CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
The title is in keeping with those of previous portentously handled albums from the Montréal art-rockers. There was their breakthrough 2007 set The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse and 2010’s The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night. The latter’s cover was similar to that of ...The Great Thunderstorm Warnings – a murky painting of a glowering sky hanging over a hostile milieu.On the new album, their sixth, “Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings” is the final track. After just-under seven minutes of soaring, stately drama comes a further 11 minutes of a low drone, akin to what Spiritualized Read more ...
Guy Oddy
South London all-female post punkers, Goat Girl caused a bit of a splash with their self-titled debut album and early, belligerent tunes like “Scum” back in 2018. Now, however, is time for its follow-up and, unfortunately On All Fours is indelibly stamped with difficult second album syndrome. Sure, they take on big issues like humanity’s parasitic relationship with the Earth; sexism and the patriarchal society; social isolation; mental health issues and the short-comings of capitalism, but instead of decking themselves in warpaint and going for the jugular, like the Slits or L7 might do, they Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Never have the early months of the year felt more cruel. Escape is what we all yearn for – from home, from ourselves and our shrunken lives. Never has music been more important to us and, over the last few days, I’ve had Steve Hackett’s new acoustic album playing and replaying as I’ve worked at long-overdue practical tasks. And while thoughts of Spain are bittersweet just now, I’m loving Under A Mediterranean Sky, which has energised me, despite all.It’s not all about Spain – the musical accents of Malta, Greece, Italy, France, and places farther east and farther south are evident Read more ...
graham.rickson
Relic's deliberate drabness hits home first; set in Victoria, Natalie Erika James’s modern horror shows us a grey contemporary Australia, a place bleached of all colour. We first see Kay and her daughter Sam (Emily Mortimer and Bella Heathcote, pictured below) driving through a wooded landscape in search of Kay’s octogenarian mother Edna (Robyn Nevin), reported as missing from the family home. James's debut highlights how fraught intergenerational relationships can be, and Kay’s indifference to Edna is made clear when she’s quizzed by the local police about when she last checked in with her Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Hope”, from the debut album by 20 year old London singer-songwriter Arlo Parks, has a perfect chorus for these times. Blissed piano chords, lazy funk beats, lusciously upbeat synth dreaminess, and on top of it all, her sweet, airy voice offering support: “You’re not alone like you think you are.” It seems directed at those who quarantine isolation has swirled down into a dark place. There is much on Collapsed in Sunbeams that easily, chattily offers similar solace.Let’s be clear, it’s not a Covid-centric album, it’s a set of gently pensive sketched miniatures whose lyrics are a cut above the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Bicep's second album fufills the promise of the first, released in 2017 to wide acclaim. Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar, friends since childhood from the city of Belfast, draw inspiration from Chicago house, Detroit techno, Italo disco and other now vintage dance genres. They appeal as much to a younger generation for whom their heady mix of dancefloor styles feels fresh and new, as to an older crowd for whom the duo serve up quality nostalgia.Made over two years and the result of a trawl through 150 demos, "Isles" reflects the impact of Bicep's move to London and exposure to music from Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Norway’s Wardruna have proved to be an unlikely international musical success, both within Scandinavia and further afield, since releasing their 2009 debut album Runalijod – Gap Var Ginnunga. In this time, Einar Selvik’s Norsemen have managed to draw fans from a broad variety of genres, including folk, world music, heavy metal and born-again Vikings, no doubt helped by their involvement in soundtracks for television dramas like Vikings and computer games like Assassin’s Creed.Kvitravn, their fifth album, doesn’t much mess with Wardruna’s established formula, which falls somewhere between Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Becoming a has-been is Eminem’s main raw material now, the rocket-fuel for his rhetorical flights. He was a folk-devil 20 years ago, then a prescription drug-zombied recluse, then a huge comeback pop star. Extending that third act has been hobbled by social media sneers since the unfocused but often excellent Revival (2018), and a perception that he’s run out of road.Having finally retired his work’s real-life supporting cast of relatives out of belated respect for their privacy, and shown withering scorn for contemporary hip-hop trends such as mumble rap, he has fallen back on his core Read more ...
Katie Colombus
In such a somnolent time We Come From The Sun is an awakening – the immediacy and presence of poetry urging you to listen, and pay attention to the beauty of now. For her latest album Cerys Matthews selected 10 poets to record their work and composed background music to accompany it, alongside Joe Acheson of Hidden Orchestra. The result is a sound journey that orbits the theme of Genesis by way of present British heritage.It is a beautifully presented soundscape of time – historical, personal, planetary. Poets speak in vivid sequences about nature, the inheritance of womanhood, football, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Catalan director Albert Serra’s interest in late 18th century France is well established – his previous film was The Death of Louis XIV – but the title of his new one has precious little to do with the triadic revolutionary slogan that swept away the French monarchy at the end of it. If Liberté celebrates freedom in any sense, it’s that of libertinage, libertinism, the rejection of moral and especially sexual restraints that was being celebrated at the time by the Marquis de Sade, whose philosophical presence is a commanding one here (alongside, cinematically, Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose final Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The tears of a clown is a familiar enough metaphor – a cliché, perhaps – and as an image it adorns the sleeve of the latest album by Mike Rosenberg, better known as Passenger, the platinum-selling former Brighton busker. Scheduled originally for release last May, Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted is his twelfth solo album and it was partially rewritten in lockdown, the tears for a relationship that ended just before.New songs written in solitary replace those which no longer fit, among them “Sword from the Stone”, which in an appealing acoustic version launched Passenger’s fireside Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Volker Schlöndorff’s brilliant adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel The Tin Drum hasn’t aged one bit: just as the book and film’s main character Oskar Matzerath decides that it’s better not to grow old, the film’s phenomenal zest feels as fresh today as when it was won the Palme d’Or in Cannes and Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1979.Set in Danzig (now Gdansk), Günter Grass’s home town, a crossroads between East and West, both German and Polish, the story takes place in the years leading up to the city’s take-over by the Nazis in 1933, World War 2 and its immediate aftermath. Oskar is a Read more ...