CDs/DVDs
Tim Cumming
Jono McCleery has one of those voices that once heard, demands your attention, an instrument of richness and depth, and one that has earned him many fans. The likes of Vashti Bunyan and Tom Robinson helped to crowdfund his recording debut back in 2008, Darkest Light; he steered himself through London’s eclectic electro-acoustic underground music scene alongside the likes of Jamie Woon and the Portico Quartet, and released four more folktronic-textured releases with Ninja Tune.His sixth album, on the Berlin-based Ninety Days Records, was recorded in early 2021, over five days in Rotterdam Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Contrary to the title’s implication, there initially seems to be little movement in Arch of Motion. A note is held on an organ. Then another note comes in and is also held. Chords build up gradually. Maybe one or two ascending or descending notes come and go. And that seems to be it.But when Track Five arrives, the mood brightens and the sonic pallete becomes more broad. The drone on “Mending (Light Pressure)” might be an analogue synth. Next, “Conversation” adds a breathy wordless voice – celestial, wraith-like. After this, the crepuscular “Inhale” features what seem to be actual words. In Read more ...
Liz Thomson
There aren’t too many musicians, male or female, who made it into Rolling Stone's list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time”, and "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". Indeed, the former was overwhelmingly male, the latter included only two women, Joni Mitchell (discuss), and Bonnie Raitt.Raitt deserves the tsunami of accolades that have come her way, including 10 album- and performance-related Grammys, and another for Lifetime Achievement. She is a singular figure in what is still, after so many decades, a man’s world. (Janis Ian is another phenomenal guitarist whose contribution Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Many groundbreaking cinema classics remain frozen in a particular zeitgeist, but François Truffaut’s first feature, from the early days of the French New Wave, is not one of them. Released in 1959, The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups) is so adventurous in style, without ever being pretentious, the coming-of age story it vividly tells so engaging, and the performance of Jean-Pierre Léaud so thrilling, that it remains fresh and relevant to this day.Léaud, a mixture of cocksure arrogance and touching vulnerability, already evident in his impressive and touching screen test (which is among the extras on Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Covid pandemic’s various lockdowns may have been a living hell for some, but there were also plenty of people who thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to distance themselves from society. One of those to thrive during this time was Jason Pierce, band leader and the only constant member of psychedelic space rockers Spiritualized.However, while the last Spiritualized album And Nothing Hurt was pretty much a solo affair, Everything Was Beautiful sees the pendulum swing to the other extreme. For, while Pearce may have played 16 different instruments during its recording – which took place in 11 Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Returning with their first new music in almost a decade, EDM supergroup Swedish House Mafia (the producer-DJ trio Steve Angello, Axwell and Sebastian Ingros) deliver their debut album with a sense of vaulting ambition and anything-is-possible belief. In their own words, Paradise Again is a “sonic adventure” to a “new world, a world of free thoughts, limitless ideas and space for progression.”There are, if we’re being generous, two ideas on Paradise Again. The first is one that anyone familiar with their oeuvre will already be well acquainted with: big, showy, glitter-gun production that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I have a theory about Reef. In the mid-Nineties, when the Somerset outfit appeared, they were reviled by London music journalists. This was mostly because they sounded like a hoary, unreconstructed early-Seventies blues-rock band. Those same journalists, however, were excitedly touting bands who lamely emulated Kinks-ish Sixties-ness, faux new wave, or a mixture of both (ie Britpop). So, Reef, arguably, just choose the wrong decade at the wrong time.As an electronic vanguard zealot I sneered at all retro. So, I too disliked Reef. However, cards-on-the-table, decades later my partner digs them Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Kranky, run in Chicago for very nearly 30 years now, is one of the most remarkably consistent record labels around. They helped define “post-rock” in the Nineties with key releases from the likes of Labradford and God Speed You! Black Emperor, and they’ve put out all manner of way out-there postpunk, psychedelic rock and electronica freakery, all well retaining a unifying aesthetic identity. And while doing all that, they have also quietly (how else?) become one of the most important platforms for ambient music in the world. With the likes of Loscil, Ethernet and Steve Hauschild they Read more ...
Tom Carr
Although the term “hipster” has become degraded to well beyond cliché, Kurt Vile is one of those artists whose fans may indeed have that in-the-know smugness. With Vile, though, this is not a bad thing. Given the increasingly confidence-shedding nature of recent world events, Vile’s mix of indie rock with psychedelia and Americana makes for a welcome escape.His first studio release since 2018’s Bottle It In, (Watch My Moves) – replete with brackets – is 15 tracks long. There’s a whole lot to dive into, beginning with “Going on a Plane Today”. With this piano-led curtain-raiser, Vile mixes in Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
"Disgusting", "depressing", "sheer horror from start to finish", a "filthy, rotten, immoral play". Such were the comments from viewers published across a spectrum of British newspapers following the BBC transmission, on 12 December 1954, of Nigel Kneale’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.The papers themselves were similarly critical. "A Tory guttersnipe’s view of Socialism" was the assessment of the socialist Daily Worker. The Daily Express opted for sensationalism. Its headline read: "Wife dies as she watches".Adapted by Kneale, obviously, from George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel, and now released Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Expansive, free-form, handmade and improvised, the extravagantly-titled The Liquified Throne of Simplicity is the fourth album from this freewheeling Slovenian trio of multi-instrumentalists. They forage among the world’s musics as well as their own, making their own handmade instruments, and creating huge tracks redolent of a borderless musical world where the guembri rhythms of the opening 20-minute track, “Wilted Superstition Engaged in Copulation”, ring and resonate with the sound of chimes, balafon, ocorina flute, ribab and viola, the peeling Egyptian double-reeded mizmar, plus "various Read more ...
Nick Hasted
West Side Story’s cinema release crashed into Omicron and never recovered. Maybe Ariana DeBose’s Oscar will help the world wake up to this Spielberg masterpiece, which definitively betters 1961’s Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins version.Spielberg loves West Side Story as much as its Romeo and Juliet, Tony and María, love each other. The material is part of his childhood, as personal as upcoming semi-memoir The Fabelmans. A film about romantic transcendence that ultimately falls to earth, this is one of his most exuberant and serious works, propelled by Leonard Bernstein’s music, ironised by Stephen Read more ...