CDs/DVDs
Tim Cumming
There are many layers of allusion that come with Marianne Faithfull’s powerful new album. The title is drawn from Keats, his formula for great poetry as opposed to instructive morality, and it’s towards a poetry of experience rather than the fixed wheel of morality that Faithfull bends her muse, just as she has always done.The album’s inside artwork features pictures of, among others, William Burroughs and a young Faithfull with a young Bob Dylan before his manual typewriter – totems of negative capability in storm-force creative conditions – and the album itself also features some musical Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Children’s Film Foundation was founded in the early 1950s. Funded by a levy on cinema tickets, its mission was to provide wholesome Saturday morning entertainment, specifically "clean, healthy, intelligent adventure". On a miniscule budget, the CFF produced scores of hour-long features until its demise in the late 1980s. Nine are included here, from 1956’s Peril for the Guy to 1984’s Pop Pirates, the latter featuring cameos from Roger Daltrey and soul singer PP Arnold. These films often depict an enchanting, prelapsarian England, one populated by bicycling policemen, pipe-smoking dads and Read more ...
joe.muggs
If there's anyone on this godforsaken planet who is fully entitled to emote their way through a mash-up of “Imagine” and “What a Wonderful World”, it's Barbra Streisand, right? This, after all, is the woman who was able to deliver “Life on Mars” as a Vegas showstopper, complete with the pronunciation “from Eye-beetser to the Norfolk Broads” and make it into a thing of wonder. This is the woman who has personified camp sincerity for decades, for whom no orchestra is too big, and no crescendo too grandiose. She is, quite often, beyond good and evil, musically speaking.One thing that is just Read more ...
Guy Oddy
One of the major abiding musical memories of the late 1990s for many wasn’t so much five Mancunians ripping off Beatles’ songs, but Keith Flint of The Prodigy, growling “I’m a Firestarter/Twisted Firestarter” while all kinds of electronic battery was let loose. The Essex Crew may no longer be the media folk devils of “Firestarter” and “Smack My Bitch Up” but they still pack a mighty punch and No Tourists, their first album since 2015’s The Day Is My Enemy and their seventh in all, is ample proof that Liam, Keith and Maxim have no intentions of sitting on their laurels anytime yet.Rocking a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You have to turn to the brief interview with director Anne Fontaine that is the sole extra on this DVD release to discover the real source of her film Reinventing Marvin. Though Fontaine and Pierre Trividic’s screenplay is credited as original, it draws heavily – Fontaine calls it a “free interpretation” – on Edouard Louis’s bestselling 2014 autobiographical novel The End of Eddy, which told the story of his growing up in the French provinces in an environment profoundly hostile to his emerging gay identity.It’s an undeniably powerful picture of a youthful outsider, one for whom lack of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Forty years on from her eponymous debut album, the eldest child of Johnny Cash and his first wife Vivian Liberto returns after a near five-year gap from recording with a collection of songs that walk the hyphen of country-rock. Hardly surprising for a musician with such impeccable country credentials who left Nashville for New York.Rosanne Cash’s distinctive voice is to the fore, the band tight, the sound bright and she has some pretty classy company – jazz man Dan Reiser on percussion, and old friends Kris Kristofferson and Elvis Costello who add vocals on “8 Gods of Harlem”, an understated Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Certain artists’ success lies in a direct ability to pastiche the past into something new and bumptious. Oasis, The Scissor Sisters and The Vaccines all had this in spades and, at their best, created music whose pizzazz and punch eventually rendered their retro allusions irrelevant. The musical back-references are still there but the albums in question long ago outgrew what was so obvious on first listening. The second album from bigger-in-America Derby rockers The Struts falls joyfully into such territory with a couldn’t-give-a-damn insouciance.The Struts look the part, adopting a dandy-ish Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In our era of TV so-called talent shows and cynically manufactured stars, how wonderful it is that many of the truly talented musicians who for decades have written the soundtracks of so many lives are releasing late-career albums that can stop you in your tracks. This year has been particularly rich – Joan Baez, Paul Simon, Judy Collins/Stephen Stills – and now David Crosby, with his fourth album in as many years.Here If You Listen finds Croz working once again with Michelle Willis, Becca Stevens and Michael League, all of whom put their individual prints on Lighthouse (2016). The album was Read more ...
Jo Southerd
Eight long years, Robyn fans have been waiting. Crazed tweets screamed #releasehoneydammit into the ether for weeks as the Swedish songwriter teased her new music.Comeback single and certified summer earworm “Missing You” was the first song Robyn wrote for the album, but there was a time when she didn’t know if she’d ever make another record. What began as a breakup song soon took on feelings of bereavement after Christian Falk, her friend, collaborator and La Bagatelle Magique bandmate, died, after a short period of illness.So Robyn isolated herself in the studio for a year, making lo-fi Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ex Mykah is a multi-instrumentalist and producer on the LA music scene who’s worked with the names such as Mark Ronson and Miike Snow. His own debut album sounds very far from either of those. Instead it comes from the warped, alt-hip hop end of the pop spectrum, while also recalling that brief Noughties blog flourish “chillwave” (the likes of Neon Indian and Washed Out). This is music dipped deep in a woozy, druggy feel, but which also never wanders far from an actual tune.Ex Mykah is Colombian-Cuban-American Bryan Senti who deeply resents the direction his country has taken and the PR Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Jamil Dehlavi is a filmmaker whose work straddles two worlds. His native Pakistan is certainly the key element in the two early films on this BFI dual-format release – it follows on from the director’s August South Bank retrospective, the first there for a director from that country – but it is as if, for a variety of reasons, he always had a foot in a cinematic context that went beyond it.His film education and training came in New York, and the spirit of experimental cinema of the time infuses his 1975 Towers of Silence, though its visual elements are anchored in Karachi’s shoreline and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It would seem that Micah P Hinson is a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He also gives the impression of a man who could make Willie Nelson seem like a spring chicken, with his deep, rasping singing voice, even if he is yet to exit his thirties. Twinned with his rootsy and mournful tunes, however, Micah’s presence is a fine accompaniment in the early hours, on an album whose quality doesn’t once betray that it was recorded in a single 24 hour stretch.When I Shoot at You with Arrows, I Will Shoot to Destroy You is not only one of the finest album titles so far in 2018, it is Read more ...