CDs/DVDs
Sebastian Scotney
Seattle-born Allison Neale’s alto saxophone sound is instantly appealing. Her playing has the light wispy, airy quality from the "cool", "West Coast" school of Paul Desmond. One day last year, she spent just six hours (10am-5pm minus an hour for lunch, I gather) with three other top-flight jazz musicians at Angel Studios in Islington – shortly before it closed, in fact. The result, Quietly There (Ubuntu Music) is a completely delightful album.Neale’s totally assured sense of how to convey melodies finds the perfect complement in New York guitarist Peter Bernstein. And if there are echoes Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s always a timeslip moment, revisiting films first seen in your teens, but never more so than when watching this beautifully restored print of Walkabout. Nicolas Roeg filmed and directed this fever dream of a movie in 1970, after co-directing Performance with Donald Cammell. Very loosely inspired by an Australian novel, Roeg enlisted playwright Edward Bond to write a script that diverged fundamentally from the original plot and barely amounted to 65 pages but it won Roeg the necessary funding. He set off with his wife, young sons, a teenage Jenny Agutter and a small crew to film this near Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Suzanne Vega sprang to fame 35 years ago, her eponymous debut one of the last albums we bought in vinyl before the advent of that new-fangled format of aluminium aspic. From it came “Marlene on the Wall”, the video an MTV hit. “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner”, from Solitude Standing, Vega’s second outing, cemented her reputation: drawn from real life, each were unusual chart successes – the first told from the point of view of an abused child, the second a cappella. Vega was the first woman to headline at Glastonbury. Vaclav Havel was a fan and she was a presidential pick for a concert celebrating Read more ...
joe.muggs
A new and very strange kind of pop music has bubbled up over the past half-decade plus. It’s internationalist, rooted in both underground electronics and the most populist styles, bound up with playful but sometimes terrifying ultra high definition psychedelic aesthetics, and dominated by female and non-binary musicians. It’s given a platform to some of the most vivid and fascinating characters in music today, from Beijing’s 33EMYBW to Margate’s BABii, Washington DC’s Swan Meat to Montevideo’s Lila Tirando a Violeta, and most prominently Glaswegian SOPHIE and Caracas-via-Barcelona Arca. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s been a decade, more or less, since The Rolling Stones opened up their From the Vaults series with The Brussels Affair, AKA Bedspring Symphony, taken from the 1973 European tour following the release of Goats Head Soup. It’s one of the most thrilling live sets any band ever released. And this at a period when it is hard to ascertain exactly how many times Keith Richards was arrested, crashed his car, set his place on fire, or had his blood changed. But together on stage, they blew the roof off and the doors out, embodying the very definition of rock n roll music at a time when the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Declan McKenna covers many bases. He’s a good looking, teen-friendly pop star who first made waves aged only 15, but he’s also a politically engaged lyricist with aspirations in the region of Bowie and Dylan. His best songs, then, combine chewy, lyrical bite with adventurous, sonically smart 21st century pop. Just last year he released the single “British Bombs” which raged admirably against its subject matter, but his new album, his second, is out of balance, its songs and themes overwhelmed by ear-frazzling over-the-top production.The lyrics offer an opaque vision of a world collapsing in Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Tricky, the bruised, self-proclaimed "mongrel" from Knowle West, South Bristol’s depressed suburb, has created a language of his own: dark and minimalist, with emotions at once raw and blurred.His 14th album treads familiar ground, but his playful exploration of a sound palette that’s as condensed as it’s colourful ensures that the Tricky Kid remains totally original as well as true to himself. His distinct producer’s voice relies on simple means – a careful choice of samples, which often surprise in their contrasting timbre and texture, and instrumental sounds (keyboard and cello) that tread Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Stretching from the 1880s through the 1920s, Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel Show Boat, about three generations of entertainers aboard a Mississippi steamer, became the 1928 Jerome Kern–Oscar Hammerstein musical, a part-musical 1929 film, next the 1936 James Whale masterpiece for which Kern and Hammerstein wrote three new songs. Whale brought in Charles Winninger, Helen Morgan, and Sammy White from the original Broadway cast, Irene Dunne from the US touring version, Paul Robeson from the 1928 Drury Lane production and 1932 Broadway revival, and Hattie McDaniel and tenor Allan Jones from the 1933 Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“If I was a better dreamer, you’d be a dream come true” sings Kristin Hersh over the opening bars of Throwing Muses’ new album, Sun Racket. It sets the tone for a distorted and woozy disc that could easily be the soundtrack to a folk-horror tale set in the woods of the band’s native New England. Floaty and ethereal melodies blend and twist around the raw and the primal to produce something truly magnificent, as Throwing Muses cast a disorientating but wholly satisfying spell with their first album in seven years.Opening track “Dark Blue” is strident with a dark and enchanting vibe that is Read more ...
graham.rickson
Comparing Harold Lloyd with Keaton and Chaplin is difficult. Though the input he brought to his films was crucial, Lloyd didn’t write or direct, and there’s much discussion as to whether he was a genuine comedian or a straight actor playing the part of one, his matinee idol appearance befitting a conventional leading man. Lloyd’s trademark horn-rimmed spectacles were suggested by producer Hal Roach, concerned that his star property was too handsome to be funny. The glasses are a superb prop, Lloyd’s normality making his physical comedy all the more effective.Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Read more ...
Tim Cumming
"The gateway to the invisible must be visible." So intones Patti Smith on the third and final journey in sound with Stephan Crasneanscki and Simone Merli, AKA Soundwalk Collective, musical psychogeographers and field recorders whose journey for this evocation of French spiritual-surrealist writer Rene Daumal’s posthumous 1952 cult classic Mount Analog took him to the peak of Nanda Devi in the Himalayas, the former Beatle hangout of Rishikesh, India’s "spiritual capital" of Varanasi, and Upper Mustang, once known as the Kingdom of Lo, which only admitted its first foreign visitors in 1992 Read more ...
joe.muggs
Katy Perry occupies an odd position. By some measure the biggest pop star in the world over the last decade, with streams in the billions, she’s always been an awkward mix of old-school razzle-dazzle showbiz hucksterism, knowing sass and awkward vulnerability.And while she often appears likeable and self-aware, there’s a piercing desperation – lyrically and sonically – to so much of her work that clearly assists it in cutting through the noise and babble of information overload culture, but all too often makes it not actually that pleasant to listen to. Her songs tend to embody the sad cycle Read more ...