CDs/DVDs
Saskia Baron
Rivalled only by Titanic and La La Land for its 14 Oscar nominations, 1950's Best Picture-winner All About Eve is a film that audiences and reviewers love – even though Joseph L Mankiewicz’s brilliant screenplay makes no bones about the fact that he thinks both fans and critics are less than loveable.Broadway star Margo Channing (Bette Davis) is dismissive of the admirers who hang around the stage door: “Autograph fiends, they’re not people. Those are little beasts that run around in packs like coyotes". Later on, professional critics are described as needing to Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It may not be a totally new phenomenon, but just recently there seems to have been a rash of techno and electronica producers and DJs working with musicians of a psychedelic bent to record side projects of one kind or another. Stand outs include Amon Tobin and Stone Giants’ West Coast Love Stories and Nicolas Jaar’s Darkside album Spiral but without any shade of a doubt, Laurent Garnier’s new collaboration with Lionel and Marie Limiñana is a project that stands head and shoulders above all the others.The Limiñanas have been turning out their own twist on psych-rock for well over a decade, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Dazzling. That was the first adjective with which the illustrious Marian McPartland described Helen Sung’s piano playing, when she had the remarkable Houston-born pianist as her guest for an episode of the NPR radio show Piano Jazz in 2006.On Quartet+ (Sunnyside), Sung is celebrating “landmark women in jazz”, including McPartland (a new arrangement of “Kaleidoscope”, the theme from the radio show, worked in with a string quartet version of “Melancholy Mood”), and also Mary Lou Williams, Geri Allen, Carla Bley, and Toshiko Akiyoshi. “True pioneers and giants all,” as Sung describes them. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Hey What is 47 minutes long and includes 10 tracks, it comes across as shorter due to its homogeneity. That’s not to say it all sounds the same, but that it has the overarching feel of a suite where the individual songs equate to movements within a long-form piece. It means that Low’s 13th full-length studio outing is an album as such, rather than a grab-bag collection of disparate compositions.Hey What is also astonishingly powerful. Metallic bursts of noise open the album. As they pass, “White Horses” emerges from the maelstrom. The pulse running throughout the first track suggests Read more ...
graham.rickson
One of several 1960s Czech films which explicitly addresses the Holocaust, Zbyněk Brynych’s 1964 thriller The Fifth Horseman is Fear ( …a pátý jezdec je starch) wrong-foots us from the first frame. There’s Jiří Sternwald’s jagged, brittle score, and the glimpses of contemporary Prague. The lack of explicit period detail is deliberate, Brynych admitting that “our story begins in 1941, but it could have occurred at another time.” The parallels between the Nazi occupation and Czechoslovakia’s post-war plight would have been as clear then as they are now.Adapted from a novel by Hana Bělohradská, Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Martina Topley-Bird, who started out doing vocals for Tricky’s first single "Aftermath" aged 15, has matured. On her fourth solo album, self-produced, she builds confidently on the dreamy vocal lines that were essential to the Bristol sound of the '90s.On her previous solo ventures, it seemed as if she were in search of an identity, a rock chick one moment and a trance-weaver the next. She has definitely found herself: bathed in soft-edged dubby sounds that suit a sensual voice that makes a virtue of reverb, this is music that floats and supports Martina’s naked expression of vulnerability. Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Certified Lover Boy is not a mixtape, a playlist or a collection of loosies, but an Album. With a capital A. This is a distinction Drake makes when it’s time to get serious, when he wants us to sit up and listen intently. Unfortunately, Drake Albums often get bogged down in this seriousness. Both 2016’s Views and 2018’s Scorpion were slogs to get through. The spark of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late and cohesion of Nothing Was the Same felt missed. Yet CLB sees Drake loosen up the collar on his big-boy Album shirt. He leans into his sleazier tendencies whilst grappling with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Following the death last year from COVID-19 of keyboard player Dave Greenfield, it appears the The Stranglers’ five decade journey may finally be drawing to a close. They bucked all odds by maintaining a path after singer Hugh Cornwall left in 1990, and the last two decades, especially, have seen them hold steady, both as a live draw and with critically respected albums. Dark Matters, their eighteenth, is a decently wrought, sometimes elegiac conclusion to a career that’s taken them from pre-punk to post-everything.Eight of the 11 songs were recorded before Greenfield’s death but the single “ Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
From the first moment the military drums start pounding and the epic brass begins to build, you know you’re listening to the start of something exceptional. Something groundbreaking, important – a masterpiece. Opening track “Sometimes I Might Be Introvert” demonstrates the confidence and skill of Little Simz – now 27 – and represents a huge step forward from her highly praised album, GREY Area.It’s personal but not sentimental, angry but not full of hate, joyful and despairing all at the same time. Her delivery has developed – lightning-speed spitting is her forté – but here she shows Read more ...
joe.muggs
Iron Maiden are in very many senses as English, as camp and as ridiculous as Christmas pantomime, even down to the “HE’S BEHIND YOU!” looming of their vast onstage zombie mascot Eddie. Which is not to say there’s nothing to them: far from it. Just like pantomime, their durability shows how much they speak to something deep and archetypal in their audience’s spirit. In some senses it’s that Englishness that underpins it – on this, their seventeenth album, as much as ever. For all the finesse and flamboyance of their playing, there is the spirit of an old Englishman painting model tanks in his Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In an interview with Zane Lowe about her new album, Halsey said that the producers wanted to “make some really weird choices”. This was, you suspect, the intention: you don’t bring Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails onboard to produce the follow-up to your mainstream pop breakthrough without being open to something pretty weird. Described by the singer (who uses she/they pronouns interchangeably) as “a concept album about the joys and horrors of pregnancy and childbirth” and combining cinematic production with pure pop riffs, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is the boldest Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The cinema fan in your life is going to thank you for this one. The BFI’s new two-disc Blu-ray version of Jean Renoir’s 1951 The River, filmed in India, is absolutely packed with extras: no fewer than six other offerings, including a 90-minute "documentary film-fiction hybrid" by Roberto Rossellini, an hour-long documentary, and even some early 20th century footage from India.There are interviews and essays, including an important and beautifully written one by Satyajit Ray, whose own film-making career was kickstarted by his involvement in the filming of The River. All this fascinating Read more ...