“You're plain as an old tin pail and you're bossy.” Tommy Lee Jones’s George Briggs doesn’t mince his words while sitting across the table from Hilary Swank’s Mary Bee Cuddy. She’s just told him that “if you lied to me and intend on abandoning your responsibility, then you are a man of low character, more disgusting pig than honourable man.” This undeniably funny exchange shines like a gold nugget in mud when set against the overall tone of the formidable The Homesman, a western which Jones describes, in one of the DVD’s on-set extras, as “minimal.”The Homesman also focuses on women in Read more ...

It would probably be best to start this review with a mention of the band, The War on Drugs, whose 2014 LP, Lost in the Dream, saw them realise their potential in a flurry of "Best Of" lists and almost unbelievable hyperbole. However, before we get fully into that, I should state, for the record, that I’ve always hated Brixton Academy. The rake plays havoc with my calves and the beer tastes homeopathically weak, while sound spirals and muddies as it travels into the gods before falling back to earth like a plague of shit brown noise. This is why the support band suffered dreadfully last night Read more ...

Fifteen seconds into I Love You, Honeybear, it’s clear this an album concerned with sonic grandeur. Strings swell while a mournful pedal steel evokes the dejection of Gene Clark’s White Light, the 1971 album by the ex-Byrds member which has come to define the nexus of the grand musical gesture and the intimate missive. As the title song album-opener progresses, Joshua Tillman sings “I’ve got my mother’s depression.”I Love You, Honeybear is the second album from Tillman in his Father John Misty guise and follows his 2012 departure from Fleet Foxes – he was their drummer. Overall, it’s his Read more ...

Woman to Woman, the second solo album from Denver songwriter and former Paper Bird front woman Esmé Patterson, has an origin story almost as interesting as the music. Teaching herself to play Townes Van Zandt’s “Loretta” during some down time on tour, Patterson found herself getting frustrated at the song’s depiction of a passive bar-room girl so in awe of the great songwriter that she drops everything any time he passes through and “don’t cry” when he’s gone. She put down her guitar, picked up her pen and the result was “Tumbleweed”: a funny and furious riposte in which Patterson, playing Read more ...

The Czars: Best ofQueen of Denmark, John Grant’s first solo album, seemed to arrive from nowhere in 2010. Here was a singer-songwriter with a unique voice evoking disparate wellsprings Eric Carmen, Randy Newman and Lionel Richie. When taken with a dramatically affecting songwriting sensibility and arresting, self-lacerating lyrics, all of this rendered the album instantly impactful.The immediate backstory was that Midlake had heard Grant’s songs, were taken with them and volunteered to be his backing band on the sessions which led to Queen of Denmark. Grant himself was then in a bad way, in Read more ...

Strange world, isn’t it? Yesterday morning, buoyed up by the Royal Opera’s impressive Tristan und Isolde, I was listening on CD to Linda Esther Gray, a Wagnerian soprano for the ages, singing the best Liebstod I know. In the evening, I was watching Linda “Sue Ellen” Gray declaiming the traditional couplets of Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, very musically – she always was a good actress, I reckon – if not as yet with immaculate timing (crikey, though, I've just found out she's 74).This was pantoland as only Wimbledon does it, and if my first return visit to the genre there since as a cub I Read more ...

“You don’t always get what you want in life,” said Angel Olsen to a group of fans haranguing her at the front last night at the Electric Ballroom. She rarely uttered a word between songs but this was a defiant end to the evening. Though her powerful Orbison-like warbling travelled clearly across the smoky stage to the denizens  a much needed intimacy was absent over the course of her fourteen-song set. A captivating presence who confidently delivers haunting vocals, she lost the connection with the audience in the final throes, who at first seemed rapt.Brazilian opener, Rodrigo Amarante Read more ...

The Pierces were on stage for little more than an hour, singing an enjoyable but quite predictable medley of their last three albums. Their sugar-glazed, glistening sound is filtered through all manner of electronic stabilisation and filtration devices which guarantee harmony and stability through their adrenaline-driven swoops and musical handbrake turns. So in some ways, you’re not getting much new content or musical insight by hearing them live. Yet a packed Shepherd’s Bush Empire, quiet to begin with, thrilled to the intensity of their charisma. There’s a wide variety, stylistically and Read more ...

I suspect that, a good few years after a dodgy couple of albums, Ryan Adams has reached a stage in his career where they’re all going to be dubbed a return to form. I seem to remember writing something similar about 2011’s Ashes and Fire – but here we are, three years on, and I couldn’t tell you the last time I listened to it (I should probably mention that I’m writing this not just as a critic, but as somebody with his artwork tattooed on my arm).There are a few things about Ryan Adams – the album, not the man – that make the story. Firstly there’s that self-titled thing, which will always Read more ...

Context is everything. It’s the difference between that “lady without a baby” line that’s got everybody talking delivered straight up, and the knowing smile and cross-dressing Hollywood actresses that come with it in the song’s accompanying video. It’s why Jenny Lewis, child starlet turned indie rock frontwoman turned accomplished alt-country singer-songwriter, is that rare artist who has made not only the best album for herself at every stage of her career, but also the one that her fans needed to hear.Depending on your reading of “Just One of the Guys”, it’s a song about confounding Read more ...

The danger of working successfully in many genres is that fans come to expect something revolutionary with each release. A secondary threat is that you succumb to generic schizophrenia, and thus are never quite sure which voice to speak with. Fin Greenall, founder/leader of the folk-blues trio Fink, has a touch of both of these in this latest release, in which songs of menacing Americana sit somewhat uneasily alongside pieces of lugubrious personal reflection. He may be feted for his eclecticism; he’s more likely to suffer for failing to please all his fans.  The title track and “Pilgrim Read more ...

It feels as if the life-on-the-road song has become a rite of passage for those rock bands that manage to clock up enough years together, but after 20 years in the business Texan alt-country rockers Old 97’s probably have more of a claim to it than most. Clocking in at just under six minutes, “Longer Than You’ve Been Alive” is one of the best examples of the genre, regardless of its titular accuracy. It’s a meandering, tongue-in-cheek portrait of the rock star excesses, but also the tedium, that comes with life in a moderately successful touring band. As frontman Rhett Miller reminisces, most Read more ...