CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
Al Jourgensen is pissed off with Donald Trump. Really pissed off. So pissed off that he’s dragged the latest incarnation of mighty industrial metal originators Ministry back into the studio for the first time since 2012’s Relapse to produce an album made up solely of songs of resistance against the 45th President of the USA and his alt-right junta. Ministry’s signature monster guitar riffs, jackhammer beats, spoken-word samples and Uncle Al’s unmistakable roar are all given a fresh airing to unleash a tropical storm of revolutionary rock with one very definite target. Make no mistake though, Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Huge-voiced rock singer Myles Kennedy is best known for two things: first, his day-job as Alter Bridge frontman and, second, the extra-curricular work he does with Slash. In neither capacity could you exactly call his approach subdued. Alter Bridge produce a kind of revved-up alt-metal, while Slash continues to plough his bluesy hard-rock furrow. For his debut solo album Kennedy changes down a gear. It's an emotionally raw, stripped-back work that occasionally evokes acoustic Led Zeppelin.Year of the Tiger is not just introspective, it's also deeply personal. The title is a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tracey Thorn’s solo career in the 21st century has veered between contemplative adult music and the pop dancefloor. With her latest, we’re definitely on the pop dancefloor, but, despite delicious synth-led production from Ewan Pearson, ignore the lyrics at your peril. It’s unlikely the likes of Dua Lipa or Rita Ora would start a song with the lines “Every morning of the month you push a little tablet through the foil/Cleverest of all inventions, better than a condom or a coil” as Thorn does on the pithily crafted motherhood-themed “Babies”. Her smart, sharp lyrics give these nine numbers a Read more ...
howard.male
Believe it or not, it’s been 14 years since the one-time Talking Heads frontman’s last solo album proper. Perhaps it doesn’t feel like that because his interim collaboration projects always sound so very David Byrne. Even when he took equal billing with the formidably talented and highly individualist Annie Clark (St Vincent), it still sticks in the memory as a Byrne album with guest Clark. But anyway, here we have it, and it too sounds very much like a David Byrne album. Is this meant as a backhanded complement? Not at all.For one thing, it’s not as sonically dense as that St Vincent Read more ...
David Kettle
Following his irreverent superhero reboot Thor: Ragnarok, one of 2017’s most distinctive blockbusters, and his quirky Kiwi indie comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople in 2016, it’s fair to say that interest in New Zealand director Taika Waititi’s back catalogue is high. Hence, no doubt, the DVD release of Waititi’s second feature, 2010’s big-hearted coming-of-age comedy Boy.It’s fair to say, too, that the director’s signature style – his bathetic, deadpan wit; his unapologetic silliness; his big emotions – are all there in this earlier movie. But there’s a more serious side to Boy: a sense of Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There was a hint of what was to come in Gwenno Saunders’ debut, Y Dydd Olaf. It was, for the most part, a Welsh-language affair, save for the closing track “Amser”, a song sung in Cornish and the album’s dizzying slow dazzle. For her follow-up, Le Kov, Gwenno has chosen to record an entire album in this Brythonic language that has, in recent times, gamely rallied itself from UNESCO-declared death.Le Kov, then, exists as a document of a living language, albeit one that the majority of listeners will have no working knowledge of. In order to make real sense of the songs, we have to do the Read more ...
joe.muggs
For some a lack of development is failure; not for Kim Deal. Her songwriting and voice have influenced hordes of indie bands from the Eighties until now – indeed the “angular” clang and arch drawl of bands indebted to Pixies, and The Breeders, her band with sister Kelly, is as great a cliché as blues licks were in the Sixties and Seventies. Yet still, on this reunion album for The Breeders' 1993 lineup, the voice, sound and structures remain utterly distinctive and gloriously alien, a world away from the imitators, just as they shone out as different from all around them during The Breeders' Read more ...
graham.rickson
Made for Italian state television in 1978, Fellini’s Orchestral Rehearsal is full of clichés. Some of them do ring true: brass players and percussionists are often a mischievous, rowdy bunch. As for the others… I’d best stop there, lest I annoy any string-playing readers. There’s also a corrupt union official and an autocratic conductor who won’t stop talking. So far, so accurate – though it would have helped if Fellini’s horn-playing extras had been shown how to hold their hooters properly, and the orchestral seating layout is a bit odd. Plus, why do film-makers always show the conductor Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Chestnut-brown canary, ruby-throated sparrow” sang Stephen Stills in his “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”, a song from CSNY’s 1969 debut album to Judy Collins, with whom he was ending a two-year affair. Collins’s big baby-blue eyes haven’t faded with time. Nor has her voice – indeed, it is far more secure now than it was 40 years ago, when she was battling pills and booze, a fight she’s documented in a number of books.Collins was a star in 1969; CSNY were making their celebrated Woodstock debut and that iconic first album had harmonies that were spine-chillingly beautiful and pitch-perfect. The tie- Read more ...
joe.muggs
Of all the wave of neoclassical or postclassical music of the past half decade or so, some of the most popular is a new breed of rippling, repetitive solo piano piece. And, really, I mean staggeringly popular: Spotify's Peaceful Piano playlist, curated in-house, has three and three-quarter million subscribers, and a simple inclusion of a track on this playlist is enough to earn a composer a good few quid. As well as established film composers and and artists like Nils Frahm, Max Richter and co, Spotify include plenty of unknowns so, given the low overheads for recording a short, won't-scare- Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Sixty years after her debut at Club 47, Harvard Square, Joan Baez this year bows out of formal touring and recording with an album every bit as remarkable as her 1960 debut, preserved by the Library of Congress in the National Recording Registry. Now 77, she’s reached an accommodation with a voice once famously described as “an achingly pure soprano”, which wrapped itself effortlessly around Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras #5. Once a bright-white diamond, it is now a deep topaz, still an exquisite instrument in the lower registers in which Baez is most comfortable.Whistle Down the Wind, Read more ...
Owen Richards
Take one of the strongest casts in British cinema and put them in a confined space; it was always going to be fun. Sally Potter’s The Party sets its sights on the duplicitous liberal elite, where venality hides behind paper-thin morals.Janet (Kristen Scott Thomas) is hosting a get-together in celebration of her promotion to Shadow Health Secretary. Her husband Bill (Timothy Spall) is strangely quiet, barely acknowledging the arrival of their guests: the brilliantly sour April (Patricia Clarkson), her new-age life coach partner Gottfried (Bruno Ganz), feminist academic Martha (Cherry Jones), Read more ...