CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
Selena Gomez is the enormously successful Disney child star who grew up to be a Hollywood actor and global pop sensation. As notably, she’s the third most followed person on Instagram, the most popular woman, with 421 million followers. Benny Blanco is the golden boy American producer-songwriter whose many, many hits run the gamut from Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” to Ed Sheeran’s “Happier” to Kesha’s “Tik Tok”. The pair got engaged last December.This, then, is a monster album. It’s also better than its icky title and tacky celeb status suggest. I admit I came to I Said I Love You First Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For fans of The Horrors, the headline here is that, 20 years into the career, for their sixth album, the band have lost two of their founding members. Original keyboard player Tom Furse has gone, as has drummer “Coffin” Joe Spurgeon, to be replaced, respectively, by Amelia Kidd of Scottish synthy post-punkers The Ninth Wave and Jordan Cook of alt-indie Welsh outfit Telegram. Happily, these changes have not scuppered their overall dynamic. Indeed, the five-piece is now imbued with an encompassing darkness that harks back to their beginnings.This is not to say the The Horrors have reanimated Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There was a telling remark in Wynton Marsalis’s recent interview with Katty Kay for the BBC show “Influential”. Talking about how jazz functions in real time as a democracy, he said: “Our music requires you to be in balance with other people”, contrasting it with unnamed but all-too-obvious examples in the US of the rise of cultures based on principles diametrically opposed to that, i.e. the search for victory and 'greatness' through bullying and subjugation.As I listened to Just, the new ECM album from the quartet of octogenarian drum icon Billy Hart, I became rapidly convinced that this Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Going by the sounds of her new album, it wouldn’t unreasonable to assume that Greentea Peng enjoys sucking on a spliff every once in a while. Tell Dem It’s Sunny is certainly Gold Seal gear with a distinctly smoky atmosphere, that’s for sure.Dubby trip hip and woozy neo-soul are the order of the day with lyrics that are sometimes political, sometimes spiritual and sometimes absurd but which always flow with the loops and basslines that she’s dreamed up with collaborators from Earbuds to Samo and Wu-Lu, to name only a few. However, even at its most heavy and forthright, as on the Dälek-like “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Sitting on a sofa, cigarettes and beer, ten years disappear…agreeing to agree, just to get along.” By going into the difficulties of resuscitating the past, the lyrics of “Ten Years,” the fourth song on The Loft’s first album, neatly sum-up the band’s current situation. The final line gives the 10-track set its title: “Everything changes, everything stays the same.”Everything Changes, Everything Stays The Same is, indeed, the first album by The Loft, a band integral to the early days of Creation Records which fell apart on stage in June 1985. Forty years ago. A long time. Before that rupture Read more ...
joe.muggs
America – the pro-wrestling-ass nation, the ultimate society of the spectacle – famously likes things big, and modern country and western music has gone along with that. Big hats, big trucks, big sentiment, big pop production, very big sales indeed, and not a lot in the way of subtlety. But country also has a parallel history, of course: as music of the little guy, the theatre of the domestic, a place for preservation of simple folk traditions in the face of the overwhelming scale of modernity. And it’s into this that through this century the Alabaman singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, whether Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Steven Wilson’s cinematic concept album The Overview is named for the cognitive shift required of astronauts and others who’ve observed Earth from space and been humbled by both its beauty and its – and their – inconsequentiality. Wilson’s grappling with the existential questions raised by what he calls “cosmic vertigo” evidently inspired him musically. The eighth solo record by the Porcupine Tree frontman consists of two infectiously melodic tracks, “Objects Outlive Us” (23 minutes) and “The Overview” (18 minutes). Each is comprised of sub-tracks that give the LP a stop-start Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
The Father of Make Believe is the latest instalment in the cinematic fantasy world that Coheed and Cambria have meticulously crafted over the last 30 years. It’s openly more personal in nature than previous albums but The Amory Wars storyline and Sci-Fi emo prog rock atmosphere that the band are known for are still as present. The catchy, anthemic tracks that are scattered amongst both the delicate and spacey, and the heavier prog metal that make up the rest of the album, are some of the strongest moments. “Goodbye, Sunshine” and “One Last Miracle” in particular stand out as highlights Read more ...
graham.rickson
One of The Barnabáš Kos Case’s incidental pleasures lies in its relatively accurate depiction of orchestral life. Much of the action in Peter Solan’s 1964 Slovak black comedy (originally title: Prípad Barnabáš Kos) takes place in a rehearsal studio, one filled with real, non-miming musicians. Actor Milivoj Uzelac, playing one of the conductors, was also a composer and actually looks convincing on the podium.If I’m allowed to be pedantic, the most glaring false note is the role played by the titular antihero; you’d never find a percussionist who only plays the triangle, let alone one who Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I come to this album from a week or so spent among the denizens of the New York and Boston folk revivals, including a key figure from Tulsa and the Guthrie Center, and a concert (Judy Collins, marking 85 years of music and activism).They were a reminder (if one were needed) of how much the music of Woody Guthrie, his children and grandchildren, still means in a country heading back at full throttle to one that Woody and his confrères would recognise all too easily: one of poverty and prejudice and life-altering climate change. But this time around there is no FDR, no New Deal, and right now Read more ...
joe.muggs
Just the other day I overheard one of my kids watching a YouTuber called Nathan Zed and was instantly gripped. It was called “How Trying Became Cool Again,” and focused on pop cultural moments like Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl show, Doechii’s Tonight Show performance, Chappell Roan’s giant pink pony at the Grammys and Tyler, The Creator’s… well, just about everything.His thesis is that in an era defined by laziness, whether in dating apps or AI generated art, people going the extra mile to express themselves matter more than ever, and this is why suddenly “theatre kids” are back on Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was uniquely disturbing, with its monster Leatherface’s first primal eruption to hang a victim on a meat-hook rivalling Psycho’s murders for shock and fright. It was only as the bludgeoning effect faded on subsequent viewings that the film’s pitch-black comedy became clear.With a ferocious singularity of mood and purpose bred by its micro-budget, hothouse shoot, it cast a Citizen Kane-like shadow over Hooper’s subsequent career, despite the landmark TV scares of Salem’s Lot (1979) and the smash-hit Poltergeist (1982), which now seems a true Read more ...