CDs/DVDs
Liz Thomson
“So you wanna be an outlaw, better take it from me/ Living on the highway, ain't everything it's supposed to be” sings Steve Earle on the opening track of his latest album, with a little help from Willie Nelson. Recorded in Texas, where Earle did most of his growing up and where he began to play music, So You Wannabe An Outlaw is an acknowledgment of his roots and influences and an “unapologetic” channelling of Waylon Jennings, a fellow Texan with a career as multi-faceted as Earle’s own.The album’s frame of musical reference is wide: the bluesy “If Mama Could Seen Me”, commissioned by T-Bone Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“So you wanna be an outlaw, better take it from me/ Living on the highway, ain't everything it's supposed to be” sings Steve Earle, a man with no shortage of outlawish credentials, on the opening track of his latest album, with a little help from Willie Nelson. Recorded in Texas, where Virginia-born Earle did most of his growing up and where he began to play music, So You Wannabe An Outlaw is an acknowledgment of his roots and influences and an “unapologetic” channelling of Waylon Jennings, a fellow Texan with a career as multi-faceted as Earle’s own.The album’s frame of musical reference is Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The follow-up to Lorde's multi-platinum, Grammy-nominated album Pure Heroine has been a long time coming after the 16-year-old singer/songwriter withdrew from the limelight and beat a hasty retreat back to her home country of New Zealand.Four years later, Lorde (real name Ella Yelich-O'Connor) took to New York to collaborate with high-end producers who've worked with Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Beyonce, Madonna and Justin Bieber. While the upswing from independent to made shows in the polished and slickly produced sounds of pop, electro, indie, ballad and a touch of a reggae beat, there Read more ...
graham.rickson
Memory plays funny tricks; Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too is fondly remembered as a cheeky 80s sex comedy. It’s not. There’s a fair bit of sex, and the laughs do come thick and fast, but the film leaves the bitterest of aftertastes. And, viewed 30 years after its cinematic release, what’s alarming is how little has changed since the late 1980s (the original tagline was "Thatcher’s Britain with her knickers down"). Andrea Dunbar’s screenplay, based on two plays she’d written as a teenager living on Bradford’s Buttershaw Estate, is a rambling, discursive affair, centring on the priapic Bob Read more ...
howard.male
Rarely has an album’s artwork better reflected its content: blackness, or the void from which light occasionally emanates. This is a collection of instrumentals enhanced by vocals, rather than what might be called songs. The opening minimalist piece “Lightshaft” begins with a single plucked guitar note and its long vibrato-laden after-echo, like the sonic equivalent of a lone flickering candle. Norwegian singer Anneli Drecker’s haunting contributions can’t be described as lead vocals because they are no more or less significant than any other texture on the record.This is only the former Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
After the persuasive opening singles “Chained to the Rhythm”, “Bon Appétit” and “Swish Swish”, as well as all Katy Perry’s pre-release talk about “purposeful pop”, there was a feeling that Witness might push the boat out, taking Perry’s music into more intriguing terrain than previously. Perhaps it might even achieve the leaps forward made by Beyoncé with last year’s masterpiece, Lemonade, or Madonna’s transformations with producers William Orbit and Stuart Price, in 1998 and 2005 respectively. Unfortunately, while occasionally tasty, it cannot meet those comparisons, yet it’s still Perry’s Read more ...
Mark Kidel
One-Eyed Jacks, the only film Marlon Brando ever directed, is a masterpiece by any reckoning, a classic western about love and treachery, as well as a startling and boundary-breaking re-invention of the genre.The tragedy unfolds, through many twists and turns, from a moment of betrayal that subsequently haunts two bank-robbers, Rio (Brando) and Dad Longworth (Karl Malden). The story focuses on Rio’s quest for revenge: after five years in a horrific Mexican prison, he comes upon Longworth, who has now re-invented himself as the sheriff of Monterey, California. The two actors, both originally Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Fellow defenders of the Delta tradition Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’ have never recorded together before. Billed as a “historic collaboration”, this album features appearances from starry performers including Bonnie Raitt, and excellent young jazz singer Lizz Wright. After a couple of listens, however, fans will be dismayed at the misuse of the term “historic”. An opportunity was missed to do something original. This is very easy to listen to. Everyone is, in a technical sense, on good musical form, and the recording is lustrous and full-bodied. Both musicians tip a hat at the blues tradition Read more ...
joe.muggs
Clifford Price – Goldie – has long cut an imposing, and complicated, figure in the music industry. Part larger-than-life entertainer, part monster (as satirised in music industry grotesque Kill Your Friends), part irrepressible raver, part grandiose conceptualist. But there's another side to him too: the massive, Pat Metheny-idolising, jazz smoothie.His breakthrough 1994 track “Inner City Life” was partly high-tech drum'n'bass ferocity, but it was completely merged with jazz-soul sophistication and of course the soaring voice of the sadly recently-deceased Dianne Charlegmane (who would work Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In 1990, Ride were in the first wave of the Shoegazing scene to get out of the blocks and into the studio to record their iconic debut EP. Four albums and a sack load of EPs and singles later, however, they called it a day and the four lads from Oxford slouched off to join Oasis, the Jesus and Mary Chain, put out solo records and, in bassist Steve Queralt’s case, to take up a career in retail at Habitat. And that seemingly was that. However, in 2015 fate intervened and the Coachella Festival came calling with the offer to get back together in front of a crowd of 70,000.Weather Diaries is Ride Read more ...
Saskia Baron
For those of us still mourning John Hurt, this lovely HD restoration of the actor’s favourite film is a real joy. Made in 1975 for Thames Television, it’s stood the test of time remarkably well. Funny, moving and often cited as a turning point in British acceptance of homosexuality, The Naked Civil Servant is based on the aphoristic autobiography of Quentin Crisp, who famously described himself as “one of the stately homos of England”. Born Denis Pratt in 1908 into a respectable suburban family, he reinvented himself as the flamboyantly camp Quentin Crisp, rent-boy, artists’ model, Read more ...
graham.rickson
“People think babies are sweet. But this one’s bitter.” So squeaks Alice Lowe’s malevolent unborn daughter in the horror comedy Prevenge, prompting her heavily pregnant host Ruth to embark on a killing spree. Think of it as an unholy blend of Rosemary’s Baby, Sweeney Todd and Kind Hearts and Coronets, as Ruth seeks to murder those who she blames for the death of her lover in a climbing accident.Childbirth should be a celebration of love; here, it’s a very grim business indeed, Ruth’s body being subject to what she describes as a hostile takeover. Prevenge makes a virtue of its limited budget Read more ...