The enduring good health of UK soul – the fact that we are treated to a continual stream of great records by the likes of Jorja Smith, Children of Zeus, Cleo Sol / SAULT, Maverick Sabre, Joel Culpepper, Yazmin Lacey, Ego Ella May, Michael Kiwanuka and so many others – is down to a few things. First there is the soft music for hard times principle: a craving for tangible tenderness, directness, unfiltered emotion and… well… soulfulness in the midst of the competitive shouting factories of the digital world and the relentless hustle of this austerity-blighted island.Secondly, and this is vital Read more ...

It begins with a superb rendering of his 2018 song “Ain’t Gonna Moan No More”, on which Van is joined by the mellifluous voice of Kurt Elling, and which was recorded alongside the other duets on the album in 2018 and 2019.It then winds through a mix of duets recorded in 2014 (alas, no Sir Cliff) and what they're calling "big band" arrangements of catalogue classics like “Avalon of the Heart”, “So Quiet in Here” and “The Master’s Eyes”, a gem from 1985’s A Sense of Wonder. This extremely likeable scoop of slightly random songs is the second of a series of releases from the vaults on Read more ...

Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (To Live) begins with an X-ray photo of the central character’s cancer-ridden stomach, a man described by the narrator (an uncredited Kurosawa) as someone “drifting through life… we can’t say that he is really alive at all…”.It’s an audacious opening, and what promises to be a small-scale personal drama soon expands and takes on epic dimensions. Kurosawa stalwart Takashi Shimura is perfectly cast as Kanji Watanabe, a low-ranking civil servant in a Tokyo town hall who’s spent 30 years "drifting through life" surrounded by colleagues who specialise in passing the buck. In Read more ...

White Roses, My God isn’t a Low album. It couldn’t be. Mimi Parker, Alan Sparhawk’s wife and partner in Low, died in November 2022. And despite Low’s many musical twists and turns, Sparhawk’s public return to music sounds nothing like any of Low’s outings across their 13 studio albums, the first of which was issued in 1994.The opening track is “Get Still.” Its melodic bed comes from a keyboard line played on what sounds like a pre-digital synth: perhaps a Korg or a Mini-Moog. A glitchey beat provides underpinning. The vocal combines a treatment similar to that heard on Neil Young’s 1982 album Read more ...

Robert Crumb puts America’s racist, misogynist Id on paper with self-implicating obsession. Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary on the underground cartoonist and his even further out family is reissued as the channels for such purging, pungent art have contracted further, zealously policed by Left and Right dreams of moral perfection.Filmed over eight years, Zwigoff shows the Philadelphia housing project where the Crumb family lived an outwardly respectable, privately maniacal post-war life, and Robert sketching the late 20th century streets of San Francisco, site of his early triumph with Read more ...

Life can be unfair, and Katy Perry can’t be alone in finding herself having to take the rough with the smooth. Still, anyone would have thought that with the excessive pearl clutching that accompanied the July release of 143’s lead single “Women’s World” that she’d put out a Nazi marching song, not a clunky attempt at a feminist anthem.The Guardian’s Laura Snapes, for one, claimed that it was “a song that made me feel stupider every sorry time I listened to it” – and that was one of the tamer responses. Similarly, the rather anonymous second single, “Lifetimes”, with its retro Italian House Read more ...

Miranda Lambert is one of those country stars who’s massive in the States but no-one’s heard of this side of the Atlantic. Famous since her early twenties, she’s had a quarter century career, encompassing seven Top Five US albums, including one chart-topper, as well as parallel success as part of trio Pistol Annies. But the most she’s troubled the British album charts is reaching No.52 a decade ago. This is a shame as she’s talented and sassy and her new album is a treat.Lambert’s songwriting chops derive from the best country traditions of storytelling, southern wit and chewy wordage, Read more ...

There’s been a lot of early 90s rave aesthetics in popular culture lately, but an awful lot of it has been at the level of signifiers. Fila, Stüssy, Air Max 90s, smiley faces, sirens, rewinds, crowd noises, hop in a Ford Cortina, tribes coming together, dancing at dawn, baggy hoodies for goalposts, isn’t it, wasn’t it, hmm? There’s been a little less discussed, though, about what raving actually felt like, and in particular that it its revolutionary character came from everyone having the same feeling of being on the same drug at the same time.Again, we might see the signifiers of tablets, Read more ...

Lighters at the ready, because here comes the flood. Drawn from 16-track tape, 1/4in reels and lo-fi sound board cassettes that are now a half century old, the 27 CDs of 431 performances, 417 of them previously unreleased, of Dylan and The Band’s 1974 arena tour of the US, is a set that challenges the listeners’ staying power perhaps more than it celebrates an epochal tour.Sure, the 1974 tour was an important milestone in the Dylan story, and a coda, of sorts, to the story of The Band and Dylan’s trajectory away from the turbulent zenith of 1966. They were like two stage sets colliding: Read more ...

Real-life couple Graham Coxon and Rose-Elinor Dougall are both musicians of some profile in their own rights. The former, especially, for his work with Blur. Their band The Waeve is a relatively recent development but they’ve thrown themselves at it with verve since their appearance a couple of years ago.City Lights is their second album, a year-and-a-half after their first. Once again produced by James Ford, it’s a tonally bewildering collection with moments that shine. Mostly, it sounds like two talented and imaginative musical creatives having fun, sharing vocals, and revelling in what Read more ...

You don’t need me to tell you that this particular law enforcer has served up yet another meaty helping of genius. It’s what we expect. So here she is, over-delivering again on her 12th album. A salve for the soul, Joan Wasser’s delicious voice and masterful songwriting are woefully underexposed and appreciated. But, actually, that’s not a bad thing – let’s keep her secret for now.One of her many skills is how intimate her delivery is, how she makes you feel she is confiding just in you, baring her soul because she just knows you’ve shared the same experiences. She soldiers on Read more ...

 Passage Secret – music by Bizet, Debussy, Fauré, Ravel, Aubert Ludmila Berlinskaya and Arthur Ancelle (piano duet) (Alpha Classics)There are many reasons to acquire this disc of French piano duets, one being the inclusion of the Feuille d’images by one Louis Aubert (1877-1968).  A composer, pianist and teacher, Aubert sang the “Pie Jesu” in early performances of Fauré’s Requiem, and Ravel dedicated the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales to him. Auber’s delightful five-movement work is ripe for rediscovery, one of its quirks being the technical demands of the lower duet part, the Read more ...