CDs/DVDs
Ellie Roberts
The ongoing trickle of quirky rock by Pixies reassuringly continues with 2024’s offering, The Night The Zombies Came. The album is the first with bassist and co-vocalist Band of Skulls’ Emma Richardson, who comfortably fits right into the existing structure of the band. There are strange, alluring lyrics, beautiful guitar hooks among nonchalant vocals, and an emotion-evoking atmosphere that will please fans with its familiarity.The 13 track album introduces a host of unusual characters, their stories told with impressive instrumentation and poetic lyrics. “Ernest Evans” describes “the king of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For many performers, flirting with death is a pose or a distant metaphor, or simply don’t-give-a-damn insouciance. This is not the case with Halsey on her fifth album. She’s been assaulted, in recent years, by a range of serious illnesses and conditions, of which Lupus and a T-cell disorder are the latest. The Great Impersonator spends time staring down the barrel of her mortality, viewed through the prism of motherhood. It is moving and musically impressive.Halsey is a global star who’s used the pop platform to spring in interesting directions. For instance, she created her last album with Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Purveyors of extraordinary energy and euphoria, Underworld never miss a beat. The new album – 30 years on from their debut, and their exposure in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting – once again features music that will always be better live, in the midst of a bouncing throng, ablaze with smiles of joy, than on the best stereo at home, or state-of-the-heart cordless headphones.Karl Hyde and Rick Smith recommend that listeners avoid shuffle mode, as this new offering is programmed as a sequence, raising a storm, driven by the electronic bass drum, pulsating synths and Underworld’s trademark Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Grandiloquent indie-synth-pop outfit Bastille have been around for over a decade. Three of their four albums have been chart-toppers (the other one still made Top 5 and went Gold). They are no flash in the pan.Head honcho Dan Smith now presents a fifth album, &, that, he says, “feels like someone talking to you, rather than turning up the volume”. Returning to his pre-success solo incarnation, he’s trying a style of music mainly associated with thoughtful 1970s American singer-songwriters. Thing is, he just can’t help laying on the over-production.In the manner of, say, Al Stewart, Smith Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Amy Taylor’s lyrics on Amyl and the Sniffers’ previous discs could hardly be described as demure – especially with song titles like “Don’t Need a Cunt (Like You to Love Me)”. So, it’s encouraging to hear that the band hasn’t decided to censor themselves in any way as they hurtle towards what promises to be their big breakout with Cartoon Darkness.In fact, the lairy “You’re a dumb cunt / You’re an arsehole”, which are the opening lines of the sharp and punky first track, “Jerkin”, couldn’t be more of a statement of intent from the Melbourne four-piece. That’s not to say that Amyl and the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The missing element is magic, the swooning sense of the romantic, spiritual and supernal which Michael Powell’s partnership with Emeric Pressburger found in the British and especially English soul, sharpened by Hungarian Pressburger’s fascinated love for his exile’s home.These five minor, pre-Archers films don’t fairly define Powell’s role – his elemental, important The Edge of the World (1937) also predates British cinema’s equivalent of Lennon meeting McCartney. Mostly made as subsidised, cheap native “quota quickies”, they show an apprentice director’s vigorous cinematic fluency and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tess Parks’ fourth solo album is suffused with otherness. When lyrics are direct, they are destabilised by the etiolated, freeze-dried voice delivering them. “Sometimes it feels like everyone should be dancing, maybe I should be dancing,” she sings during “Koalas.” It does not sound as if Parks has the energy to dance.After a while, acclimatisation arrives and penetrating the album’s miasma-like atmosphere becomes possible. Nods to Mazzy Star and the solo Syd Barrett are evident (especially with “Koala”). There are also hints of early Chapterhouse, Recurring-era Spacemen 3, Nico and Judee Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If there’s a rough-hewn tinge to Laura Marling’s eighth album, then there’s a wildly valid reason for it. It was written shortly after the folk singer-songwriter had her daughter, and was recorded in a home studio with the baby ever present – either in between naps, or with her bobbing around in the bouncy chair while Marling strummed and sang.It’s a drumless record with an acoustic softness, written quickly and produced roughly which gives an authenticity and low maintenance feel that is welcome in the slickly filtered instaworld we all currently inhabit. Later set to strings by Rob Moose Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s a real bind for Kylie Minogue. Her core audience want disco pop, people like me slag her off if she branches out from disco pop and goes country, she does disco pop well… but it’s really, really hard to do disco pop relentlessly well all the time.She’s done much, much better at it than pretty much anyone else on the planet: her creative longevity and continued cultural relevance has been truly something to behold, she’s proved that being a pop princess isn’t only about providing low-camp fizz and sensation in the moment (not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course) but can Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Just before the five-minute point, a Mellotron’s distinctive string sound is heard. Three minutes earlier, a guitar evokes Robert Fripp’s characteristic shimmer. Uniting these might result in King Crimson but, instead, these are just two elements of “I Cover the Mountain Top,” the wild, 22-minute opening track of Catching Fire, a studio-quality live album recorded on 20 January 2017 at Oslo’s Nasjonal Jazzscene.At the show, a union of prodigious Norwegians, Elephant9 were collaborating with guitarist Terje Rypdal. As it has been since Nikolai Hængsle (bass), Torstein Lofthus (drums) and Ståle Read more ...
joe.muggs
Londoner Ayman Rostom has been around the block and then some. For some 25 years he’s been a hip hop producer as Dr Zygote, for the past decade he’s made wiry and weird house music as The Maghreban – both of these aliases are still, it seems, fully functioning. Before that still he made jungle and drum’n’bass in the initial 90s boom. And now he’s got a new alias to write, as you may guess by the album title, some very sad songs.There has always been a deep strand of outsiderdom, of being the odd one out, of not doing things in the typically correct order, to his music. So it’s no wonder that Read more ...
graham.rickson
František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1966) has been voted the best Czech film ever made, a visionary 13th century epic whose expense prompted its director to shoot the shorter, lower-budget The Valley of the Bees (Údolí včel) back-to-back with it.Recycling Marketa Lazarová’s lavish sets and costumes proved impossible, though both films share a vivid sense of time and place. Zdeněk Liška again provided a stark, haunting score, though large stretches of The Valley of the Bees are devoid of both music and dialogue. We first meet Petr Čepek’s Ondřej as a taciturn adolescent, incurring his Read more ...