CDs/DVDs
CD: Carly Rae Jepsen - DedicatedThursday, 16 May 2019
Carly Rae Jepsen is a brilliant pop star. Her music pure and unashamed radio pop, full of the excitement of living and loving, but her status with her audience and relationship with them are a bit more like what you'd expect from a cult indie act.... Read more... |
CD: Lizzo - Cuz I Love YouWednesday, 15 May 2019
Cuz I Love You starts with a big, bold, black-and-white soul moment, an album title hauled from the heavens via the lungs of an extraordinary pop star. It’s a stunning rush of feeling from Lizzo, the Minneapolis-based singer and rapper, alone in the... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: NovemberTuesday, 14 May 2019
Life in rural 19th century Estonia looks hard. The ice and the squalor are tough enough, but then you’ve the kratts to contend with. We see one in the eye-popping opening sequence of Rainer Sarnet’s 2017 epic November, an unsettling creature cobbled... Read more... |
CD: Lewis Capaldi - Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish ExtentMonday, 13 May 2019
Ed Sheeran, Tom Odell, all those Mr Vulnerability cats; this dude makes them sound like a night out with Slipknot. He is, in fact, a generational divider. Taking the contemporary route to success, wherein smirky, buddy-ish social media is just as... Read more... |
CD: K-X-P - IVSaturday, 11 May 2019
Five years ago, the Swedish tech company Elektron began marketing the first version of the Analog Four, an all-in-one instrument marrying analogue oscillators with a digital sequencer, digital processing and a multi-track capability. That past-... Read more... |
CD: Imperial Wax - Gastwerk SaboteursFriday, 10 May 2019
Gastwerk Saboteurs is the debut album by Imperial Wax, the final line-up of the Fall (the one whose first album together was Imperial Wax Solvent) – but one without the menacing presence of Mark E Smith of course. It’s also a collection of gritty... Read more... |
CD: Whitesnake - Flesh & BloodThursday, 09 May 2019
Whitesnake were always the most absurdly priapic of the successful Eighties heavy rockers. It was therefore with some glee that this writer approached their 13th studio album. In the snowflake age, where offence is taken at the slightest politically... Read more... |
CD: Holly Herndon - PROTOWednesday, 08 May 2019
To consider the third album from experimental composer Holly Herndon solely as a piece of music is to miss the point. PROTO is part artwork, part research project, on which Herndon teams up with collaborators both human and inhuman to discover... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Big ClockTuesday, 07 May 2019
John Farrow’s inexplicably neglected 1948 thriller The Big Clock is a difficult work to pigeonhole, combining traces of noir, screwball comedy and suspense. Farrow’s source material was a novel by poet and pulp fiction writer Kenneth Fearing, here... Read more... |
CD: Esperanza Spalding – 12 Little SpellsMonday, 06 May 2019
Singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding originally released 12 Little Spells last year as a dozen separate tracks, each with its own video. This new expanded edition is available on physical formats and download, with four new tracks as bonus extras.... Read more... |
CD: Clinic – Wheeltappers and ShuntersSunday, 05 May 2019
Before we get to the music, there’s the title of Clinic’s first album in seven years to deal with. It comes from the title of a 1970s Granada TV series, The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, a northern entertainment revue presented by,... Read more... |
CD: Eliza Carthy - RestituteSaturday, 04 May 2019
Restitute, from its music down to its title, is much about its own back story. Three years ago Eliza Carthy, a key figure in British folk music, made a well-liked album called Big Machine with her group, The Wayward Band. They lost their funding... Read more... |
