CDs/DVDs
Album: Ratboys - The WindowMonday, 21 August 2023![]() Ratboys have been around since 2010, knocking out their guitar-powered indie fare over three albums in their home city of Chicago. However, with album number four, they have decided to branch out and pay homage to the US alt-rock scene of the early... Read more... |
Album: ¿Téo? - LunaFriday, 18 August 2023![]() A little remarked fact of modern music is just how lush the sound of modern R&B and adjacent music is. A decade ago, the relative harshness of trap beats and EDM synths seemed to dominate sonically, or on the more bohemian fringes... Read more... |
Album: Hozier - Unreal, UnearthThursday, 17 August 2023![]() Only a few artists can be said to have exploded on to the scene like Hozier. The solo, Irish musician – full name Andrew John Hozier-Byrne – shot to stardom with the omnipresent hit “Take Me To Church” back in 2014. Although his work since hasn... Read more... |
Album: Genesis Owusu - StrugglerWednesday, 16 August 2023![]() There’s been a sense of anticipation around Ghanaian-Australian Genesis Owusu ever since his ebullient 2021 debut album Smiling with No Teeth. He won a bunch of Arias, Australia’s Grammys, but could he break internationally? He’s toured the US with... Read more... |
Blu-ray: EarwigTuesday, 15 August 2023![]() Even more than David Lynch, to whom her work has been compared, director Lucile Hadžihalilović is a strange agent between this world and the dreamworld.From her debut feature, Innocence, an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s symbolist novel about pre-... Read more... |
Album: OSEES - Intercepted MessageMonday, 14 August 2023![]() On the face of it, this is an extremely simple record. It is big, stomping, party-monster neanderthal synth-rock.There’s no new sounds here: the structures are classic garage punk, the synthesisers’ growl and squeal sounds like some jerry-rigged... Read more... |
Album: Rhiannon Giddens - You're the OneSaturday, 12 August 2023![]() In late 2019, BC, another age, Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi stepped on to a Southbank Centre stage and gave one of those mesmerising performances that forever stays in the memory.In the three years or so since, Giddens has been given a... Read more... |
Album: Neil Young - Chrome DreamsFriday, 11 August 2023![]() A curious and rather marvellous sonic chimera manifests in the twilight of the rock gods, an album from 1977 finding its physical release 46 years after it was committed to acetate, and then abandoned, reasons unknown. Neil Young’s Chrome... Read more... |
Album: Laura Groves - Radio RedThursday, 10 August 2023![]() “Sky at Night” begins Radio Red. Its brooding atmosphere is shared with Saint Etienne’s “Hobart Paving.” Also, a sinuous sense of melody is at one with Todd Rundgren’s finest ballads. Melodic filigrees suggest Laura Nyro or Brighton band The Mummers... Read more... |
Album: Public Image Limited - End of WorldWednesday, 09 August 2023![]() The world might end with a whimper or an inferno, but it’s hard to imagine a day will dawn that extinguishes John Lydon’s scorn for other people’s fecklessness and idiocy. That hand-made polemic typically drives the cauterising post-punk hosannahs... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The English SurgeonTuesday, 08 August 2023![]() Describe The English Surgeon as the story of a plucky doctor attempting to defeat a brain tumour and you’d incur the wrath of its protagonist Henry Marsh, who, in a recent interview included here as an extra, moans that he hates seeing surgeons... Read more... |
Album: The Hives - The Death of Randy FitzsimmonsMonday, 07 August 2023![]() Anyone who has seen the Hives playing live will know that they far transcend their rakish lounge lizards playing garage rock image.The Hives live are a truly life affirming experience. Their performances are full-on from beginning to end and are not... Read more... |
