CDs/DVDs
joe.muggs
For underground music producers, there almost always comes a phase in life when they accept they're no longer young guns and embrace either massively complicated synthesisers, floaty new age music, or both. For Bristol-based Jake Martin aka Hodge it's the latter. This, his debut album after a decade releasing a couple of dozen EPs on connoisseurs' favourite labels and DJing around the world, has all the signifiers. Rainfall, tropical bird sounds, breathy synth tones in rising patterns, huge reverbs on tiny sounds... yes, even things that sound like panpipes: it's all there. From the hippie Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Laura Marling has always loved to weave the textures of Seventies Laurel Canyon folk-rock into her music. Never before, though, has she evoked the spirit of David Crosby and Joni Mitchell quite like on her new record. From the opening strummed chords to the last hummed notes Song for our Daughter is full of Californian haze, making for a gorgeously contemplative experience. Of course, Marling hasn't actually lived in LA for some years now, having returned to London in 2014. But her experiences living near the Hollywood Hills – and the life-lessons learned – Read more ...
Liz Thomson
This is the perfect album for these dark and dislocating times, a delicious slice of folk-Americana, 10 beautifully crafted songs (plus a bonus online) that envelop you in the gentle winds and fogs of California’s Monterey peninsula, and the waves on its flotsam-dotted sands.It is in fact the fourth album by Nels Andrews, who now lives in Santa Cruz but who discovered his song-writing talent while in Taos, New Mexico, a landscape that has inspired many. Released in the US last fall, its UK and European appearance was originally timed to coincide with a tour. That must wait, leaving us to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Their debut’s title was a disillusioned shrug, and for most of the 19 years since Is This It, The Strokes have continued with seeming reluctance, releasing new albums fitfully. But here they are, still riding the afterglow of Manhattan’s decadent energy in the season before 9/11 and Giuliani’s clampdown, and with producer Rick Rubin, career resurrection a speciality, on hand to tease out growth beyond the Television tribute act they once resembled.The New Abnormal is a diverse and mature sixth album, exuding worldly confidence as it dismisses the detractors, rivals and lovers of a time less Read more ...
graham.rickson
These three films come from Buster Keaton’s mid-1920s purple patch, the high spots of which prompted critic Roger Ebert to describe Keaton as “arguably the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies”. High praise indeed. And while I’d rank The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr slightly above the films making up this anthology, each one makes for joyous viewing.1924’s The Navigator was a personal favourite of Keaton, prompted by his chance acquisition of a defunct US Navy passenger liner about to be scrapped. The set-up has Keaton’s foppish Rollo Treadaway and the girl who’s just Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The perfect introduction to Newcastle’s mighty Pigsx7 is undoubtedly to be made in the live arena, for it’s here they seriously let sparks fly with monolithic slabs of sound and an exuberance that is truly infectious. That isn’t to say that their studio output isn’t worth serious attention and Viscerals is a sonic treat with plenty to offer. For while the band’s sound remains firmly rooted in the legacy of Black Sabbath and Hawkwind’s peak moments, their new disc is sharper than both Feed the Rats and King of Cowards, while losing none of the intensity of either.“Reducer” hits the ground Read more ...
Mark Kidel
David Lynch’s second feature, his only period movie, is as good as anything else he has ever done, building on the claustrophobia of his first, Eraserhead (1977) The story of Joseph Merrick, born in Victorian times with the most terrible physical deformation, rescued from a humiliating life as a carnival attraction by kind Dr Treves provides an opportunity for Lynch to explore themes at the core of his work: the purity of innocence and the terror of evil.The cinematography, by Freddie Francis, creates a gloom and a vision of London’s dangerous streets that is reminiscent of German Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Talk about a great big melting pot! The eighth studio album by the man born 36 ago as Andrew Heissler in Bloomington, Indiana, and known to the world as Pokey LaFarge digs deep into the bubbling cauldron of Americana, in its very broadest sense. He himself has described it as kind of like a mix-tape and even the most casual listener will discern in Rock Bottom Rhapsody elements of country, blues, bluegrass, barrelhouse, doo-wop, jazz, rockabilly, the great American songbook and even hints of movie music.Pokey’s first outing since 2017’s Manic Revelations, it was mostly written in LA, to where Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Filmic. Lushness balanced with intimacy. Ren Harvieu’s follow-up to 2012’s Top Five Through The Night is crammed with wide-screen aural dramas. Take “Cruel Disguise”. It begins with a slinky Sixties spy thriller vibe along the Shirley Bassey lines and after a brief moment of contemplation evolves into a swirling drama evoking Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t Have to Say You Love me”. Next up, the crisp “Yes Please” nods to Laura Nyro when she’d hooked up with LaBelle but, again, darker – trip-hop-tinged – terrain is explored.The singing voice is melodic, yearning and nuanced. Yet Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Purity Ring, the Canadian duo, are purveyors of simple yet sophisticated dream pop. Corin Roddick makes synth tracks at one end of the country, while crystalline-voiced Megan James writes the lyrics and records the vocals thousands of miles away. Perfect music for the age of social distancing, similar in a way to those multi-layered anthems now popping up on the internet with musicians syncing up in quasi-miraculous symphonic harmony.Womb is their third album, and it is, if anything more ethereal than the first two, Shrine (2012) and Another Eternity (2015), both of which stayed closer to the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Alongside the man he calls “the other half of my brain”, Flying Lotus, Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner sits near the heart of Los Angeles’ fertile, genre-busting scene, helping to link Kendrick Lamar’s righteous rebel rap, Kamasi Washington’s spiritual jazz, and the faux-nerd white one-man bands of Louis Cole and Sam Gendel. Breaking through himself with Drunk (2017), It Is What It Is confirms Thundercat’s own complex character, being both slyly funny and obscurely moving, as if attending a party that’s almost over.“Black Qualls” features another in the current generation of prodigious, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Zed Nelson brings enormous humanity to this portrait of the changing identity of Hackney’s Hoxton Street as gentrification impinges on its long-established community. Shops that have been there for decades vanish overnight, fancy new pavement cafes spring up, and Nelson listens, patiently, to all who will talk to him, with a striking sense of their being able to speak in their own time, unprompted, unhurried. A Hackney resident most of his life, he worked on The Street over four years and the trust he obviously earned speaks to the best traditions of social documentary.A couple of miles from Read more ...