sat 11/10/2025

CDs/DVDs

Hollie Cook's 'Shy Girl' isn't heavyweight but has a summery reggae lilt

Hollie Cook was in the final line-up of post-punk groundbreakers The Slits. When singer Ari Up died in 2010 and the group ended, there was a flurry of interest in Cook for a while. She supported The Stone Roses and appeared on Jools Holland’s Later....

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Pop Will Eat Itself's 'Delete Everything' is noisy but patchy

Pop Will Eat Itself deserve to be more celebrated. The Stourbridge outfit were one of the first 1980s bands to realise the potential of smashing punky indie-rockin’ into hip hop and electronic dance.They had hits, many great songs, and covered the...

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Odd times and clunking lines in 'The Life of a Showgirl' for Taylor Swift

It’s funny: people say a lot online that what you’re allowed to like and dislike in music is bounded by age, gender and so forth. “It’s not FOR you,” they say. And in many ways, when it comes to Taylor Swift, that’s fair enough.There are certainly...

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Album: Boz Scaggs - Detour

Boz Scaggs rarely does a less than wonderful album. His latest is an exemplary collection of smooth and soulful standard and a few other choice items including a song he wrote for his first album Boz Scaggs (1969) “I’ll Be Long Gone” and an Allen...

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Emily A. Sprague realises a Japanese dream on 'Cloud Time'

The history of experimental musicians from Europe and North America adopting Japanese aesthetics is … patchy. It got especially dodgy in the 1990s when every other electronica dork started flinging random kanji characters on their sleeves, writing...

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Waylon Jennings' 'Songbird' raises this country great from the grave

This is quite a tale: Shooter, son of Waylon Jennings, discovers a tranche of his father’s personal multitrack tapes from the analogue years, dating between 1973 – when he wrestled artistic control from RCA – and 1984, when he had quit cocaine,...

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Slovenian avant-folk outfit Širom’s 'In the Wind of Night, Hard-Fallen Incantations Whisper' opens the door to inner space

The 16-minute album opener “Between the Fingers the Drops of Tomorrow's Dawn” coalesces at the 12-minute point, when clattering percussion meshes with what sounds like a sitar to fashion a hypnotic, repetitive whole. It’s as if Slovenia’s Širom have...

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'The Art of Loving': Olivia Dean's vulnerable and intimate second album

In the age of streaming, it’s never been less clear knowing when you can safely say an artist is well known in the mainstream. But for the rising star of Olivia Dean, the neo-soul Londoner, if Spotify streams count for anything then with...

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Doja Cat's 'Vie' starts well but soon tails off

Doja Cat is a fascinating one-off. She’s a rap-centric Californian artist whose background dips into everything from new age philosophy to skate culture. She’s the epitome of a 2020s singer who’s as much a social media phenomenon as a pop star (and...

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Mariah Carey is still 'Here for It All' after an eight-year break

One of the great moments of Private Eye magazine’s fustiness in recent years was putting Mariah Carey in Pseud’s Corner, for the quote about how she deals with the ageing process: “I do not acknowledge time.” That quip is of course in no way pseudo-...

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Album: Solar Eyes - Live Freaky! Die Freaky!

Solar Eyes are an indie dance two-piece from Birmingham’s Hall Green. With a sound that binds together psychedelic guitars, foot stomping beats and trippy lyrics, their sophomore album Live Freaky! Die Freaky! exudes a wild-eyed exuberance that...

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Album: Night Tapes - portals//polarities

“Helix” is the ninth track on portals//polarities. With this dramatic, acid house-leaning slab of shoegazing-infused electropop, Night Tapes make the case that they’re the real deal.Up to this point, their pop-inclined electronica has embraced...

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