CDs/DVDs
Graham Fuller
The first film rendering of Christopher Isherwood’s experiences in early 1930s Berlin, I Am a Camera has been restored and released on Blu-ray to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. Popular when released in the UK in 1955, presumably because it was then risqué, director Henry Cornelius’s movie has curiosity value as a monument to bad writing and acting and for the feebleness of its condemnation of Nazism.Julie Harris won the first of her five Tony awards playing Sally Bowles in Henry Van Druten’s Broadway play, which he'd adapted from Isherwood’s novella Goodbye to Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Swedish singer Lykke Li has called her new album Eyeye “her most intimate work to date”. In regard to Lykke Li’s music, this feels almost impossible at this point. Her music has time and time again explored the depths of heartbreak. Is it possible to write a song more intimate than “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone”?Eyeye is her fifth album and it sees Li return to familiar topics of love and heartbreak. She also returns to work with Björn Yttling, who worked on her first three albums. Eyeye leaves the more electronic experiments of 2018’s So Sad So Sexy behind and returns to more minimal, Read more ...
Tom Carr
Since their 2010 debut, Man Alive, Everything Everything have dissected the various structures of human relationships, from socio-political to interpersonal, but all in their own experimental art-rock sound.As a result, their recent albums took on an uncanny relevance: 2017’s A Fever Dream was inflected by the uncertainty of Brexit and Trumpian rhetoric, while 2020’s Re-Animator was heavily poignant amidst the isolating pandemic owing to its deep, personal introspection and drawing from Julian Haynes’ theory of the bicameral mind. Now on Raw Data Feel they cast a curious glance over our Read more ...
Mark Kidel
There is so much gospel out there that it’s not easy to stand out above the crowd. Mavis Staples, with a distinctive voice that has delivered a gritty contralto for many decades, never stops. This new release, a set of songs that were recorded in 2011, is a collaboration with the Band’s late drummer Levon Helm, a sure-fire fan of African-American church music.It’s a only just more than a decent collection, with a few moments of glory, not least a rocking and rolling version of the classic “You Got to Move”, but there's something a little too efficient rather than ecstatic about it, even if Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Driller Killer, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer form a self-descriptive yet misunderstood trinity in American cinema’s sordid underground. Originally subtitled Sympathy for the Devil, Henry modernised the serial killer as protagonist, minus Hopkins' later suave intellect as Lecter, or Dexter’s benign foibles.Debutant director John McNaughton begins with a close-up of a beautiful woman’s face, then pulls back to contemplate her body in blood-splashed grass, one of several aestheticized tableaus showing a slaughter pandemic. The sound design’s Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Kendrick Lamar is so breathlessly revered it’s sometimes hard to pull apart what’s going on in his records. It’s sometimes felt like he might become the rap game Radiohead: exploratory, aware, hugely technically accomplished, endlessly thematically “important” – but not actually that interesting to listen to.And certainly on the 18 tracks of his comeback album after a near four-year break – five since his last album proper, DAMN. – there’s a lot that’s potentially extremely worthy. There’s a lot of moody piano lines, there’s a lot of ultra-intricate rhyme patterns, and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dubstar didn’t really fit the niche where the 1990s put them. Signed to Food Records, original home of Blur, they were lumped in with Britpop but their music was always closer to the thoughtful electronic pop of Saint Etienne, and they also had – and have – something in common with Pet Shop Boys. Their new album, their fifth and second since reuniting a few years back, is permeated with a wistful sadness, pinpointed by smartly prosaic lyrics and sweetly doleful orchestration.Two is produced by Stephen Hague, who was at the desk for their first two albums, producing all those songs that Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The mystifying chasm between Van Morrison’s personality and music became total with last year’s Latest Record Project Volume 1, as masterfully sung, textbook R&B rolled under biliously paranoid words. This 28-song more than double-album was loaded with the likes of “The Long Con”, which found Van “targeting individuals” who are “pulling the strings” and “trying to erase me”, as he came out fighting mad at lockdown, and the pandemic’s temerity in keeping him offstage. Despite singing “Why Are You On Facebook?”, Van seemed to have swallowed the social media Kool Aid.Now, here are 15 more Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The title of Florence + the Machine’s fifth album, Dance Fever is a bit of a misnomer, as it’s unlikely that it will ever come to soundtrack anyone losing themselves and their inhibitions on the dancefloor. In fact, it’s unlikely that many will feel moved to dance to these tunes at all, unless their steps have been very heavily choreographed.Gone is the spirited hippy with the fog-horn voice of “Hurricane Drunk” and “What Kind of Man”, and in her place there has appeared a considerably more measured artist who argues “in the kitchen about whether to have children”. Still, middle age catches Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Among the plentiful bonus items in this Criterion Collection Blu-ray of Round Midnight, the last one is a surprise. It shows Dexter Gordon in his prime, back in 1969.He’s doing the thing for which, purely as a jazz musician, he’s best known. We see his blistering inventiveness as a bebop improviser. He is playing his own tune “Fried Bananas” with barrelling energy at a club in Copenhagen. In other words, it's nothing whatsoever like the slow, atmospheric playing of Dale Turner, the character played by Dexter Gordon, that we hear throughout Bertrand Tavernier’s moody film.By the time Tavernier Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This album starts with an unfortunate sound. Its title track begins with the kind of drum loop that rock bands from U2 on down adopted in the early 1990s having heard Massive Attack and Happy Mondays and deciding that they were going to get on the groovy train. It’s unfortunate because as with all those Nineties bands, it remains completely beholden to a very Eighties Big Rock production style with over-egged notions of “fidelity”. Every element is neat, tidy, separated, sparkling – completely missing the point of what dance and hip hop producers were doing by hacking the possibilities of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Around a decade ago, Scottish singer Emeli Sandé appeared during a golden time for original female songwriters. On well-wrought, richly-inhabited songs such as “My Kind of Love” she quickly established herself as a characterful performer able to write grown-up songs with emotional heft, in the same league as the mighty Adele. She sold millions, and maintained course, balancing elegant, thoughtful, soul-pop with more interesting fare, such as 2016’s “Garden” with Jay Electronica. Her fourth studio album, however, while rife with contemporary electronic tics, wanders steadily into the middle-of Read more ...