CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
The music of Daniel Lopatin – AKA Oneohtrix Point Never – exists at the sonic/electronic vanguard. Were the likes of avant-gardists such as Iannis Xenakis, George Antheil and Edgard Varese around today, maybe even Stockhausen, they might dig what he’s up to.Unlike them, though, Lopatin places post-modernism at the centre of things. His latest album is, for want of a more technical phrase, completely out there. If you want to hear music unlike anything else, it’s a one-stop shop.Lopatin has said of the new album that it’s a “speculative autobiography” which “imagines what might have been Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Steven Wilson has merged various genres – metal, shoegaze, pop, dance, jazz – in his solo career without shrugging off the prog label he considers reductive. He hasn’t exactly jettisoned it with his seventh album The Harmony Codex, a collection of songs driven by programming and guitarwork that narrows the distance between the solo artist and the Porcupine Tree band leader.Wilson’s unaffected singing – very English, understatedly yearning – is the strongest connective tissue, but the new album shares beats, cadences, and mood shifts with his cult combo’s 2022 comeback LP Closure/ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Gregory’s Girl stands alongside Kes as one of the few films offering a realistic depiction of state school life. Director Bill Forsyth’s surreal flourishes delight without getting in the way: think of the penguin waddling along the corridors, or the young lad glimpsed smoking a pipe in the boys’ toilets.That Gregory’s Girl exists at all feels like a happy accident; Forsyth’s background was in making low-key documentaries on Scottish subjects and his friendship with John Baraldi, founder of the Glasgow Youth Theatre, prompted him to write the script. When a BFI funding application was rejected Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
It felt inevitable that Doja Cat would turn her back on being a popstar. The Californian rapper’s career has been shaped by her ambivalent relationship to fame and earlier this year she went as far as denouncing her previous albums as “mediocre pop”. She regularly gets into spats online, recently telling one of her own fan accounts that they should “delete the entire account and rethink everything.”It was refreshing to see a popstar challenge the toxic aspects of modern fan culture so head on. But the dismissal of her own music felt a bit harsh. Doja Cat’s blend of disco-revival and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Animal Collective have been putting out albums of off-kilter and whimsical psychedelic pop, in various guises, for over 20 years. And while their 12th album together doesn’t exactly rock the boat and bring on a major stylistic change, it’s not really business as usual either.Isn’t It Now? has been produced by the Grammy Award-winning Russell Elevado, who can more usually be found at the controls for the likes of D’Angelo, the Roots or Kamasi Washington. He hasn’t turned the Baltimore four-piece into a group of hip-hop soul-jazzers though nor have they seized the moment to make a desperate Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Two years after the release of her rather flaccid Disco album and five since her somewhat inadvisable foray into country-ish music, 2023 has seen something of a return to form for Kylie Minogue. First there was this summer’s all-conquering single, “Padam Padam” – which even managed to persuade some national radio stations to rethink their policies on which tracks should be played on heavy rotation. Now comes her new album, Tension, which is marinated in Nineties House and Electro grooves and more than confirms that its lead single was no flash in the pan.In fact, album opener, “Padam Padam”, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Had Devendra Banhart been born between 1940 and 1950, he’d likely be a household name. His output – very loosely – sits between Cat Stevens, Syd Barrett and Richie Havens, studded with a greatness not widely acknowledged. He had a spell around 15-20 years ago when he seemed about to commercially explode. That didn't happen but he’s settled to a solid career and done much gorgeous work since.2013’s Mala album, a career highlight, was followed by two that appeared to dip into the alternative possibilities of 1960s Latin American songwriting (do check the luscious Helado Negro remix of "Love Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nothing Lasts Forever opens with a drone, a weightless prologue of guitar feedback evoking the initial moments of the Buffalo Springfield’s “Everydays,” written by Stephen Stills and heard on his band’s 1967 second album Again. Teenage Fanclub’s 11th album ends with “I Will Love you,” a similarly gossamer reflection fusing the atmosphere of The Beatles’ “Across the Universe” and the cyclic rhythms of motorik.While an airiness suffuses the mostly low- to mid-tempo Nothing Lasts Forever, it is impossible with Teenage Fanclub not to think of what could have inspired them, what they might be Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It was more than a decade ago when I first saw Rachel Sermanni in concert, in the upstairs room at The Old Queen’s Head in Islington, London, for a Nest Collective night. She had yet to release her debut, 2012’s Under Mountains, but was already making an impact as a stage performer.Her most recent album, 2019’s So It Turns was a self-released set of songs inspired by her time spent at Samye Ling Tibetan Buddhist monastery, the first to be established in the west, and which features, too, in the work of the late Genesis P Orridge. Dreamer Awake, meanwhile, is her first release on Navigator Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Partie de Campagne (1946), while not being one of French cinema giant Jean Renoir’s best-known films, unfinished and just under 40 minutes long, is still regarded as an important if not essential example of the director’s multi-faceted and often innovative work.The somewhat fragmentary story, based, along with many French movies, on a short story by Maupassant, focuses on a brief moment of love between Henriette and Henri, a fun-loving charmer, and evokes the transience of romantic love. The theme of class-difference, which runs through the left-wing director’s work and is central to his Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Joshua Redman’s latest album, where are we, marks the jazz saxophonist’s debut on the Blue Note label, after a recording career which now spans just over thirty years and has many high points, not least his eponymous debut on Warner in 1993.When announced in May ths year, the label move was, unsurprisingly, described in such a way as to raise expectations. Blue Note President Don Was gushed that Redman was “the living embodiment of the Blue Note ethos”. Redman dutifully responded with his thrill at joining the Blue Note family for a “new phase in my recording journey.”Those announcements left Read more ...
Tom Carr
With 2022’s Laurel Hell and Be The Cowboy from 2018, the Japanese-American solo musician Mitski Mayawaki – better known simply as Mitski to all – had refined a massively Eighties influenced, synthesiser led sound.Having combined the invaluable songwriting experience of her earlier, more frenetic and indie lo-fi albums, her most recent two efforts were creatively elaborate and thematically whole.This has continued to drive her forwards, returning with her seventh album The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We. Once again she employs a wholly different sound, yet retains the crux of her previous Read more ...