brink of... Read more... |
DVD: SinkSaturday, 08 June 2019
This debut feature from Mark Gillis is a film of real anger and considerable tenderness. The anger is both at the general situation it depicts, and reveals itself in the particular when his protagonist Micky Mason (Martin Herdman) repeatedly has to... Read more... |
CD: Calexico and Iron & Wine - Years to BurnFriday, 07 June 2019
Anyone familiar with Calexico and Iron & Wine will be unsurprised by Years to Burn. The 32-minute album (one track of which is a short instrumental) showcases lilting, mid-paced, reflective, country tinged and acoustic-bedded songs fleshed... Read more... |
CD: Avicii - TIMThursday, 06 June 2019
Sadness abounds in Avicii's posthumous third album. In context, even the plaintive single syllable of the title is full of pathos. It reminds of the real person, the Swede Tim Bergling who as a teenager discovered he had an unerring ability to hit... Read more... |
CD: Jamie Cullum - TallerWednesday, 05 June 2019
On one level it’s a paean to stylistic pluralism, on another it’s a love letter to his wife. First and foremost, though, Taller sees Jamie Cullum staking out new ground as a singer-songwriter, adeptly aided by his long-time collaborator and friend... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Track 29Tuesday, 04 June 2019
A chronic recycler, Dennis Potter fashioned five feature films from his earlier TV dramas and another from one of his novels. The best of them are 1985’s Dreamchild (from the BBC's Alice, 1965) and Track 29 (1987), which he adapted from the BBC... Read more... |
CD: Naomi Bedford & Paul Simmonds - Singing It All Back Home: Appalachian Ballads of English and Scottish OriginMonday, 03 June 2019
Outside the Palladium a couple of months back for Joan Baez’s farewell, I was given a flyer for this album – by Naomi Bedford herself it turns out. We had a brief chat which left me with a good feeling about the project and I was disappointed... Read more... |
CD: Santana – Africa SpeaksSunday, 02 June 2019
You hear a lot about living legends, but there aren’t actually that many around – at least not since the first half of 2016. Carlos Santana, however, definitely fits the bill. From his early days stealing the show at Woodstock alongside drummer... Read more... |
CD: Peter Perrett - HumanworldSaturday, 01 June 2019
June 2017 witnessed a musical miracle, of sorts – the resurrection to recording and brilliant songwriting of Peter Perrett, The Only Ones’ singer, songwriter, and architect of his own ghoulish entombment in a Gothic south east London pile, fielding... Read more... |
CD: Fujiya & Miyagi – FlashbackWednesday, 29 May 2019
Over the past two decades, Brighton’s Fujiya & Miyagi have managed, without fanfare or fuss, to amass an enviable back catalogue of linear, krautrock driven grooves dresses in slinky, drop-shouldered pop melodies. It’s a formula that has... Read more... |
