CDs/DVDs
Tim Cumming
There’s been quite a breadcrumb trail leading up to the release of Paul McCartney’s 20th solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane – a The Rest is History podcast recorded at Abbey Road, interviews galore, and the expectation of an octogenarian McCartney delving into the deeper end of his past (almost a decade after he released Memory Almost Full).Thus the Dungeon Lane of the title – a local boyhood hangout for McCartney, a kind of second-tier Penny Lane. Recorded between tours over a period of five years, the 14-song album is packed with tunes and melodies brought together in a busy rush of songs Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Admittedly, my journey into the strange world of IDM, electronica and ambient music has not been a complex one. Whilst finding Aphex Twin, Burial, Squarepusher and the other entry level artists that pioneered these genres, I more than once tried to venture further out, and stumbled across the now classic Music Has the Right to Children by Scottish duo Boards of Canada. Deep fulfilling synths, trudging rhythms and precise vocal chops and samples, the album defines what they do best, and now, 13 years since Tomorrow’s Harvest, Boards of Canada are back with the dark and twisted Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
For the majority of Turnover fans, listening to Down On Earth for the first time will be a rollercoaster. The highs are moments that resemble their 2015 touchstone dream pop emo phenomenon Peripheral Vision in any way at all, and the lows are every time it veers from that in a strange, confusing, incohesive way. That’s not to say that bands shouldn’t explore, it’s to say that Peripheral Vision is so widely regarded as a perfect album, that one will never be enough. Although 2017’s Good Nature was a great follow up, the hope and excitement around Turnover Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This may be Willie Nelson’s 79th solo studio album, and his 156th in all, but despite such prodigious and prolific writing, the Red Headed Stranger is still a minimalist in his 93rd year. Case in point: Dream Chaser’s 10 tracks clock in at half an hour, and they’re each as astute, funny and affecting as ever. Title song and album opener “Dream Chaser” lasoos Bobby Tomberlin into the very well-oiled Cannon-Nelson writing team, for a sweet bout of lossless reflection, while “Fly Away”, penned by Cannon and Bobby Whitlock, is a sweet, spare heart-breaker. The more intimate, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“I tell people this is my first and last big band album,” says Helen Sung about Oracles. The Houston-born pianist received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021, and that enabled her to bring what she has called this “dream project” to fruition, to write and record a whole programme of music for big band. The new music she says, “pays homage to the jazz masters whose music, wisdom and generosity changed my life,” and that gratitude fuels an album which is an upbeat celebration of several of the jazz luminaries whom she has known, learnt from and been inspired by.If Oracles doesn’t get a Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There must have been something in the ether. Only last month, not knowing that they had a surprise album about to drop, I namechecked “groovy Wirral millennials The Coral” in reviewing Ringo Starr’s Long, Long Road, linking them to Merseyside’s “romanticisation of the far side of the Atlantic”. And hey presto, here they are with 388, their 13th album – released without announcement initially in physical shops only – and both their grooviest and their most transatlantic-facing record in quite a while.The band have always been doused in nostalgic Americana of various kinds, of course. When they Read more ...
Tom Carr
Rewind the clock back 10 years, and all seemed very promising for the upcoming rock group Marmozets. Cultivating an energetic sound from a range of influences as diverse as Dillinger Escape Plan and Architects, they appeared to heading to wider success. Tunes like "Move Shake Hide" and "Captivate You" exemplified how they refined their eclectic influences into something truly their own. Their third album in 2017 seemed to only further signify at the time that things were coming good for the Yorkshire group, at the time consisting of - and founded by - two sets of siblings: Becca, Josh Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik is a lurid triumph of style over substance, a film as insubstantial as its eponymous source material. The most famous of Italy’s fumetti neri (comic books aimed at adult readers), Diabolik, created by sisters Luciana and Angela Giussani first appeared in print in 1962. The books, a new one issued each month, featured a charismatic, amoral villain clearly inspired by French super thief Fantômas, their popularity inspiring scores of imitators. After the huge success of André Hunebelle’s mid-1960s Fantômas films, that it took so long to make a Diabolik feature is Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Maisie Peters is a singer-songwriter from Sussex who’s 26, next week, and is a protégé of Ed Sheeran (she’s on his Gingerbread Man label). If you’re younger than her, you’ve likely never heard of her, but her last album, The Good Witch, was a chart-topper, and the one before that, her 2021 debut, only stalled at No. 2. She has a devoted fanbase.Her third album is lyrically impressive, if lacking musical heft. Her default musical mode is over-airy acoustic songs, carefully painted with warm electronic production, occasionally rising to a pulse that’s faintly danceable. What she does has much Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Drake just released not only his expected ninth album, Iceman, but another two albums, Maid of Honour and Habibti. Forty-three songs. Two-and-a-half hours of music. And a trying listen for anyone with a soul.Drake is the one of the world’s most successful male pop stars. This is troubling, but it makes sense. He’s admired, in our capitalism-as-religion age, as much for his social media reach and business acumen as his art. “I’m not a people-pleaser, bro’, I’m a CEO,” he burbles over the horizontal chillage of “White Bone”. That’s about right. He’s a figurehead for the romance-free, the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Tamikrest are one of the swaths of Tuareg bands that were born out of the violent oppression of their people at the hands of the Malian Army, Kremlin-controlled paramilitaries and radical Islamists but who came to prominence in the wake of Tinariwen’s breakthrough in the early years of this century. Along with the likes of Tartit and Terakaft they have sung their hypnotic desert blues in exile from a land which is ruled by a military junta, where political opposition is banned and media suppressed, with an intense yearning to return that is thoroughly tangible.Assikel, which was recorded live Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There’s a whole wide open area of leftfield music that belongs entirely to Chicago. The 1960s social radicalism and futurist musical experiments of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and its parent organisation the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), fused into punk and alternative attitudes with the founding of labels like Thrill Jockey and Touch & Go, fed the jazz-electronic-dub-“post-rock” genre meltdown of bands like Gastr Del Sol, Tortoise and Chicago Underground Duo/Trio/Quartet/Orchestra in the 1990s, and is still vividly present in a sprawling and endlessly Read more ...