CDs/DVDs
Lisa-Marie Ferla
At recent live shows, Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn has taken to describing the band’s current lineup as the best it’s ever been. Boosted to a six-piece by the return of Franz Nicolay on keyboards, the Hold Steady of the band’s latter-day London residencies has been well worth the annual 800-mile round-trip: celebratory; poignant; communal; joyous. Thrashing Thru the Passion takes all of these moods, combines five of the tracks released digitally over the past 18 months with five new ones, and the result is the band’s tightest and most fun album since 2008’s Stay Positive.“Denver Haircut” Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Frank Turner’s compendium of extraordinary female lives, from the “impudence” of a Byzantine princess to his mum via Mata Hari, is admirably ambitious and historically intriguing. The arena-playing folk-punk digs deeper into factual byways than he has any career need to, insisting on his own wayward course. “Jenny Bingham’s Ghost” sympathetically revives the 17th century landlady who poisoned and cooked abusive men and was condemned as a witch, and draws idealistic threads to the agreeably seedy rock dive on the site of her tavern, Camden Underworld, and its ongoing role as “a sanctuary for Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ashley Joiner’s expansive documentary Are You Proud? opens with the testament of a redoubtable nonagenarian remembering his experiences as a gay man in World War II. Though followed by the admission that he had to live his later life as a lie, it’s told with considerable humour and concludes with a question – “How can you be criminalised for being born the way you are?” – to which the larger part of UK society would surely today reply with a degree of understanding.Whether it’s such tentative early moves towards reform – how good Fergus O’Brien’s 2017 film Against the Law was in bringing that Read more ...
howard.male
“I don’t want to talk, man. Let’s just fucking do it,” announces Ese Okoroduku, before crashing into the opening guitar chord of her debut album’s title track. This sums up the Nigerian-born, south London musician's whole ethos. Up In Smoke was recorded is just two days, with only a couple of overdubs added later, and analogue tape used to capture gorgeous valve amp buzz and vocal warmth. Such a cavalier approach could easily have backfired had she not already thoroughly learned her craft as a busker before then touring her band for 18 months.The material here oscillates between sophisticated Read more ...
Ellie Porter
If you’ve been paying attention, you might have already heard most if not all of Bon Iver’s curiously named i,i album – weeks before its physical release on August 30. The band debuted two tracks (“Hey Ma” and “U (Man Like)”) at London’s All Points East festival back in June, and since then they’ve been dropping videos, teasers, singles and unrelased tracks all over the place. “Listening parties” on 7 August preceded the album’s official digital release on the 9th, with tracks popping up on Twitter and Spotify throughout the following day.That certainly whipped up a lot of excitement among Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The perfect primer to The Regrettes comes towards the end of the colourful video for “I Dare You”, the bubblegum update to “Last Nite” by The Strokes that is the lead single from their second album. Teenage frontwoman Lydia Night delivers the title lyric for the first time in the song with a cheeky wink to the camera, but it’s so subtle - and her face is but one of four, off-centre on screen - that you’ll convince yourself you dreamt it. Besides, you’re but two beats away from the drums coming in again, kicking off another fizzy chorus about the all-consuming madness of first love.Now you, an Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Slipknot’s new album We Are Not Your Kind is to be let loose just as the band celebrate 20 years since their self-titled debut was released and five since .5: The Gray Chapter. Any idea that the misanthropic US shock-rockers might have turned down their shtick with time are far wide of the mark. Relentless tsunamis of guitar riffage and pounding drums with roaring vocals power such nihilistic monsters as “Nero Forte” and “Orphan”, as might be expected. However, there are also plenty of darkly psychedelic moments, like the quietly eerie “My Pain” and the whoozy jazz of “What’s Next” to provide Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After 15 seconds, it’s obvious who The New Adventures Of… is by. PP Arnold’s instantly recognisable, slightly cracked yet melodic, gospel-informed voice weaves through “Baby Blue” like a bird navigating thermal air currents. The song itself is no slouch too. Moody soul-pop with a baroque arrangement, rolling rhythm and swirling strings in keeping with her first two albums, the opener of her third is lovely. It’s followed by the similarly arresting, equally swoon-some “Though it Hurts me Badly”.While The New Adventures Of… is Arnold’s third album, both its predecessors were issued in 1968. Read more ...
joe.muggs
Founded in 1998, the Los Angeles based Anticon collective has become one of the most curiously individual of 21st century groupings. Taking the wordiest and nerdiest tendencies of hip hop – notably the slam poetry-informed tongue-twisting of fellow Californians like Freestyle Fellowship and Blackalicious – and the wordiest and nerdiest tendencies of electronically enhanced psychedelic indie as their starting points, they built a world of introspection and frazzled wordplay that they still inhabit to this day via several dozen collaborative and individual projects.Why? was originally the stage Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Don’t Look Now is beautiful in its dankness – an eldritch psychological thriller that follows a grieving father’s stream-of-consciousness as it flows into deadly waters. Time Out 's critics have been magnanimous in twice voting Nicolas Roeg's 1973 film Britain's greatest, but it sustains its power as a modernist conundrum. Spiffed up in 4K and Ultra HD for the four-disc set, it's one of 2019's homevideo treats.Allan Scott and Chris Bryant adapted the screenplay from a short story published as part of a Daphne du Maurier collection in 1971. Wearing a shiny red plastic mac, Christine, the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
On the face of it, the idea of “an East Anglian Americana collective” is a little weird, but then East Anglia’s an area that’s historically been host to a lot of Yanks and it was from one of the USAF bases that the late great Paul Oliver, the British polymath who chronicled the blues in so many ground-breaking books, first heard the sounds of authentic Americana. The flatlands there may not "shine like a National guitar", but hey...So here we are, a high-energy eponymous debut album from Morganway, a six-piece that’s been championed by Bob Harris and which began a festival tour last month Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
If you are between 13 and 17 years old, Mabel is pop royalty because she’s maintained a playlist/daytime radio presence for the last two years, culminating in her over-my-ex smash “Don’t Call Me Up” at the start of this year. With six Top 20 hits under her belt, two Brit Award nominations and a billion streams, she’s doing well. If you’re upwards of 35, Mabel is pop royalty because her mother is singer Neneh Cherry, her father is trip hop producer Cameron McVey, and her grandfather is jazz trumpet pioneer Don Cherry. If you’re in the former category, her debut album may satisfy. If you’re in Read more ...