CDs/DVDs
Blu-ray: Michael Powell - Early WorksTuesday, 22 October 2024
The missing element is magic, the swooning sense of the romantic, spiritual and supernal which Michael Powell’s partnership with Emeric Pressburger found in the British and especially English soul, sharpened by Hungarian Pressburger’s fascinated... Read more... |
Album: Tess Parks - PomegranateMonday, 21 October 2024
Tess Parks’ fourth solo album is suffused with otherness. When lyrics are direct, they are destabilised by the etiolated, freeze-dried voice delivering them. “Sometimes it feels like everyone should be dancing, maybe I should be dancing,” she sings... Read more... |
Album: Laura Marling - Patterns in RepeatSaturday, 19 October 2024
If there’s a rough-hewn tinge to Laura Marling’s eighth album, then there’s a wildly valid reason for it. It was written shortly after the folk singer-songwriter had her daughter, and was recorded in a home studio with the baby ever present – either... Read more... |
Album: Kylie Minogue - Tension IIFriday, 18 October 2024
There’s a real bind for Kylie Minogue. Her core audience want disco pop, people like me slag her off if she branches out from disco pop and goes country, she does disco pop well… but it’s really, really hard to do disco pop relentlessly well all the... Read more... |
Album: Elephant9 with Terje Rypdal - Catching FireThursday, 17 October 2024
Just before the five-minute point, a Mellotron’s distinctive string sound is heard. Three minutes earlier, a guitar evokes Robert Fripp’s characteristic shimmer. Uniting these might result in King Crimson but, instead, these are just two elements of... Read more... |
Album: Mystery Tiime - Maudlin Tales of Grief and LoveWednesday, 16 October 2024
Londoner Ayman Rostom has been around the block and then some. For some 25 years he’s been a hip hop producer as Dr Zygote, for the past decade he’s made wiry and weird house music as The Maghreban – both of these aliases are still, it seems, fully... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Valley of the BeesTuesday, 15 October 2024
František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1966) has been voted the best Czech film ever made, a visionary 13th century epic whose expense prompted its director to shoot the shorter, lower-budget The Valley of the Bees (Údolí včel) back-to-back with... Read more... |
Album: MC5 - Heavy LiftingMonday, 14 October 2024
MC5 were the original proto-punkers who led the charge against wafty hippy music in the late Sixties and early Seventies. They were touted by Lemmy as the blueprint for Motörhead’s early sound and their initial release Kick Out the Jams arguably... Read more... |
Album: Justin Adams & Mauro Durante - Sweet ReleaseSaturday, 12 October 2024
Sweet Release opens up a landscape of redemption by riding the rails of a classic blues, the title track talking of messages of peace and songs of sweet release, wrapping itself around a typically lean and potent riff conjured by guitarist... Read more... |
Album: Immanuel Wilkins - Blues BloodFriday, 11 October 2024
Immanuel Wilkins’s third Blue Note Album – Blues Blood – has a big concept behind it. According to the album blurb, we are offered “a multimedia performance about the legacies of our ancestors and the bloodlines connecting us...”. It... Read more... |
Album: The Offspring - SuperchargedThursday, 10 October 2024
With Warped Tour anniversary rumours in the air, Green Day and blink-182 touring the world, and 20 huge new tracks from Sum 41, The Offspring’s latest contribution to the thriving Pop Punk scene couldn’t have been timed better. Supercharged is... Read more... |
Album: Ded Hyatt - GlossyWednesday, 09 October 2024
This record keeps you guessing. It starts off with “Hybrid Romance”, an ambient piece that’s very pretty but has swooping glassy synths that crack and fracture and could easily be about to break into some super jagged Berlin deconstructed club music... Read more... |
