CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
Four albums in and The Pretty Reckless singer, Taylor Momsen, still feels the need to explain herself to her doubters. In a recent interview, the former actress reiterated that quitting the TV show Gossip Girl, a decade ago, was her best decision ever; music has always been her real passion, she said, and now it's become her saviour. Momsen's recent emotional struggles are laid bare on Death By Rock And Roll. The album's tracks are shot through with tragedy and grief. Two deaths, in particular, underpin the LP: Firstly, the suicide of friend-of-the-band Chris Cornell. Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Slowthai’s debut Nothing Great About Britain was both strikingly intimate and anarchic. He rapped about his childhood and British inequality over grime beats that sounded as if they were falling apart around him. Here "abrasive" and "insightful" coexisted within the same songs effortlessly.On TYRON, slowthai divides these two attributes, splitting the album into a raucous first half and a sombre second. The caps lock is used to hammer home this overarching theme of dualism.The first half delivers the mosh pit energy that slowthai does so well. The dizzying instrumentals are excellent. On “45 Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto) is Italian filmmaker Elio Petri’s dark 1970s satire on state corruption. The narrative follows an unnamed, psychologically-distressed police chief who, after secretly committing a brutal crime, inserts himself into the ensuing investigation. He does so – he tells us – not to assure his innocence, but to verify his own conviction: that he is a citizen above suspicion.Performing the role of that titular cittadino is Gian Maria Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s odd that there’s still no name for the wave of genre-agnostic British bands of the '00s. Not manic enough to be nu rave, way too interesting for the retro-guitar nu rock revolution / landfill indie tsunami, the likes of Hot Chip, Metronomy, Friendly Fires, Simian and the super-louche Wild Beasts between them mapped out a new area of psychedelic pop. And into this in 2009 came the Scottish / Northern Irish / English band Django Django, a perfect fit into this unnamed movement with their winsome melodies and ability to fold everything from psyche-folk to acid house to rockabilly into their Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In the autumn of 1975, Martin Scorsese was finishing Taxi Driver, Bob Dylan began his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, and Orson Welles’ F for Fake premiered in New York. Welles’ manipulation of found documentary footage of art forger Elmyr de Hory into a viewer-hoodwinking shaggy dog story has far more to do with Scorsese’s film of Dylan’s tour than, say, The Last Waltz.Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story is a film of crude forgeries and exhilarating truths, fake interviews and vérité theatre, smoke and mirrors. Tipping the wink with its subtitle, and the opening, titular trick from Georges Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“I could have been a doctor or a lawyer, playing golf with my rich friends at the club” bemoans Paul Leary on the title track of his first solo album in 30 years. That, however, would have deprived the rest of us of the warped genius of the Butthole Surfers: those insane, heavy psychedelicists who seem to have somehow been relegated to a mere footnote in the history of Grunge, and of whom Leary was guitarist and occasional singer.Born Stupid may not have the Black Sabbath-esque riffing, disturbing samples and punk rock heft of the Buttholes, but listeners who are familiar with their off- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The massed rock audiences which caused Dave Grohl’s old band such angst have fuelled the Foos. This tenth album was finished early in their 25th year, with a celebratory lap of 2020 festivals booked. Now these are anthems without an audience, released into a world in stasis, where communal closeness is an alien and fearful prospect.Then again, I’ve stood feet away from the band’s festival gale-force, seen the whites of Grohl’s eyes as he grins and sweats at his work, and felt indifferent to the relentless, undifferentiated uplift. Grohl’s proverbial niceness, the positivity with which he Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The Staves – Emily, Jessica, and Camilla Staveley-Taylor – have routinely been described as “an indie folk act”, and while the term folk has undergone a lot of stretching over the years the band’s first two albums – Dead & Born & Grown and If I Was – could broadly be said to fit, their latest, Good Woman, requires redefinition.The album – recorded in London with producer John Congleton – comes after a six-year gap, though the three sisters began writing the material for it in 2017. But matters of life, death and birth intervened, leading to the sisters regrouping in Read more ...
Guy Oddy
John Carpenter may be more celebrated as the director of such great cinematic landmarks as Escape From New York, Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween, but he is also well-deserving of his plaudits as one of the founding fathers of modern electronic music. This acclaim has primarily been achieved through the mesmeric soundtracks that he has composed for his own films but there have also been a handful of stand-alone albums that have surfaced over the years. Lost Themes III: Alive After Death is not a collection of Carpenter’s soundtrack work, as might be expected from the title, but actually Read more ...
Graham Fuller
One hundred and seventy four years ago today, on Tuesday, 2 February 1847, the body of Virginia (“Sissy”) Poe, Edgar Allan Poe's 24-year-old wife, was interred in a vault in a graveyard near the couple's rented cottage in Fordham, in the Bronx; she had died of consumption (tuberculosis) the previous Saturday. Five years previously, Poe had been traumatised by seeing Sissy bleed from the mouth while playing the piano – the first sign she had contracted the “white plague” that had killed his mother when he was two, probably his foster mother, and possibly his brother (more likely a cholera Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Arrival Of The New Elders is unlike anything Norwegian trio Elephant9 have done before. Previously, their jazz-prog mélange was as full-on as it could be. Attacking, hard and heavy. Now, a previously unfamiliar pensiveness has been revealed.While Elephant9’s sixth studio album still sounds like keyboard player Ståle Storløkken, bassist Nikolai Eilertse and drummer Torstein Lofthus, there’s a more measured, clearly less improvised approach. Tempi are slower and the interplay between the players is easier to discern. There’s a new space too. Storløkken plays more electric piano than before, Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Fela Kuti and Afro-Beat have achieved a kind of joyous immortality: his son Femi and his grandson Made keep the flame of Nigerian agitprop and party-music ablaze, with a pair of albums (Stop the Hate by Femi, and For(e)ward by Made) that both, in their distinct ways, pay homage to the man who started it all.Femi sticks closely to the family tradition, with as tight and powerful a band as ever. There is the intricate mesh of guitars weaving lines that speak to each other with compelling fluency, a drum-kit haunted by the constantly inventive spirit of the late Tony Allen, and a punchy horn Read more ...