CDs/DVDs
Kathryn Reilly
What’s all this? Female voices, guitars, a song lasting over four minutes… harmonies? Have Britain’s savviest social commentators gone soft? Fear not, their sixth album is wall-to-wall uncomfortable sleaziness, biting observation and bruising belittlements.If anyone is equipped to document the horrors of the last year on plague island, it is Iggy Pop favourite, Jason Williamson (who kicks off proceedings, in "A New Brick", by confirming that we’re all “Tory-tired”). Too true. Who else is in the firing line this time? “Class tourists” in "Nudge It" (featuring Amy Taylor of Amyl & The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When the concept album first properly took flight, in the late 1960s, before it became slave to the bloated artifice of prog-rock, it was an extension of the LSD-soaked times: “Songs aren’t big enough, man, I need a bigger canvas!” Famed albums by The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Kinks and The Pretty Things sum up this golden period. The second album from singer-songwriter James Wallace’s Skyway Man persona is a psychedelic concept piece, but in line with this wide-eyed period, rather than crap by Yes and the like. Wallace’s psychonaut indie ruminations are, thus, loaded with opaque visionary Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Night Porter depicts the consuming sadomasochistic love affair of an SS officer, Max (Dirk Bogarde), and the Catholic woman, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), whom he both tortures and protects when she is a teenage concentration camp inmate, and who becomes his partner in a protracted liebestod when they meet by chance in Vienna 12 years after the war’s end. Think of it as the anti-Casablanca.in 1957, Max is the eponymous hotel employee, ashamed of appearing in daylight, and Lucia is the decorous wife of a famous American conductor. They are drawn together again by mutual desire and guilt Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Back in 2013, the London-based singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist launched the first of a trilogy of albums exploring her Polish roots and family history, entwined around the history of Poland and Europe and the traumas of the Second World War, as well as raising questions of personal and national identity. Pazport had a strong vintage klezmer and gypsy jazz feel, a mood reinforced by Carr’s preference for 1940s clothing and hairstyle. Polonia followed two years later, and now, in Providence, the trilogy concludes with a set of ten songs that feature water as a key element. These Read more ...
Guy Oddy
theartsdesk eases into 2021 with a Disc of the Day title, Himalayan Dream Techno, that will be hard to beat over the next 12 months, even if it is a bit of a misnomer. For one thing, this album doesn’t hail from the Himalayas, it’s also not techno, and anyone who dreams like this must wake up every morning in an unpleasant cold sweat. Instead, New Age Doom’s sophomore album is a collection of twisted instrumental sounds that flow into each other, while building into giddy caldrons of menacing, otherworldly vibes before bursting into howling tsunamis of feedback.For Himalayan Dream Techno, the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The key tracks on Every Mover are “Play 'til Evening” and “Earthborne”. The first shimmeringly fuses anthemic, gospel-edged singing and surging instrumentation with a Philip Glass pulse and a trance-like throb. The second is a sparse contemplation, where piano underpins the vocals. Little else is heard. Despite the forthrightness of one and the intimacy of the other, there's a shared mood of yearning and the sense unease has invaded the creator’s life. “Play 'til Evening” and “Earthborne” are the most straightforward of Every Mover’s 11 tracks. The second album Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Their PR cannot put the band name in the header of promotional emails, as they’ll go straight to the spam bin, but Swedish punk outfit Viagra Boys have, nonetheless, become a name to contend with. It’s their wild live persona that’s put them on the map but their second album raucously – and tenderly – demonstrates they also have the range and the songs to explode into something bigger.Their sound is a Tennessee-flavoured, rock’n’rollin’ electro blues, pumped up with grubby distorted bass-end riffing and occasional Krautrock tints. Welfare Jazz pushes this stew into all sorts of shapes and Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Among the many tragic deaths last year was that of Justin Townes Earle, son of Steve Earle, who died in August, felled by the demons his father had vanquished but which Townes Van Zandt, the revered singer-songwriter after whom his daddy named him (much against the wishes of the boy’s mother) did not. So Justin, whom Earle called “the Cowboy” when he was a kid and JT when he grew up, had a lot to live up to, and lot to live down.Whatever personal angst he struggled with, musically he triumphed, writing exquisitely nuanced songs, preoccupied with loss, heartbreak and forgiveness; story-songs Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Music has been a solace during a year when we’ve both retreated into our private spaces and reached out more feverishly than ever on social media.There’s been very little live music: I’ve almost obsessively trawled YouTube for the best old footage: from Tina Turner belting it out on stage in 1966 and the delightful videos that Dust-and-Digital load daily on Instagram, to a blistering solo by Eric Dolphy at the Antibes Jazz Festival in 1960, backed by Charles Mingus on bass and Danny Richmond on drums. He tears his way through a simple blues and gospel chord changes with a freedom that’s Read more ...
peter.quinn
One of the great ironies of 2020 was that, in a year in which the importance of music – as escape, as release, as comforter – was amplified like no other, vast swathes of musicians saw their livelihoods disappear overnight.A far-reaching commentary on the unending cycle of human greed and corruption, couched in music of Ellingtonian richness, Wynton Marsalis’s The Ever Fonky Lowdown was the latest in a line of hard-hitting socio-political works from the acclaimed trumpeter and composer which includes Black Codes (1985), Blood on the Fields (1996) and From the Plantation to the Penitentiary ( Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The title of Swedish director David Färdmar’s feature debut gains a degree of helpful context from one of its opening lines, “But there’s no more we”. One partner, Hampus (Jonathan Andersson), is telling the other, Adrian (Björn Elgerd), that whatever feelings may remain between them, their life as a gay couple, their coexistence and cohabitation of some years – the element that has made them we – is over. That essence is perhaps told more succinctly in the title of Färdmar’s 2018 short film, simply No More We, an impressionistic, work-in-progress abbreviation over 14 minutes of Are We Lost Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When satire becomes redundant, all that’s left is to tell it like it is. Drive-By Truckers released The Unraveling in January 2020, but Covid couldn’t dim the relevancy and glowering power of its requiem for Trump-trampled American hopes.Patterson Hood’s high, sorrowing voice suited both the appalled “Babies in Cages” and “21st Century USA”, a sympathetic panorama of a ground-down country: “Men working hard for not enough, at best/Women working just as hard for less/They get together late at night in bars/Bang each other just like crashing cars.” Cleansing guitar thunder contributed to a Read more ...