CDs/DVDs
CD: Espen Eriksen Trio with Andy Sheppard - Perfectly UnhappyFriday, 04 May 2018
Perfectly Unhappy’s sixth track makes the album’s case. Until this point, Andy Sheppard’s playing has largely gone with the flow; working through and around the melodies pianist Espen Eriksen has composed for his trio’s first recorded collaboration... Read more... |
CD: Jon Hopkins - SingularityThursday, 03 May 2018
Jon Hopkins navigates the territory between avant-garde electronic and beat-driven dance music with brilliance. There’s plenty here to make you want to get up and move, but as much to persuade you lie down and let the symphony of textures and... Read more... |
CD: Gaz Coombes - World's Strongest ManWednesday, 02 May 2018
It’s been nearly 30 years since Gaz Coombes’s former band Supergrass released their first brash single “Caught by the Fuzz”, and he hasn’t stopped making great indie music since. His second solo album Matador received a Mercury Prize nomination in... Read more... |
DVD: 50 Years LegalTuesday, 01 May 2018
Simon Napier-Bell’s film has a huge appetite for its subject, which is, of course, the half-century of gay history in Britain that followed the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality brought by the Wolfenden Report in 1967. 50 Years Legal barely... Read more... |
CD: Plan B - Heaven Before All Hell Breaks LooseMonday, 30 April 2018
The opening couplet on Plan B’s new album runs thus: “What the hell have I got to be grateful for?/Can’t be the money as I wasn’t trying to make no more.” One appealing aspect of singer-actor-MC Ben Drew is that he’s spiky, emanating a certain rage... Read more... |
CD: Confusion Master - AwakenSunday, 29 April 2018
Awaken is the debut album by German heavy rockers Confusion Master, a combo of relative unknowns from Rostow who are straight out of the blocks with an unashamed tribute to early Black Sabbath. Loaded with slow and low grooves that come on like a... Read more... |
CD: Janelle Monae - Dirty ComputerSaturday, 28 April 2018
In an impressive pop royalty hat-trick, the title track features Brian Wilson, Pharrell pops up on “I Got the Juice”, and Prince helped source sounds for “Make Me Feel”. So does Kansas City gal Janelle Monae’s third album live up to expectations set... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: They Came to a CityFriday, 27 April 2018
Ealing Studios veteran Basil Dearden may have directed it, but 1944’s They Came to a City is mostly a JB Priestley film, an engaging blend of the mundane and the metaphysical. The work’s stage origins are clear; apart from the newly-written prologue... Read more... |
CD: Van Morrison and Joey DeFrancesco - You're Driving Me CrazyThursday, 26 April 2018
Van Morrison has always been drawn as much to jazz as anything else. There is a natural swing to his voice, and his phrasing, melisma and familiar vocal mannerisms have always suited the medium well, from early excursions on Astral Weeks, through... Read more... |
CD: Blossoms - Cool Like YouWednesday, 25 April 2018
Blossoms are the latest inheritors of the massive-in-Manchester mantle that has, so often in the past, translated into massive-almost-everywhere ubiquity. That their eponymous 2016 debut album was a chart-topper shows they’re on the way, although... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: The TouchTuesday, 24 April 2018
The touch is not always light here. Swathes of clunking, cliché-ridden English dialogue threaten to make the star-crossed lovers look ridiculous, and one of them (Elliott Gould) can be a wooden actor at times. But Ingmar Bergman's first major film... Read more... |
CD: Oliver Way - From The ShadowsMonday, 23 April 2018
There’s a regular problem with techno albums. The DJ-producers who make them are usually so deeply embedded in club techno that when it comes to making a long-form collection, leaving the dancefloor and showcasing variety, they’re incapable. What,... Read more... |
