CDs/DVDs
CD: Bon Iver - 22, A MillionThursday, 29 September 2016
Justin Vernon hasn’t put an album out under the name Bon Iver for five years but you wouldn’t necessarily have noticed. Falsetto-strained, bearded, lumber-jack shirted folk introspection seems to have spread through music like Japanese knotweed, its... Read more... |
CD: Craig David - Following My IntuitionWednesday, 28 September 2016
Craig David’s comeback has been astonishing. Partly this is due to the reason his career stalled in the first place. Lampooning him was, famously, the core element of Channel 4 comedy show Bo’ Selecta!. That programme and his career wound down... Read more... |
DVD: Fire at SeaTuesday, 27 September 2016
There’s a doctor on Lampedusa who has nightmares about the corpses the sea brings to his island: the women who give birth on sinking boats with umbilical cords left uncut, the diesel-poisoned skins, and those left to dehydrate and rot in holds.... Read more... |
CD: Gruff Rhys - Set Fire to the StarsMonday, 26 September 2016
Super Furry Animals front man Gruff Rhys is a quietly prolific talent. Every few years or so, there’ll be another album, complete with the kind of thought-through concept that gives lift to his literate and expressive story songs and colours them... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: John FoxxSunday, 25 September 2016
In 1985, John Foxx released In Mysterious Ways: his fourth solo album since leaving Ultravox in 1979. In 1980, he had charted with “Underpass”, his first solo single. Subsequently, he charted a path where frosty, anomie-filled electropop gave way to... Read more... |
CD: Van Morrison - Keep Me SingingSunday, 25 September 2016
“In time, you’ll be mine,” sings Van Morrison in the opening song to his first new collection in four years. That line sets the tone for a warm bath of an album, a genial, reflective, though always finely honed stroll through the themes and styles... Read more... |
CD: Pixies – Head CarrierSaturday, 24 September 2016
For a few years after their 2004 reformation, it looked like Pixies were going to be more than happy as a heritage act, churning out the highlights of their Eighties magnificence to enthusiastic audiences around the world. In truth, when they... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Glass Key/The Blue DahliaFriday, 23 September 2016
In popular accounts of Hollywood history, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the insolent real-life first couple of Warner Bros film noirs, have traditionally overshadowed Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Paramount's fallen angels were quieter... Read more... |
CD: John Prine - For Better, Or WorseThursday, 22 September 2016
John Prine was once touted, along with every other gravelly young huckster with a guitar, as the new Dylan. If this latest release is any indication, he’s more like the new George Jones. For Better, Or Worse is an anthology of classic country duets... Read more... |
CD: Billy Bragg & Joe Henry - Shine a LightWednesday, 21 September 2016
In 1983, on the raucous punk-a-billy number “A13, Trunk Road to the Sea”, Billy Bragg affectionately sent up the parochial nature of Britain as compared to the USA (“If you ever have to go to Shoeburyness/Take the A-road, the okay road, that’s the... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Early MurnauTuesday, 20 September 2016
“FW Murnau’s work is, at first glance, the most varied, even inconsistent, of the great German cineastes.” Those are the opening words of film critic David Cairns's What Will You Be Tomorrow? an extra conceived for Early Murnau: Five Films, 1921-... Read more... |
CD: Marillion - FEARMonday, 19 September 2016
Sometimes it seems there's nothing less progressive in life than progressive rock. That was certainly once true of Marillion; during the Eighties critics were quick to pounce on their ponderous 20-minute songs, and Fish's painful sixth-form poetry.... Read more... |
