New releases on CD & DVD
Review: Tori Amos - Ocean to Ocean, review
Wednesday, 27 October 2021
A “sonic photograph” is how Tori Amos describes her sixteenth album, recorded at her home in Cornwall during the spring and summer of Britain’s third lockdown, when, travel, her usual mode of coping with “troubling things”, was not an option. Living in Bude, with her English husband Mark Hawley, their daughter and her partner, she had no option but to “sit with myself and accept where I was”.
Blu-ray: I Never Cry
Tuesday, 26 October 2021
In Piotr Domalewski’s I Never Cry, newcomer Zofia Stafiej excels as sullen Polish schoolgirl Ora, who resentfully travels to Dublin to collect the body of her estranged father, Krzysztof, who has been killed on the unsafe waterfront site where he’d been hired as an emigrant construction worker.
Blu-ray: The Damned
Tuesday, 26 October 2021
One German writer found a neat yet teasing way to sum up the difference between Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), the first film in the Italian...
Album: They Might Be Giants - BOOK
Monday, 25 October 2021
“We’ve always tossed in some super-dire, high-voltage, death-trip lyrics that offset the merriment of a melody,” John Flansburgh of They Might Be...
Album: Nightmares On Wax - Shout Out! To Freedom...
Saturday, 23 October 2021
George Evelyn is one of British music’s more interesting characters. With equal parts Yorkshire bluntness, hip hop swagger and cosmic dreams, he has...
Album: Lana Del Rey - Blue Banisters
True romance from the Americana pop icon |
Album: Elton John - The Lockdown Sessions
While the nation baked bread, Sir Elton called up his friends |
Blu-ray: La Dolce Vita
Fellini's prescient vision of a paparazzi-dominated world |
Album: Young Thug - Punk
Different eras of Young Thug come together nicely on long-awaited new album |
Album: Jarvis Cocker – Chansons d’Ennui Tip-Top
An amusing French fancy with a soupçon of inevitability |
Album: Coldplay - Music Of The Spheres
Universalist faith inspires earthbound sounds |
Album: Finneas - Optimist
Brother and collaborator of one of the biggest stars on earth steps out on his own |
Album: Pokey LaFarge - In the Blossom of Their Shade
Pokey's lockdown escape |
Blu-ray: The Lighthouse (Mayak)
Subdued, elegiac meditation on wartime life in the Caucasus |
Album: Santana - Blessings and Miracles
Latin Jazz pioneer hampered by a surfeit of brilliant guests |
Album: James Blake - Friends That Break Your Heart
Our James Blake-phobic reviewer has to admit the singer's latest has much to admire |
Album: The Courettes - Back In Mono
Garage rock revivalists go-go girl group crazy |
Album: Sam Fender - Seventeen Going Under
The Geordie stadium singer-songwriter unleashes fury while maturing his sound |
Album: Ministry - Moral Hygiene
Uncle Al raises a battle flag against the US political right-wing |
DVD/Blu-ray: Another Round
Thomas Vinterberg's superbly ambivalent drama about drinking in Denmark |
Album: Efterklang - Windflowers
The Danish art-poppers balance the tension between reserve and forthrightness |
DVD/Blu-ray: Maigret - The Complete Series
Entertaining, idiomatic Simenon adaptation, brilliantly cast |
Album: BADBADNOTGOOD - Talk Memory
Jazz/hip-hop mavericks' psychedelic voyage has a Hollywood ending |
Album: Vangelis - Juno to Jupiter
The septuagenarian electronic don maintains his course to the stars |
Album: The Specials - Protest Songs 1924 - 2012
Raw, spirited covers set featuring well-chosen songs of dissent and satire |
Album: Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga - Love for Sale
A new Tony Bennett album...at 95 |
Blu-ray: Johnny Guitar
Nicholas Ray's operatic Western gets the revival treatment |
Album: Catherine Graindorge - Eldorado
Ambient reflections on lockdown and death |
Album: Black Dice - Mod Prog Sic
Twenty-three years into their career, the raw electronic trio get to the hub of things |
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