CDs/DVDs
joe.muggs
Sadness abounds in Avicii's posthumous third album. In context, even the plaintive single syllable of the title is full of pathos. It reminds of the real person, the Swede Tim Bergling who as a teenager discovered he had an unerring ability to hit the commercial sweet spot with his dance productions, and rocketed to global giga-fame. There, in the heart of the seething spectacle of pyrotechnics, screaming crowds, private jets and oafish “EDM” culture was sad, lost Tim: socially awkward, unsure of his own abilities, worked relentlessly by a voracious industry and eventually drinking himself to Read more ...
peter.quinn
On one level it’s a paean to stylistic pluralism, on another it’s a love letter to his wife. First and foremost, though, Taller sees Jamie Cullum staking out new ground as a singer-songwriter, adeptly aided by his long-time collaborator and friend – the conductor, arranger, multi-instrumentalist and producer, Troy Miller.Propelled by a tight horn chart, strings, Miller’s crisp backbeat, plus a backing chorus that includes the stellar vocal talents of Brendan Reilly, LaDonna Harley Peters, Sharlene Hector, Sumudu Jayatilka, Xan Blacq and more, the title track’s compelling drop-out point at the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A chronic recycler, Dennis Potter fashioned five feature films from his earlier TV dramas and another from one of his novels. The best of them are 1985’s Dreamchild (from the BBC's Alice, 1965) and Track 29 (1987), which he adapted from the BBC's Schmoedipus (1974). The latter was one of Potter’s "visitation" plays, in which frustrated or guilty protagonists conjur into existence an angel – or the devil, in the case of Brimstone and Treacle (banned in 1976, remade in 1982) – to commit an act of liberating violence.As in Schmoedipus (which starred Anna Cropper and an inspired Tim Curry), Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Outside the Palladium a couple of months back for Joan Baez’s farewell, I was given a flyer for this album – by Naomi Bedford herself it turns out. We had a brief chat which left me with a good feeling about the project and I was disappointed to see I’d be away for the London concert marking the launch of Singing It All Back Home: Appalachian Ballads of English and Scottish Origin. My intuition was correct for this, the third outing from Bedford and Simmonds and a talented group of confrères, among them Ben Walker on banjo, Rhys Lovell on bass and Ben Paley (son of the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
You hear a lot about living legends, but there aren’t actually that many around – at least not since the first half of 2016. Carlos Santana, however, definitely fits the bill. From his early days stealing the show at Woodstock alongside drummer Michael Shrieve, to achieving bone fide icon status for his pioneering work in the field of fusion solos, he’s at a stage where he can do pretty much whatever he wants. This makes the intent and wide-reaching scope of Africa Speaks all the more impressive, and Santana’s claim that this is a project born out of a love and obsession for the music of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
June 2017 witnessed a musical miracle, of sorts – the resurrection to recording and brilliant songwriting of Peter Perrett, The Only Ones’ singer, songwriter, and architect of his own ghoulish entombment in a Gothic south east London pile, fielding serious addictions for decades and emerging only briefly in 1996 for his excellent Woke Up Sticky album, and the publication of Nina Antonia’s biography One & Only, for whose launch he performed in the basement of Helter Skelter on Denmark Street with Only Ones guitarist John Perry. His sons also played, as a duo called The Kuntz, “because that Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Over the past two decades, Brighton’s Fujiya & Miyagi have managed, without fanfare or fuss, to amass an enviable back catalogue of linear, krautrock driven grooves dresses in slinky, drop-shouldered pop melodies. It’s a formula that has served them well and has proved elastic enough for them to grow without it ever seeming to give at the seams. This is, in part, due to an admirable sense of simplicity that reached a peak on 2017’s self-titled near-masterpiece (in fact a compilation of three EPs). On Flashback, however, there is a distinctly different cut to their cloth. Certain Read more ...
graham.rickson
The British Transport Commission was created in 1948 by the Atlee government, an ambitious attempt to organise rail, road and water transport under a single unwieldy umbrella (for a time it was the world’s largest employer, with a staff of over 900,000). British Transport Films was set up a year later, the biggest industrial film unit in the UK. It was run by renowned documentary maker Edgar Anstey and survived until the late 1980s, its intention to promote the virtues of a newly nationalised transport network. The BTF’s output included travelogues and training materials, the more popular Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Richard Hawley’s eighth solo album, Further is, like so many of his previous discs, a masterclass in good taste and relaxed easy listening vibes – but it’s one which manages to steer well clear of the middle of the road. In fact, there’s much here that is reminiscent of that other cool Northerner in a suit, Barry Adamson, who spent a fair few albums wrestling the Easy Listening genre from the '70s cardigan-wearing hell of Val Doonican and his pals. For much of Further, Hawley is on a similar track with a groove that suggests Roy Orbison fronting Phil Spector’s famous Wall of Sound.Further Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Yousou N’Dour has come a long way from his cassettes with Super Etoile de Dakar, that wild mbalax energy, fed by the clatter of the high-pitched sabar drums, with vocals that soared and fizzed with emotion and soul. Today’s Youssou is air-brushed and smooth, world music for global tastes, with a slickness that almost - but not quite – submerges the unique quality of the heart-stirring voice that made him famous.Salif Keita, that other super-charged West African voice, led the way back in the late 80s, with rock-flavoured productions by Ibrahim Sylla. As with Youssou’s more recent Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Soundwalk Collective is a multi-disciplinary audio-visual collective founded by Stephan Crasneanscki, a musical psycho-geographer and field recorder, the source material of his works drawn from specific locations: in the case of The Peyote Dance, it's the Sierra Tarahumara of Mexico, also known as "Copper Canyon", and as spectacular a wilderness as you can imagine.Here, the French Surrealist poet Antonin Artaud came in 1936 on horseback, in search of peyote, a shaman and a cure to opioid addiction. His subsequent encounters with the ceremonies of the Rarámuri Indians and the peyote shamans of Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Anatole Litvak’s The Night of the Generals (1967), beautifully restored here to 4K, is a tortuous and at times entertaining mash-up of the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler and the murder of a prostitute in Nazi-occupied Warsaw a few years earlier. Producer Sam Spiegel cast Omar Sharif and Peter O’Toole as Nazi officers, the same duo that had starred in his earlier success Lawrence of Arabia. The script – workmanlike but without any great surprises – is by the French novelist Joseph Kessel and the seasoned British screenwriter Paul Dehn.The recent representation of Nazis on screen has become very Read more ...