CDs/DVDs
Harry Thorfinn-George
2020 marks the year when the PC Music label’s influence became undeniable. It’s easy to forget that, founded by A.G. Cook in 2013, it was once at the centre of a mini culture war. The label’s refusal to distinguish “between high and low, between Burial or Britney” felt exciting to some, but contemptuous to others. In retrospect, journalists’ comparisons to “Japanese tween pop of the distant future played through JD-Sports in-store radio of 2002” didn’t help the case against the latter.The war was waged and won, as A.G. Cook’s futuristic vision of what pop music could be is now reality. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
This breathtakingly lovely album opens with the aptly titled “Hey My Friend (We’re Here Again)”. Before the October 2020 release of ÖB and its related singles, the last record Finland’s Joensuu 1685 issued was a 12-inch on a Norwegian label which came out in 2011. This, the trio’s second album, was begun in 2008 just after the release of their eponymous first. Eleven years on, ÖB was completed.Joensuu 1685 resumed playing live in 2018. During the interregnum, when work on what’s become ÖB was on hold, frontman Mikko Joensuu issued the three epic, intense Amen albums. Each charted his struggle Read more ...
Russ Coffey
2020 was, for many music fans, the year of cathartic singer-songwriters and their "surprise" lockdown albums. Not me. The last thing I craved during the months cooped up was brooding introspection or angsty art-pop. It was escapism I was after, and I found it in good old-fashioned rock'n'roll. The hardest rocking band in 2020, for me, were Aussie veterans AC/DC. Power Up was the sound of a band overcoming a series of recent catastrophes – singer Brian Johnson (73) split his eardrum, drummer Phil Rudd was charged with manslaughter and songwriter Malcolm Young Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Dropped a month into the year’s first lockdown, Laura Marling’s seventh album landed like a soothing tonic to an odd and chaotic time. The stripped back production had an air of loneliness, yet the vocals were effervescent and soothing. The profoundly insightful lyrics of Songs For Our Daughter and Marling’s confident solitude was like a foreboding of how 2020 was to unfold.The daughter to which the title of the album speaks, is made up and it’s this facet of storytelling that makes the album so dreamy. It lifts you out of reality and allows for escapism into the folky rasp and narratives Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
One of the world’s leading architectural photographers, Julius Shulman was the subject of a show at London’s Photographers’ Gallery this autumn, “Altered States of America”. That title surely alluded to the visual modernism that changed the face of that country over the course of the 20th century, which Shulman, working in close tandem with the architects concerned, captured over a career of almost eight decades, in California especially.Visual Acoustics, Eric Bricker’s documentary about that career, was originally released in 2008, the year before Shulman died, just a year or so short of his Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Back in October, Fiona Apple – whose Fetch the Bolt Cutters, released in April, captured a particular early pandemic mood – was interviewed by Emily Nussbaum for The New Yorker Festival. “I think we women should be marrying our friends,” she told the journalist. “We have sexual freedom! We have dogs! We have fun! We can do whatever we want!”Experiences like these have been a teeny, tiny crumb of positive over these unending months. Would I trade 10 months and counting without live music (last gig: The Hold Steady, arguably the best live band in the world, at their annual London “Weekender” at Read more ...
graham.rickson
This BFI compilation looks back to an age when an evening at the cinema was a proper night out, the main attraction preceded by a short supporting feature. Nine spooky and macabre examples are included here, though the set earns its four stars by dint of excellent documentation and historical significance rather than cinematic brilliance.Disc one’s chills are very mild indeed, opening with a pair of shorts from 1949 starring and narrated by Algernon Blackwood, a one-time male model, violin teacher, hotel manager and journalist who found fame writing ghost stories. Both films feature Blackwood Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve is best known for mainstream films like Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049, stylishly expressive in their harnessing of alienating terrains, notably deserts and plains. Their claustrophobic equivalent in Polytechnique (2009), the eerily quiet 77-minute indie Villeneuve made before his 2010 breakthrough Incendies, is a college campus and its environs during a blizzard – the brutalist architecture and freezing temperature redolent of the feelings of the lone shooter who matter-of-factly fires his semi-automatic rifle at women in a classroom, a Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Given Dylan’s last album of originals was in 2012, and his standards phase had concluded with a slightly meandering three-disc set in Triplicate, expectations of anything other than an archival release or new tour announcement from Dylan in 2020 were low – until, that is, some weeks into the first lockdown, when his longest ever song dropped out of a clear blue sky."Murder Most Foul" began with cringey rhymes and rose and revolved into a most extraordinary, time-defying meditation and reverie, pulling from the aethyr all the names of power from the 20th century’s canonical list of musical Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Crash, David Cronenberg’s dazzling, daring, disturbing adaptation of JG Ballard’s novel about car crashes and sex is one of the most infamous of all cinema cause celebres.The film's premiere in Cannes in 1996 caused an extraordinary ballyhoo, with then Evening Standard critic Alexander Walker writing a review with the headline "a movie beyond the bounds of depravity" and jury president Francis Coppola declining to join his fellow jury members in awarding the film a special jury prize. The festival showing was followed by attempts around the world, most notably in the UK and US, to have Read more ...
Guy Oddy
If there’s been one thing that has coloured the UK music scene in 2020, it’s been the lack of any type of performance in front of a living, breathing and sweating audience for much of the year. Who was to know back at the beginning of January that we would only have about nine weeks to get in all of our gig-going? Fortunately, I managed to see a handful of concerts during this time and the most glorious by a country mile was Slipknot’s show in Birmingham. Despite taking place in a huge barn-like venue, Iowa’s arch misanthropes put on a fierce, attention-grabbing performance of extreme energy Read more ...
joe.muggs
Among the glints of light in this overcast year, one particularly bright one has been the state of British soul music. Not just in the sense of good records released, although there’ve been plenty of those – but something significantly deeper: a contextualisation, an acknowledgement and a pride in the rich history and unique talents of these islands. This manifested in things like the BBC showing a long overdue documentary on The Real Thing, the announcement of Sade’s catalogue getting the full deluxe box set treatment, Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock (re)schooling a mainstream audience in that Read more ...