CDs/DVDs
Mark Kidel
When, as an artist, you live under the power of a quasi-dictatorship, you choose to stay rather than go into exile, and you want to avoid being thrown into prison, one of the best strategies for opposition is poetry. Turkish rock diva Gaye Su Akyol hasn’t chosen the confrontational path of Pussy Riot, but works instead a rich vein of musical surrealism that questions the power of Erdoğan in a language that the leader and his entourage wouldn’t understand.The rich and operatic mix on this, her second album with Glitterbeat and co-authored by her partner and co-producer the guitarist Ali Güçlü Read more ...
joe.muggs
“Caustic motherfucker”. There it is, right up in the first few lines of Baxter Dury's spoken narration over the sleazy, spanky electro beats of Etienne de Crecy. There it is: a statement of intent, a phrase to relish in the mouth, that show's he's going to make full use of the English language. Of course, it's a descendent of his dad's “arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks” – Baxter has never hidden his musical and lyrical lineage – but it's also entirely his own, coming from a place that delights in the physicality of those consonants, and in the mechanics of storytelling and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Psychopathologies come and go but they always tell us about the historical time period in which they’re produced.” So says the journalist and academic Chris Hedges in Lauren Greenfield’s documentary Generation Wealth. The idea the film plays with is that a psychopathology which currently dominates to a morbid degree is our obsession with being rich and, as much, with the public signifiers of wealth. Its hour and 40 minutes length is never dull, offering up regular revelatory tidbits, but rather than a driving sense of focus and purpose, Greenfield chooses to wander her chosen terrain in a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Think of Karen "MØ" Andersen and you may well picture one of her smash hit videos. "Lean On", for instance, where the singer gyrates to a Bollywood/ house mashup. Or "Kamikaze" set in post-apocalyptic Ukraine. Yet, for all the Zeitgeist-y imagery what really made those songs so popular was really just simple youthful exuberance. "Forever Neverland" sounds like it should offer much of the same. Instead, it feels curiously grown-up.MØ, it would seem, has moved in from her recent incarnation as the singer of Diplo pop songs. Diplo - the producer responsible for both "Lean On" and "Kamikaze" - Read more ...
Guy Oddy
There is no doubt that the hippies of the late Sixties and early Seventies gifted the world a horde of beautiful music before they finally slipped into a dope cloud of tedious self-satisfaction. Despite what some might claim, it’s hard to view Yoko Ono’s songs as part of this treasure trove and easy to suspect that she would now be viewed as a footnote in the history of the avant garde art world, if not for her place in the Beatles’ mythology.Half a century after Yoko’s emergence into the spotlight comes Warzone, an album of re-recorded tracks drawn from 1985’s Starpeace (which contributes Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“There’s a lot of weirdness I didn’t want explained,” Paul Schrader reveals at one point in a new director’s commentary to his 1990 film. He certainly succeeded on that score: with its script by Harold Pinter (adapting Ian McEwan’s elliptical 1981 novel), you sense that explanation – in any standard sense, at least – was indeed never going to be much of an issue in The Comfort of Strangers.If the novelist had offered little dialogue in his investigation of the irreconcilability of the sexes, and the playwright riffed on his favourite theme, that “language is a tool we use not to communicate Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Karine Polwart has a stellar track record as a pop and folk songwriter and interpreter of traditional songs, from Malinky through a solo career that has garnered six BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, including Folk Singer Of The Year 2018. Her new album follows one of the most ambitious projects of her career so far, Wind Resistance, a critically acclaimed debut work for theatre exploring midwifery, ecology, sanctuary and solidarity and recently shortlisted for Scottish Album of the Year.Laws of Motion proves more than a match, opening with the beguiling and beautiful "Ophelia", and the title track Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Collaboration clearly suits Neneh Cherry. From co-writing with husband Cameron McVey, to projects with Youssou N’Dour, her band cirKus, The Thing and RocketNumberNine, the give-and-take of partnership has produced some stunning work that has always seen the singer give as much as she has taken. Cherry is an honest, open performer and that translates to her vocal style. Much attention has been focused on the involvement of Keiron “Four Tet” Hebden as producer on this project, and his trademark sparkle is much in evidence with carefully controlled clatter and subtle rewinds sitting behind Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Mikko Makela’s debut feature is as sheerly concentrated a piece of filmmaking as you can imagine. The Finnish director – previously better known as an actor – manages his principle cast of three immaculately as they play out a powerful drama that takes in family relationships, sexuality and the immigrant experience, and the sense of belonging (or not) that the last two issues generate.There’s another strong presence here, too, namely the lakeside location in which, as its title hints, A Moment in the Reeds is set; it has the kind of isolated, back-to-nature beauty that is so appealing on long Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The first release from Jess Glynne’s new album, “I’ll Be There” confirmed the North London singer as the first ever British female artist to have seven no.1 singles in the UK Chart.She’s been winning MOBOs, Grammys, Brit, Ivor Novello and MTV Awards for the last four years, and while some of the above successes have come from collaborations (major hits with Clean Bandit’s "Rather Be" and Route 94’s "My Love", for example) Jess has become a household name in her own right, with a distinctive sound of big vowels, mad vibrato, gospel underlay and a housey beat. Which is clearly a reliable Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kurt Vile is a cult artist with growing commercial heft. He’s gained this without making concessions to mainstream sensibilities. Ever since Walkin’ on a Pretty Daze in 2013 he’s become an unlikely contender, mustering sales. His last album, a collaboration with Aussie fuzz-troubadour Courtney Barnett, almost made the UK Top 10. He’s not yet in the league of his old pals and band-mates The War on Drugs but his latest album, a step forward and slightly to the left, won’t do his career trajectory any harm.Bottle It In is Vile’s eighth solo album. It is long and unafraid, every now and then, to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Out of Touch hinges on the yearning “Conceptual Mediterranean (Part 1)”, the seventh of its ten tracks. At this point, over two-thirds of the way into the album the yacht rock via early Eighties, late-night blue-eyed soul amalgam has bedded in to such a degree it’s become possible to home in on the song rather than its conceptual foundations. Way back, decades ago, the track could have passed for a Hall & Oates demo but here in the early 21st century it’s a triumph of putting theory into practice.Finland’s Jaakko Eino Kalevi certainly knows what he’s doing and Out of Touch is an assured Read more ...