CDs/DVDs
Blu-ray: Dragon's ReturnMonday, 21 November 2022
Slovak director Eduard Grečner wrote the first draft of a screenplay for Dragon’s Return (Drak sa vracia) in 1956 but didn’t have the confidence to direct it, this adaptation of a novella by the Slovak author Dobroslav Chrobák that he... Read more... |
Album: Carl Cox - Electronic GenerationsMonday, 21 November 2022
Carl Cox is one of the key DJs of his generation, the generation that propagated the club culture which blossomed from the European acid house/rave scene (and originally, of course, from black American house and techno).Going through various musical... Read more... |
Album: Jamie Lenman - The AtheistSaturday, 19 November 2022
Jamie Lenman is as cult an icon as cult icons can get. The former guitarist, song-writer, frontman of Reuben, a band unfortunately most notorious for breaking up, but still dearly beloved by a devoted, passionate fanbase.Lenman has since carved for... Read more... |
Album: Christeene - Midnite Fukk TrainFriday, 18 November 2022
Christeene is not so much a musical entity, as a performative assault, an artist who pushes drag somewhere visceral, caustic, wilfully edgy and defiantly unpolished. The creation of New York-based, Louisiana-raised Paul Soileau, her videos and shows... Read more... |
Album: Craig Fortnam - Luna One - A-Sides - Full Moon Releases October 2021 - September 2022Thursday, 17 November 2022
There can be few currently operating musicians who have a sound as distinctive as Craig Fortnam’s. Whether solo or with his erstwhile band The North Sea Radio Orchestra, his writing has a kind of zig-zagging melody that’s part Robert Wyatt, part... Read more... |
Album: Neil Young with Crazy Horse - World RecordWednesday, 16 November 2022
When most of us fall victim to things beyond our control, the impulse is to howl into the abyss, scream to the stars, wave our fist at clouds. Most of us, of course, aren’t Neil Young.While the raging wildfires that destroyed the singer’s home in... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The TrialTuesday, 15 November 2022
“Two-percent movie-making and 98% hustling,” Orson Welles sighed not long before his death in 1985. “It’s no way to spend a life.” His 1962 film of Franz Kafka’s The Trial was his penultimate full-scale completed feature, only 1965’s Chimes at... Read more... |
Album: Dermot Kennedy - SonderSaturday, 12 November 2022
Not even a worldwide health epidemic could stop the meteoric rise of the Irish singer, who has managed to crack America, achieve national treasure status in his homeland and rack up streaming figures that could actually pay his winter gas bill. Not... Read more... |
Album: Larkin Poe - Blood HarmonyFriday, 11 November 2022
The Larkin Poe story goes back to 2010, when they released four beautiful and distinctive seasons-related EPs, displaying the Lovell sisters Rebecca and Megan’s rich, absorbing vocal harmonies, slippery slide guitar work and a winning with with... Read more... |
Album: Bruce Springsteen - Only the Strong SurviveThursday, 10 November 2022
Bruce is back! His 21st studio album (can it really be 50 years next year since Greetings from Asbury Park?) and his second covers album. It’s a musical world away from the first, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006), but like that... Read more... |
Album: STR4TA - STR$TASFEARWednesday, 09 November 2022
There’s retro and there’s retro. Some music – what you might call the Oasis tendency – simply reproduces the obvious signifiers of the past as signposts of cool. But there’s other stuff that shows deep understanding of both the technique and the... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Owl ServiceTuesday, 08 November 2022
The Owl Service is instantly unsettling, Bridget Appleby’s credit sequence cutting between flickering candles and shadow puppets while a plaintive Welsh folksong is drowned out by the sound of a motorcycle. Alan Garner’s uncompromising 1967 fantasy... Read more... |
