CDs/DVDs
Lisa-Marie Ferla
At no point in their near-30-year career have “shy” or “retiring” been adjectives you could apply to Garbage - and yet, on this their seventh record, the Scottish-American rockers go to places that they never have before. With songs taking on capitalism, climate change, misogyny, racism and police brutality, No Gods No Masters is a no holds barred, politically charged firecracker of a record - one which is as brutal, messy and vulnerable as the human condition.Despite its songs pre-dating the pandemic - the band’s last day of recording together was in March 2020, before the world went into Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The latest album from Marina Diamandis, her fifth, is a startling explosion of vim and attitude. It mingles speeding, wordy, indie-tinted dance-pop bangers, tilting at all manner of contemporary ills, with sudden moments of broken-hearted piano-led contemplation. When she last appeared two years ago, it was with the lengthy Love + Fear album, Paloma Faith-ish songs whose tastefulness masked real character. Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land, on the other hand, is packed with plenty of juice and surprises.It opens with the title track, an electro-glam-pop stomper midway between Britney Spears’ “ Read more ...
Nick Hasted
James, and Tim Booth in particular, have always been too genuinely, gauchely odd to be hip – outsiders at the Madchester rave yet responsible for one of its biggest anthems, “Sit Down”, then shedding their skin for suppler, sexual territory with Laid, an Eno collaboration which opened their sound and self-image into something both gauzier and raw, but trailed behind his stadium-ambient U2 smashes. Being a mighty festival band has sustained them, alongside a drive for new material reliably bearing comparison with their past.Sixteenth album All the Colours of You is produced by Jacknife Lee ( Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
There is an irony in the fact that the most celebrated of auteurs to emerge during Hong Kong’s "Second Wave" of directors in the 1980s did not originate from within the bounds of the administrative region. Born in Shanghai, Wong Kar Wai was the son of a sailor and a housewife. It was only on the eve of China’s Cultural Revolution, as Mao Zedong sought to strengthen his grip on Chinese society, that Wong's parents took the bold decision to emigrate to British-ruled Hong Kong.For Wong, the journey was a success. Less so, however, for his two older siblings, whom Wong would not see for a Read more ...
peter.quinn
This second full-length album from South Korean quintet TXT scrambles musical genres in rich and fascinating ways. From the fizzing hi-hats and dreamy chords of opener “Anti-Romantic” to the harmonic stasis and minimalist groove of “Frost” which brings the eight-track collection to an impressive close, textures, timbres and tempos are impressively varied throughout.Beginning with the merest hint of vinyl crackle before bass and drums kick in, “Magic” is a bona fide summer banger which packs an enormous amount of detail into just a shade over two and a half minutes – a killing vocal Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When Wolf Alice appeared a decade ago, you’d have to have been a soothsayer of Merlin-like proportions to predict the career trajectory they’ve had since. Certainly, prior to their debut album, this writer took them for just another female-fronted London indie guitar band, following the same old formula. Instead, they blossomed into imaginative alt-rock/pop ones-to-watch who can sell out Alexandra Palace, a Mercury Music Prize under their belt, now on the verge of big-festival-headlining proper fame.They deserve it. It’s an overused word (by music journalists, at least) but eclecticism is Read more ...
Guy Oddy
While so many bands of a psychedelic bent treat the genre as if it has been pickled in aspic since the swinging sixties of London and San Francisco or maybe the motorik sounds of mid-70s West Germany, the Cult of Dom Keller don’t give any impression of being hemmed in by such self-imposed and heritage-worshipping rules. Flipping from harsh industrial sounds to the voodoo blues of early Velvet Underground, trippy dream pop to dark drones with weird Middle Eastern samples, They Carried the Dead in a UFO has nothing about it that suggests business as usual in Planet Head-spin. Far from it in Read more ...
joe.muggs
Greentea Peng is a south Londoner, heavily tattooed, heavily spiritual, heavily anti-establishment, and very, very heavily into basslines. She cuts a singular figure in many ways, but her rebel dub soul style also makes her a particularly British archetype: the next iteration in a lineage starting with Poly Styrene and Ari Up, and running through Neneh Cherry, Tricky and MIA. (Yes, OK, Ari Up was German and MIA is Sri Lankan, but their sound and their cultural fusions could only have happened on this island.) Like each of those artists, she is unmistakeable in sound. One of the most Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 2021 is like taking a trip in a time machine and stepping out into a totally different world. The 1982 teenage comedy marked the debut of director Amy Heckerling (who would go on to make Clueless) and writer Cameron Crowe (who later wrote and directed Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous). Rolling Stone journalist Crowe was 22 and went undercover, impersonating a student at a notoriously wild high school in California to write about kids taking drugs, partying, and having sex. It’s hard to imagine journalism’s codes of practice allowing Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Pop music, like Hollywood, is a dream factory: a place where you can be anything you like, as long as that’s not a middle-aged woman. I’ll hit the last year of my 30s next week, with the number one spot in the country held by a woman who has her driving licence but isn’t old enough to drink. Cannot relate. In either respect. Thank god, then, for the return of Liz Phair.Coming more than a decade since her last album, Soberish is a record with plenty to say. The woman who wrote “Divorce Song” when she was 23 has, in her 50s, written what may be the greatest ever song about divorce: “Spanish Read more ...
peter.quinn
More than three decades after their acclaimed, self-titled debut, Crowded House has grown from a trio to a quintet. In addition to the group’s lead singer, main songwriter and founding member, Neil Finn, the current incarnation of the band includes co-founder and bassist Nick Seymour, keyboardist (and former Crowded House producer) Mitchell Froom, plus Finn’s sons Liam on guitar/vocals and Elroy on drums.The band’s seventh studio album – their first since 2010's Intriguer – is aptly titled. Whether it’s the nearly orchestral scope of some of the writing, the circuitous nature Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Blues is one of the few genres of modern music which isn’t completely in thrall to the Cult of Youth and there might even be a view that older is better among its practitioners. Indeed, the likes of John Lee Hooker and RL Burnside, to name only a couple, were still turning out tunes at ages when anyone else might have hung up their guitars and dedicated the rest of their lives to relaxing with some quality malt whisky. Likewise, ZZ Top frontman Billy Gibbons, at the fine old age of 71 summers, clearly has no thoughts of calling time on the boogie just yet and that’s a fine thing, as his Read more ...