CDs/DVDs
Mark Kidel
As he cruises into the autumn of his life, 71 year-old Bruce Springsteen, The Boss, as he's generally known, revisits territory that will sound very familiar to his fans. Perhaps that's what's needed, at this time when those core American values he's sung about with enduring passion seem threatened as never before.There are new songs – like the title track “Letter to You”- that sound quintessential, as if nothing had changed: the trademark twangy guitars, rolling Hammond B Organ and churchy rock’n’roll piano, the romance of Bruce’s sweet desperado voice, wrapped up in a wall of sound that Read more ...
Liz Thomson
What a pick-me-up this album is. Released as the days darken, literally and metaphorically, it’s a real joy – a transport of delight to dappled squares in Paris or Lisbon, or a street party in Rio. Sunset in the Blue is billed as “an orchestral celebration of Melody Gardot’s jazz roots” but the abiding sound that remains in the mind’s ear after the album’s finished is that of a jazz guitar, played with a bossa nova rhythm.This is Gardot’s fifth album in twelve years, a mix of standards and originals in which her voice is close-miked and properly out front in the mix. Peggy Lee, Eartha Kitt Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s not hard to understand why so many people in the UK really don’t like political pop and rock music. For one, you only have to look at the clowns who ply their trade in the world of politics, but also so much music that tries to tackle the subject is painfully dull and worthy. The Special AKA’s “Free Nelson Mandela” was an obvious exception, but it is very much in a minority.This does not seem to be the case in West Africa though and artists such as Fela Kuti, his son Femi and even Tinariwen have turned out plenty of this kind of fare without ever sounding dour or boring. Songhoy Blues Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Shot across a period of five years, David Lynch’s creepy debut feature Eraserhead (1977) follows the story of Henry Spencer, played by Jack Nance, an employee at a print factory in a quiet, unnamed town. Henry arrives home one evening to a missed telephone call from a woman named Mary (Charlotte Stewart), inviting him to dinner at her parents’ house. Once he arrives, Mary’s mother breaks the news that her daughter has given birth to a baby, and Henry is the father.“They’re still not sure it is a baby!” If the premise sounds innocuous enough, Mary’s tortured reply sets the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The big news is that this is Faithless’s first album without longterm frontman Maxi Jazz. Instead, remaining members Rollo and Sister Bliss work with a cross section of vocal talent. A multi-million selling, festival-headlining act, Faithless are one of Britain’s surviving 1990s dance music juggernauts. 25 years into a career that seemed to have wound down, the absence of such a key presence could mark the final fizzle-out. Instead, All Blessed is a creative resurgence. They sound like a band reinvigorated.Cards on the table, for this writer Faithless’s initial Nineties gold run of hits was a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Released in 1956, J. Lee Thompson’s Yield to the Night is remembered by many for what it isn’t, namely a fictional retelling of the events leading to Ruth Ellis’s execution in 1955. Mike Newell’s Dance with a Stranger told that story in 1985 with Miranda Richardson in the lead role. Thompson’s star, Diana Dors, stated that the film "wasn’t about Ruth Ellis at all. Everybody thinks it was but the script was written two years before she committed the murder.” The screenplay was co-written by Thompson’s wife Joan Henry, a former debutante who had spent eight months in Holloway Prison for fraud. Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Music increasingly escapes categories: labels are of course useful, but they also fail to evoke the richness of practices which are led by musical experiment and imagination rather than obedience to one of the genres or sub-genres that have proliferated as musicians no longer define themselves as strictly as they used to.The Portuguese composer and pianist Rodrigo Leão could be described as "contemporary classical", but this hardly does justice to the singular path he treads, a genre of its own, instantly recognisable and strongly reminiscent of his work as leader of the group Madredeus. The Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s over ten years now since theartsdesk cited Tinie Tempah’s success as marking the start of a revolution for post grime black British rappers conquering the pop charts on something approaching their own terms. And it’s very nearly as long since we noted the bleak directness of what was then known as “road rap”, underground hip hop well away from the charts in a world of self-distributed mixtapes and YouTube videos, and charting the violence and rivalries of the class A drug trade. That revolution did happen and then some, and in fact it incorporated the grim Read more ...
Ellie Porter
Making sourdough, PE with Joe Wicks, writing a novel… none of that for Derby’s finest purveyors of unapologetically retro rock. Instead, the Struts decided to make the most of lockdown by recording a new album – all piling into producer Jon Levine’s Los Angeles house (having got themselves COVID-tested first) and spending ten days coming up with this, the follow up to their 2014 debut Everybody Wants and 2016's Young&Dangerous.Ten days well spent, it turns out. Strange Days is a great record that does its darndest to put a smile on your face – full of radio-friendly, huge- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The term electro-pop has kind of lost its meaning, The Top 20 has, for many years, been full of music created on computers, from Charli XCX to BTS to Clean Bandit. Yet still, as a genre header, it's often used to refer to music that riffs on the sound of the 1980s synthesizer pioneers. The music of Norwegian singer Annie has tended in this direction but her latest album, only her third in two decades, is even more explicitly in this vein. It is a bright, engaging affair, given emotional heft by her trademark melancholia.Annie appeared amidst the millennial focus on the Norwegian city of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Every cliché about Hollywood is true,” director Bernard Rose remarked in 2018, at the screening Q&A of the restored version of his 1999 Ivansxtc that appears as an extra on this Arrow release – and, post-#MeToo, the film’s satire of that milieu and all its associated excesses feels as savage as ever. Its story of a talent agent felled at the height of his career by rapidly progressing cancer offered a corrosive view of the studio system seen very much from the inside, the trajectory of its protagonist seen by many at the time to have mirrored the burnt-out self-destruction of feted CAA Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s been 22 years since the Dub Pistols surfed into public view on the Big Beat wave with the absolutely rocking “There’s Gonna be a Riot” single. Eight albums later and Barry Ashworth’s collective are back with a cracking new disc of ska, dub and drum’n’bass rhythms, shot through with punk attitude, that are more than enough to get any self-respecting party-goer into the dance floor and working up a sweat. Just when we all need it, Addict has plenty to raise smiles and get feet moving and hips swaying.As with their previous albums, the Dub Pistols have again managed to rope in plenty of Read more ...