CDs/DVDs
Tom Carr
Having propelled to stardom with their debut album Night Visions back in 2012, the Nevada pop-rock giants Imagine Dragons have reigned supreme on charts and airwaves.Their blending of elements from a wide range of genres into one melting pot, from rock to reggae, hip-hop to metal, has meant they’re a band with a little bit for everyone. Though their debut largely stayed true to a pop-rock foundation that was listenable and full of anthemic sing-a-longs, the boundaries on each album since have been pushed somewhat more noticeably.Take their 2014 follow up album, Smoke and Mirrors, which has Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Oh this is sad. Up until this point Camilla Cabello has been a good pop star. Her biggest songs were loaded with familiar-to-the-point-of-cheesiness retro Latin samples, or angsty mini-dramas loaded with the musical theatre-style chops that had made her an X-Factor star in her teens, always delivered with a ton of conviction and feeling. Even the infuriatingly catchy “Senorita” with her then boyfriend Shawn Mendes somehow managed to maintain likeability despite its ubiquity. There was a general sense that she knew what she was doing and was good at it; she had her own lane.It feels churlish Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Wow, this is a trip back in time. A visit from "The Man in Black" 21 years after he passed away, just a few months after his beloved wife, June Carter Cash, who stood by him through thick and thin as together they made such beautiful music.I saw him live only once, in the very early 1980s at the annual International Festival of Country Music, a three-day Easter extravaganza at what was then Wembley Arena. Mervyn Conn, the impresario behind the jamboree, was a sleaze bag and tight with his money but boy did he pack that stage with amazing stars! He’d watch over the shows like a Roman emperor, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
She has one of the most distinctive voices in folk and contemporary British music, impossible to forget once heard, and impossible to ignore. Even – or especially – as Linda Peters, singing, aptly enough, “I’ll Show You How to Sing” on a fairly obscure 1968 single with Paul McNeill.A lot of songs have gone under the bridge since then, and Thompson’s standing as one of our great singers has not been diminished by the singer’s struggles with spasmodic dysphonia, a condition that robs her of her voice, but not her music, spirit, wit, love or humour, all of which are in abundance in this new set Read more ...
graham.rickson
One of those rare films that leaves you speechless after the closing credits, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (L'Armée des ombres) sounds on paper as if it shouldn’t work.Melville’s penultimate film (it was released in 1969), this World War 2 thriller unfolds at a daringly slow pace, the dialogue pared back to essentials. Melville based his screenplay on a semi-autobiographical novel by Joseph Kessel, a fictionalised account of the author’s experiences as a member of the French Resistance. The big set pieces are viscerally exciting, but the mood is subdued, cinematographer Pierre Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Madeleine Peyroux made her name with her second album, 2004’s Careless Love. It consists almost completely of cover versions, delivered in a quiet, jazz-bluesey shuffle redolent of singers from the 1930s. She’s never flown as high again but has maintained a decent career, mostly mining similar sonic territory. Her new album, and first in six years, does not wander far from the path, but is all originals, written with regular collaborator Jon Herington. Despite being spiked with songs that have something to say, it’s a deliciously lazy summer listen.Contrary to a common perception, Peyroux is Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
When Zara McFarlane sang the National Anthem at this year’s FA Cup Final, it served as a reminder of quite how adaptable she is, how suited so many different contexts. Other work in recent years has been with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Glyndebourne, and her last album, Songs of an Unknown Tongue (Brownswood), was a collaboration with producers Kwake Bass and Wu-Lu which the label’s blurb calls “a futuristic sound palate” (sic) of Jamaican rhythms and electronica.Sweet Whispers: Celebrating Sarah Vaughan (Eternal Source Of Light/!K7 Records) is totally different from its predecessor. It Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Out on the perimeters where there are no stars, in a void full of bong-smoke and synesthetic noise… there, in a greasy biker hovel full of gigantic amps, there live Wytch Pycknyck. Some say that place is called Hastings. Whatever it’s called, this four-piece arrive to reinvigorate heavy rock with a demented energy, zigzagged to the gills with lysergic spirit and a belief in gutter-punk rock’n’roll.Their debut album’s opening lines, on the speeding, riff-tastic smasher “Rawkuss”, are “I wanna party with the animals and live in the zoo”. It’s not metal, although the music tips its hat that way Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Pepe Deluxé are no exemplars of the puritan work ethic. Comix Sonix is only their sixth album in almost 30 years – but while they aren’t concerned with quantity, they certainly know how to produce electronic psychedelic weirdery of seriously high quality.After coming together in the Nineties club scene and initially blending electronica with hip-hop, breakbeats and trip-hop, they soon jumped ship from anything that might even tangentially be described as “commercial” to inhabit far more experimental and eccentric genre-spanning territory. A place where they still find themselves.Comix Sonix Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Almost exactly five years ago, I was transported by Singing It All Back Home, the third album from Naomi Bedford and Paul Simmonds. I gave it four stars, which in retrospect was perhaps a little ungenerous. Now at last comes a new opus from the duo, Strange News Has Come to Town, the making of which was “a long march across hard ground”, obstacles including the pandemic, as well as personal health and money issues.The self-drive of 21st century music-making makes “entry” into the world seem superficially easy but recording is only the first tiny step. Getting the music out there, reaching the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Powell and Pressburger’s least remembered Forties film is shrouded in Blitz darkness, deepening in the warped flat where alcoholic weapons expert Sammy (David Farrar) stares at a whisky bottle as if it’s a bomb. Following the vivid English fantasias of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), The Small Back Room turned to haunted psychological and social realism, veined with tension, humour and bleak beauty.Based on Nigel Balchin’s wartime bestseller, it is set during spring 1943’s mini-Blitz, as a new sort of booby-trapped bomb needs defusing. Sammy Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The noise in the international mainstream in recent years might be about dance-pop, hip hop beefs and the serious balladry of Taylor, Billie and Lana – yet at the same time, R&B has been strange, brilliant, ultra-popular, but generated a tiny fraction of the column inches and “discourse”.Jhene Aiko, Tinashe, SZA, H.E.R., Mahalia: these are radical artists, each making fascinating music that generates billions of streams, yet certainly in the UK they’re generating micro-fractions of the column inches that their contemporaries in other genres are. The reaction to SZA’s Glastonbury Read more ...