CDs/DVDs
Tom Carr
While discourse on many topics grows toxic and polarised, it’s the voices who speak plainly about the reality of everyday lives that provide some sanity and make us feel heard. Enter Sam Fender, whose straight talking and pride of his working-class roots has seen him emerge as a figurehead for the younger generation, who at times feel unheard and underappreciated.Fender rocketed to stardom with his 2019 debut Hypersonic Missiles, which paired cutting takes at the political elite with a huge, spacious indie rock sound that harkened back to Eighties era Springsteen. With his follow up, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Canadian singer Basia Bulat has tried on various musical hats during her career but is most associated with singer-songwriterly folk-pop. Her last album was the melancholic, string-swathed The Garden but with Basia’s Palace, her seventh album, she seems in a jollier frame of mind. She has veered into overtly electronic pop before, especially on her 2016 album Good Advice, but this time it’s a bubblier, warmer version. Then again, these nine songs still find room for heartache.Bulat’s voice and style remind of Emmy the Great. This isn’t to hint at plagiarism – both singers started releasing Read more ...
graham.rickson
In Jewish folklore, a golem is an inanimate clay figure, brought to life when a magic word is placed inside its mouth. Piotr Szulkin’s dark 1979 film debut makes reference both to this legend and to Gustav Meyrink’s unsettling 1914 novel, moving the action forward from the latter’s fin-de-siècle Prague to a geographically non-specific dystopian future.Tomasz Kolankiewicz’s booklet essay describes Szulkin and co-screenwriter Tadeusz Sobolewski’s struggling to adapt the Meyrink, Szulkin’s Golem ultimately becoming “a philosophical riddle about our true identity”, clearly alluding to “the day-to Read more ...
joe.muggs
The question of personality in abstract and ambient music has always been a fascinating one. Without conventional signifiers of expressiveness, and especially in the age of AI, it’s easy for people to think “a computer could have done that”. Indeed, there’ve been plenty of musicians from Brian Eno levels of prominence on down who have played with this, using algorithmic generation, anonymity and so forth as part of the project.That’s never been the case for Canadian musician Tim Hecker, though. The fact that this is a collection of extracts from Hecker’s recent film and TV soundtrack Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Park Jiha is a super-talented and gloriously inspired Korean multi-instrumentalist. Her new album follows Philos (2018) and The Gleam (2022) and continues to mine a rich vein of Korean tradition, which she filters through a contemporary aesthetic. This isn't fusion, but the wonderfully original and beguiling exploration of a musical world in which sound, timbre, and form evoke the world of nature.In cultures of the East – China, Japan and Korea – all languages (visual, verbal and musical) are connected to nature in a much more direct way than in the West, where words describe at one Read more ...
Ibi Keita
After more than 10 years away, Rizzle Kicks are finally back, and it feels long overdue. Their music was a huge part of my childhood – soundtracking summer days, parties, and just about any time I needed a pick-me-up.Thankfully, Competition Is for Losers brings back everything that made Rizzle Kicks great while pushing things forward in a really solid way. The album keeps the brass-heavy sound they’re known for, but it doesn’t feel stuck in the past. It also has a message of taking a step back, using confrontation as a last resort in any context. In politics, personal life and the world Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album is SHORT. At 27 minutes and just five tracks, one might wonder why Julienne Dessagne (this is a solo act) didn’t call it an EP. But maybe this is a good way to go in the trenches of the modern attention wars. It set me to thinking about two recent-ish albums that have become fabourites: Earl Sweatshirt’s 24 minutes of rap introspection SICK! from 2022, and last year’s Rosenhagtorn by Isabel Gustaffson-Ny, a sub-18 minute wisp of puzzling, barely there jazz-folk abstraction.In both those cases, getting caught out by the short run-time was conducive to hitting “play” again, or indeed Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Manic Street Preachers’ earnest and literate pretentiousness is both their Achilles Heel and their superpower. Their greatest songs are amped by full investment in whatever awkward path they’ve cussedly marched down. At these times, their ever-vaunted love of fist-pumping classic rock lives up to itself.Such qualities have occasionally made them magnificent. On the other hand, when the songs can’t match the lyrical or conceptual ambitions, the whiff of bombast and stadium dirge is pungent. Critical Thinking, unfortunately, too often falls into this category.This is, says bassist-vocalist Read more ...
graham.rickson
Akira Kurosawa’s mastery of different genres is a given and one of High and Low’s strengths is a seamless blending of various styles within a single film. Though highly rated by Japanese critics, this 1963 adaptation of an Ed McBain 87th Precinct crime novel has been long overlooked, High and Low taking in corporate politics, familial tensions and a thrilling race to catch an enigmatic villain.Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune plays Kingo Gondo, a senior executive at National Shoes. He's at odds with other board members seeking to cut costs by producing cheap, short-lived footwear (“shoes must Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brighton band Squid are not in the business of straightforward. Combining jazz chops with a sensibility that’s at once post-punk, prog and avant-garde, their music is wilfully tricksy. Yet it does groove, upon occasion, it does funk. Tunes do pop in for a visit.Throughout their near-decade career, they’ve fired out some tasty off-the-wall cuts, from skronk-rock bangers to wigged-out alt-pop. Just check “Houseplants”, “The Narrator” or “Fugue (Bin Song)” for evidence. Their third album contains a couple of equally intriguing songs but whether it’s a wholesale listen will depend on the Squid- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Deep Below’s first track is titled “Hibernation.” “A winter breeze blows through my mind,” intones a colourless, dispirited male voice. The ensuing lyrics are similarly bleak. “Trying to warm myself with the memories you’ve left behind, Deep inside this hole bitterness consumes my soul, One day I might wake up but I know it won’t be today.”Musically, the setting for this despair unambiguously evokes The Cure – themselves recently reanimated with last year’s Songs Of A Lost World album – around the time of their 1980 to 1982 Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography albums. Consequently, the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It was only six months ago that Hifi Sean and David McAlmont released their Daylight album. A fine disc of summery dance pop that was enough to put the spring in anyone’s step.Now, however, it’s time for the comedown and its soundtrack, the considerably more laidback Twilight is already being touted by vocalist, David McAlmont as the duo at their best. A claim that is well worth taking seriously, rather than dismissing it as new release hype.Kicking off with a murmured “Daylight becomes twilight / Twilight becomes daylight”, courtesy of The Blessed Madonna, Twilight eases into existence with Read more ...