CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
When Disclosure appeared a decade ago, they were a necessary antidote to the rank gorgonzola of EDM, which was turning club music into a garish mire of musical infantilism. These two deliberately faceless Surrey brothers, Guy and Howard Lawrence, doffed their caps to the classic house sound but updated it to the 21st century, splashed it with garage and R&B, and never wandered too far from the party. Their third album, with assistance from impressively well-chosen collaborators, attempts the same but is too often trapped by its own tastefulness.The short of it is that the first half of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It’s not all just about that great voice. Gregory Porter also has a mighty generosity of spirit, plus empathy, warmth and optimism. And he has gathered a superb team around him to make a strong album with plenty of scale and depth.All Rise (Blue Note/Decca) is deliberately a very different album from Nat King Cole & Me. The 2017 album was mostly covers, with arranger Vince Mendoza ensuring a creation of luxuriant spaciousness. Songs on the new album are all written or co-written by Porter who brings satisfying variety, both emotional and stylistic.There are gentle, thoughtful, Read more ...
India Lewis
There’s something very familiar and also a little disappointing about Fanny Lye Deliver’d. Set in the years following the English Civil War, the story follows a young couple who enter the home of a stern, God-fearing family, disrupting their lives and their strict sense of right and wrong. This disruption is followed by a larger, more violent confrontation, both events coming to secure the delivery of the title.Director Thomas Clay's film has clear precedents in classics like Witchfinder General and more recent fare like A Field in England and The Gallows Pole. However, Fanny Lye Deliver’d is Read more ...
Guy Oddy
AK/DK’s third album, Shared Particles is a lo-fi electro-punk monster with a psychedelic splatter that has the dancefloor clearly within its crosshairs and the muscle to deliver on its intentions. These punchy, relentless grooves with distorted, half-heard vocals from Brighton’s synths and drums duo are more than enough to spin any minds while getting hips swinging and working up a sweat. In fact, in this festival-free summer, it is an emphatic reminder of just what we are all missing while Covid-19 stalks the globe.As with on their previous discs, Synths+Drums+Noise+Space and Patterns/ Read more ...
joe.muggs
Some of the greatest acts of all time are the ones which find a sound and never need to alter it. Motörhead, Dinosaur Jr, Status Quo... and in the electronic world, Switzerland’s finest, Yello. It’s over 40 years since they first set millionaire playboy and conceptual artist Dieter Meier’s maniacal cackle to music, and 36 since he and former truck driver Boris Blank settled into their status as a duo, codifying their formula of Meier’s dada scatting over zippy electropop with their first hit “Bostich”. Their louche and high tech style would become a foundational influence on global club music Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The title, translated from the Portuguese, is “now” – an immediacy that, on first listen, seems apt for Bebel Gilberto’s lush and loose Agora. Originally scheduled for a May release, the Brazilian singer’s first album in six years sings with a creative freedom one imagines slowly returning to Rio as it emerges, tentatively, from coronavirus lockdown: in interviews, Gilberto has spoken of quarantining in the city through the worst of the pandemic.If the release isn’t quite what Gilberto was imagining, neither was the album itself. Much of it was recorded in 2017 and 2018 with indie producer Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Rock’n’roll’s spirit is mother’s milk to Prophet, imbuing everything he touches. His old band Green On Red had stopped being roots rivals to R.E.M. long before their 1992 split, but alongside their co-leader Dan Stuart’s solo trilogy embellishing his Mexican wild years (where Ambrose Bierce met Hunter Thompson), Chuck Prophet has become a Zen rock songwriting master, rolling out a series of unassuming classics. His touchstones are mostly dead wastrels, his style wry, low-slung and romantic.The Land That Time Forgot finds him gentrified out of recording in his San Francisco hometown, instead Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Batman’s cartoonists cribbed the Joker’s face from Conrad Veidt’s rictus grin, backswept hair and crazed stare in this 1928 silent classic. Director Paul Leni’s film can’t though be reduced to either a supervillain’s footnote, or a prelude to Universal’s Thirties horror cycle, whose makeup artist Jack Pierce and art director Jack Hall partner here. It’s assembled instead from three earlier traditions: the masochistic grotesquerie of Man of a Thousand Faces Lon Chaney, who turned this down for Phantom of the Opera; German Impressionist cinema, imported to Hollywood via talent such as Leni and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Norwegian singer Solveig Slettahjell has a feeling for slow. Her 2001 debut album was called Slow Motion Orchestra, and in the years since then she has turned her very fine sense of how to convey the essence and the meaning of songs at a very measured pace into her calling card.She has explained what draws her to slowness: “When I slow down the tempo, I can hear the sound in the words, there are so many little details when you play and sing slowly. These little details fascinate me.”In the early days when she was taking on the mantle of Norwegian jazz singers such as her teacher Sidsel Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s quite unusual for the extras on a DVD release to talk down the main attraction. But that appears to be the case with the BFI’s package for Equus, Sidney Lumet’s 1977 adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s acclaimed stage play. “I didn’t like it,” mumbles actor Peter Firth of the film (in a new audio interview), having originated the part of disturbed youngster Alan Strang on stage in London, before taking the play to Broadway, then onto screen. And even Lumet, in a 1981 Guardian lecture, dismisses his work as a “brave attempt that should never have been made”.Their misgivings relate in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
During the first decade of this century Conor Oberst was critically anointed as a successor to the likes of Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. It didn’t seem to make him very happy. His project Bright Eyes, with musical prodigies Nate Walcott and Mike Moggis, twisted and turned through varying musical styles, as if purposefully evading easy definition, while Oberst’s lyrics became increasingly bleak and opaque. Bright Eyes now return, after nine years of absence. Oberst is no happier, but his cryptic, committed, broken-voiced melancholy is a good fit for these times.Bright Eyes' last Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’ve been plenty of global breakout successes from Nigeria in the past decade; D’banj, Davido, Wizkid and more – but by far the most recognisable to the international audience is Damini Ogulu aka Burna Boy. And doesn’t he know it. His last album was called African Giant, and this one – his sixth – plays on that, depicting him on the cover in cartoon form as a titan, striding over modern roads and ancient monuments. Everything about it radiates confidence before you’ve even hit play – and that includes the tracklist, which very notably doesn’t include any US megastars, unlike most of his Read more ...