CDs/DVDs
Album: Cher - ChristmasFriday, 08 December 2023
I honestly never thought I'd add a Cher song to my painstakingly curated Christmas Spotify playlist. But after listening to the ultimate diva's new album entitled simply, Christmas, as we decorate the tree (much to my children's chagrin –... Read more... |
Album: Gregory Porter - Christmas WishThursday, 07 December 2023
The cat in the hat with the mellifluous voice delivers his Christmas Wish for the festive season, his first Christmas album, and it sounds more or less as you would imagine it – tasteful, discreet, soulful, reined in, but richly expressive, and... Read more... |
Blu-ray: BlackhatWednesday, 06 December 2023
The Boxing Day release of Michael Mann’s first feature in eight years, Ferrari, finally follows up Blackhat, a Chris Hemsworth-starring cyber-thriller dismissed on its 2015 release in a manner he hadn’t experienced since The Keep (1983). This two-... Read more... |
Album: Neil Young - Before and AfterMonday, 04 December 2023
Down memory lane, taking us back some six decades to the Buffalo Springfield, the latest Neil Young album's almost 50 minutes of continuous music, each song segueing into the next.“Songs from my life, recently recorded, create a music montage with... Read more... |
Album: Shirley Hurt - Shirley HurtSaturday, 02 December 2023
The realisation that Shirley Hurt is the name assumed by Canada’s Sophia Ruby Katz for recording helps explain why her debut album is so oblique. As well as the cloaked identity, what seem initially to be direct songs cleaving to familiar musical... Read more... |
Album: Ghost Woman - Hindsight Is 50/50Friday, 01 December 2023
Ghost Woman’s 2022 self-titled album and this January’s swift follow-up Anne, If were both fairly laidback and spaced out affairs, with echoes of Beak’s free form motorik grooves and the Byrds’ pastoral psychedelia. Now that multi-instrumentalist... Read more... |
Album: Trevor Horn - Echoes: Ancient & ModernThursday, 30 November 2023
A deathless trend in pop is taking great songs, slowing them down, doing orchestral versions, or rendering them raw acoustic. This, ostensibly, reveals their genius and/or brings them a new audience. Rarely, it can work, as on Johnny Cash’s final... Read more... |
Album: Peter Gabriel - I/OWednesday, 29 November 2023
Some 28 years in gestation, Peter Gabriel’s eighth studio album of wholly original songs – his first since 2002’s Up – will delight his fans and top the charts. Gabriel’s best instrument remains his voice, that husky marvel, which is at its most... Read more... |
Blu-ray: King and CountryTuesday, 28 November 2023
British anti-war films inspired by “the war that” failed “to end all wars” include Oh! What a Lovely War, The Return of the Soldier, A Month in the Country, Regeneration, Mrs Dalloway, The Trench, Testament of Youth, the different versions of... Read more... |
Album: Harp - AlbionMonday, 27 November 2023
After leaving Midlake while recording their fourth album, Tim Smith said he was pursuing music under the name Harp. That was in 2012. Smith had been the Denton, Texas-based band’s singer and main songwriter. Without him, Midlake pushed on and issued... Read more... |
Album: Catrin Finch & Aoife Ni Bhriain - Double YouSaturday, 25 November 2023
Two weeks ago, Welsh harpist Catrin Finch and Irish fiddler, violinist and Hardanger fiddle player Aoife Ni Bhriain entranced their audience at the Union Chapel in North London, playing from their new album, Double You, as part of the London Jazz... Read more... |
Album: Take That - This LifeFriday, 24 November 2023
Listening to the best of what they’ve created since their post-2005 reformation, it would take a staunch anti-Take That churl to hold fast to the punk-rockin’ claim the “man band” are, musically, just talentless piffle. “Shine”, “Patience”, “Hey Boy... Read more... |
