CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Strings swirl. A flute drifts like a bird floating on warm air. The melody is subdued, its tonality evoking The Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please, Let me Get What I Want.” A wistful, French-accented voice sings “I’ve always been so cruel, Hard on myself, You say I’m just a fool, Trying to be somebody else.” Mood set with opening track “Bluer Than Blue,” How and Why subsequently showcases nine more similarly moody, acoustic-centred songs.The dreamy, slightly husky, voice is recognisable. Since 2003, Mélanie Pain has been a main vocalist with France’s Nouvelle Vague, Marc Collin and Olivier Read more ...
graham.rickson
Quite why this dialogue-heavy monochrome science fiction series was first broadcast in a teatime children’s slot is outlined in TV historian Jon Dear’s booklet essay accompanying this BFI reissue. Writer Christopher McMaster, best remembered for directing scores of early Coronation Street episodes, penned what became Object Z in 1965. Looking for a show to attract younger viewers (and maybe to compete with the BBC’s fledgling Doctor Who), pioneering ITV channel Rediffusion picked up the project, McMaster quickly redrafting and simplifying his scripts.
The central conceit has astronomers Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Barbra Streisand has given her blessing to Where We Fall (Backwards Dog Records), an album of six covers and five original songs. She wrote to her 1.8 million Instagram followers: "[Jason] just gave me his new album […] and it stopped me in my tracks. His sound, his soul, his musicality. I’m sooo proud to be his mama!" Streisand’s son Jason Gould is also the "true" son of Elliott Gould – as opposed to Ross and Monica from Friends, who are merely his fictional children in his role of Jack Geller, a "pater simulatus" with enduring celebrity status in his own right.
There you have it: at Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Implosion is a purely instrumental, collaborative album of cinematic, dystopian sounds from dubstepper and extreme electronica experimentalist the Bug and his pal Ghost Dubs. However, rather than working on the same tracks together, as could be implied, they have each applied their production know-how to alternate tunes on the two discs that make up this recording.
That isn’t to say that the sounds on Implosion swing from one flavour to another and back again. This is an album with a singular vision that is consistently eerie and sinister and has much in common with early 1990s ambient Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It’s really interesting to see how Amy Winehouse’s legacy continues to reverberate – and not just through endlessly repeated iconography or the tragedy-for-sale machine that’s built around her but musically too. Even rapper Little Simz namechecks and musically nods to her, and her unique update of Billie Holiday’s tone has been passed on to one degree or another to singers like Lola Young, Yazmin Lacey – and especially Celeste.Not that Celeste is a copy of anyone by any means: her voice is very much her own with its own strengths and mannerisms, and her gothic cabaret-tinged style and Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Mavis Staples, the woman to whom a young Bob Dylan proposed marriage when they met at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival and whose voice he has described as his “favourite voice”. Mavis Staples, who announced her retirement in 2023 and then realised she still had “work” to do, even after more than 75 years on the road. Mavis Staples, sole survivor of the Staple Singers, founded by Roebuck “Pops” Staples, a friend of Martin Luther King Jr who committed his family to the civil rights struggle and toured throughout the Jim Crow south – the whole family was once arrested in Memphis after Pops was Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It’s weird, right? We’ve somehow stumbled into a world where, for all we’re told that algorithms homogenise music, actually more people than ever are exposed to very, very odd and abstract soundmaking.There’s new age gong baths at even the most normie health spas. There’s a kajillion hours of “relaxation music” flooding streaming services from who knows where, a lot of it just drones and/or modulating white noise. There’s the sound design of scores by the likes of Hildur Guðnadóttir, Daniel Lopatin, Cristobal Tapia De Veer that reach millions in surround sound via movies, games and prestige Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Climb upon a bridge to far, go anywhere your heart desires.” The key phrase from the title track of Midlake’s sixth studio album conveys the perception that anything is within reach should an appropriate mind-set be attained. However, later on the album there are references to a “lion’s den” and “war within the valley of roselesss thorns,” a setting where “power and glory were in store.”It seems, then, that this is a realm where escaping to a place called “far” is necessary for self-protection. Midlake singer and frontman Eric Pulido has said of the album’s "The Calling" that the song “has Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Three of last year’s finest singles were by Luvcat, a classy-but-naughty Eartha Kitt-style bad girl steeped in burlesque-rock’n’roll spirit. In fact, she’s the wanton basque’n’fishnets persona that, during a decadent sojourn in Paris, possessed the soul of Liverpudlian singer Sophie Morgan.The question is, can she engagingly maintain this wordy, filmic conceit for a whole album? The answer is… yes.First, those singles, all golden and placed in sequence early on this 13-track set. Her debut, “Matador”, is a mariachi nightworld chanson of lust and vengeful rage; “He’s My Man” is a sinister Read more ...
Tom Carr
If you were looking for the most perfectly brooding autumnal album this year, Florence Welch and her Machine may have been one of the least likely places you would have expected. However, motivated by deeply personal tumult of the past few years, Welch and co return with an ominous, hauntingly beautiful sixth album, Everybody Scream. Since their iconic, evergreen debut album in 2009, Welch’s voice has beckoned the Machine to be an everlasting presence across the airwaves and atop the charts ever since. Following their last album, 2022’s Dance Fever, Florence had an unexpected brush with death Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Twenty-five-year-old South Londoner and current Celebrity Traitors contestant Cat Burns is a charming performer. Her songs have a rare ability to present the most fundamental of youthful relationship ups and downs as fresh and real. They also make more modern expressions of hope and solidarity around sexuality and neurodivergence escape the twee, flowery framing of live-laugh-love Mum’s-on-Facebook-again posting.Maybe most important of all, sings in her own accent with her own mannerisms, with a rich tone. All of which makes me want to like her second album Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The youthful subject of A Complete Unknown, which closes with him "going electric" at Newport as the culmination of a rainbow arc that began in monochrome, distant Minnesota, is currently lightly treading the boards across Europe’s arenas, concert halls and theatres.This new iteration of a complete unknown is largely hidden from view from his audiences, sat behind a baby grand and lyric sheets for most of the set, only the top of the head visible to many paying punters. Bootlegs and fan reports suggest an 84-year-old artist in fine form as he enters the fourth year of touring his most recent Read more ...