CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
That's What Remained is the aural equivalent of being pulled into a maelstrom and then surrendering to this powerful natural force. Initially, it does not seem safe. But it soon becomes apparent that submission isn’t a problem. It will be fine. Emerging from this experience is accompanied by a shakiness. But that’s OK too.It’s not necessary to know anything about Lucidvox to be knocked for six by That's What Remained, their second album. Over its eight tracks and 33 minutes it effortlessly accommodates the hard edge of shoegazing – the sensibility sustaining My Bloody Valentine’s “You Made me Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Madness are an English institution due to deathless, jolly hits such as “House of Fun”, “Baggy Trousers” and “One Step Beyond”, but there’s always been another side to them.The London band are often at their best when bittersweet. Lesser-known songs such as “Grey Day”, “Madness (is All in the Mind)” and “One Better Day” showcased a downbeat poignance. Their new album, their 13th, is a case in point. It’s a response to the disturbing times we live in, and to “a disparate couple of years which saw the band at their most polarised and fragmented”. I can’t stop playing it.Ignore the iffy Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The KLF are endlessly fascinating. There’s never been a “pop group” like them. From the late Eighties into the early Nineties, they treated music, especially electronic dance music, as a laboratory for lunatic experiment. Unlike most avant-garde thinkers in pop, though, they made a glorious and highly unlikely commercial success of it, via a series of globally successful singles (and, to some degree, the album, The White Room).From their beginnings to demise, filmmaker Bill Butt was an accomplice, creating films and videos as asked. The BFI's 23 Seconds to Eternity gathers these together Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Carried in Sound is Chichester alt-folkies Smoke Fairies’ sixth album and first since 2020’s Darkness Brings Wonders Home. A relatively lo-fi piece that was largely recorded at home during the pandemic, it is intimate and warm yet largely deals with the not exactly uplifting subject matter of failed relationships, aging and loss.The recording process that was forced on the duo for this disc has produced a suite of tunes that are airy and sparse, featuring little more than Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies’ voices and guitars or piano with rarely employed percussion created from beating bin Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
If lockdown had an official soundtrack, it would be the bedroom drum and bass of PinkPantheress. Her lo-fi singing over garage and jungle tunes was ubiquitous on TikTok at the time – it was as if her brief and sweet songs were just as moreish as the videos on the app.When these songs first popped up, PinkPantheress was an enigma. But as restaurants and clubs opened up PinkPantheress tentatively stepped out of her bedroom and embraced the spotlight. Earlier this year the 22-year-old Bath native had her first international smash hit, the Ice Spice-assisted “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2”, as well as a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bradford unit Bad Boy Chiller Crew blew up from a regional scene which combined jokey lo-fi videos, a bangin’ fusion of UK garage and hard house (“bassline house” as they termed it), and grime-style rapping in local accents.Boasting parochial slang, tongue-in-cheek self-awareness, and a defiantly working class attitude, they were a breath of fresh air. Their vibe was redolent of acts such as Kurupt FM, Die Antwoord and Goldie Looking Chain. They were a blast. Live, they likely still are, but their new album sees them jump the shark.For one thing, it’s 21 tracks long where, as every artist Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Margaret Calvert's creations are never far. She set the rules for the design of Britain’s road signs, as well as drafting typography and graphics for national, regional and local rail signage. Back to the Swamp’s fifth track “Margaret Calvert Drives Out” features the lyrics “maximum information conveyed by minimum means, triangles for warning, circles for limits, blue for instructions, green for directions.”“Margaret Calvert Drives Out” gets into the specifics of this important figure’s guiding principles and inspirations within the framing of a pulsing music hinting at Arthur Russell and Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Cat Power, aka singer-songwriter Chan Marshall, is releasing her first live album – a recording of the faithful recreation of Bob Dylan’s infamous gig of 1966, played in November 2022 at the Royal Albert Hall.Dylan’s transformative gig actually took place at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, but was known as the “Royal Albert Concert Hall” after a Bootleg Series typo. Halfway through the set he switched from acoustic solo guitar to electric, thus changing the course of history for folk music, which prompted “boos” and walkouts from an infuriated folk-purist audience.It’s not her first foray Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Bony Biyake, whose vocals grace this delicious soup of ancient and modern sounds, from Europe and the Congo, once sang in a soukous band, and then made his name in collaborations with the French musical magician, the late Hector Zazou. Their most famous collaboration was a 1983 album, Noir et Blanc, which still sounds ahead of its time today.Biyake and his collaborators Guillaume Lozillon and Guillaume Gilles, masters of digital keyboards and programming, and percussionist Gaëlle Salomon weave a rich texture of sounds that speak to each other in musical tongues. This is a kind of sorcery, in Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s always encouraging to a have a musical rallying call in times of political strife. A song for a better future to encourage those on the right side of history not just to march but to dance as well.As Emma Goldman, the Russian-born anarchist of a century or so ago, once said: “A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having”, and this is clearly a view shared by Belfast DJ and producer David Holmes. For Blind on a Galloping Horse is no po-faced, muscular call to burn everything down. Instead, it is a compassionate song of hope that praises those “dreamers, misfits, radicals Read more ...
graham.rickson
Not all Scorsese films are behemoths; Killers of the Flower Moon may last over three hours but After Hours, a low-budget black comedy released in 1983, packs an incredible amount into just 93 minutes.That Scorsese directed the film at all is a happy accident; Joseph Minion’s screenplay was set to be directed by the young Tim Burton, Scorsese opting to take it on after his first attempt to shoot The Last Temptation of Christ had collapsed.Filmed on location in New York, After Hours is dark, oppressive and claustrophobic. An early entry in the “yuppie nightmare” genre (see also Something Wild Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Los Angeles is a collaboration from ex-Cure man Lol Tolhurst, former Banshee, Creature and Slits’ drummer, Budgie and producer Jacknife Lee, as well as an army of musical mates from Bobby Gillespie and The Edge to LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Starcrawler’s Arrow de Wilde. So, it could easily have descended into a supergroup exercise of backslapping and excessive self-regard by a load of rock stars who haven’t been in the limelight for a while.Not so fast though, despite trading under the rather clunky name of Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee, Los Angeles is an unexpected peach of Read more ...