CDs/DVDs
graham.rickson
Wendy and Lucy is a road movie with a protagonist who’s unable to move on, and a study of friendship where one half of the partnership is mostly absent from the screen. Originally released during the 2008 financial crisis, Kelly Reichardt’s third feature film is ripe for reissue, its depiction of life on society’s margins more relevant than ever.We’re not told what events have prompted the central character to up sticks from her Indiana home and head north-west with her beloved dog Lucy. As played by Michelle Williams, Wendy is an unconventional runaway. She’s conventionally dressed, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Witch Fever are a rising four-piece, originally formed in Manchester. Their debut album, 2022’s Congregation, was a raw, sludge-punk howl that represented singer Amy Walpole’s livid rejection of the stridently patriarchal Charismatic Church of her upbringing.Since then, they’ve toured with everyone from Biffy Clyro to IDLES, and gathered a righteous amount of attention (and, of course, they look great). Their second album is less laser-focused on religious subject matter. It’s a match for its predecessor but with greater use of atmospheric effects and electronic trimmings.Opener “Dead to Me Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Demi Lovato is impressive on many fronts. She’s a Noughties Disney tween star who’s become an outspoken activist in an America where it’s increasingly dangerous to be one. She’s lived a rollercoaster ride of a life, rampantly exploring sexuality, drink and drugs amid chaos, abuse and serious mental health calamities, and she’s overcome the worst of it.Alongside all that, unlike most of her Disney child star peers, she’s maintained a successful career, both as a film and TV actor, and as a singer who, for well over a decade-and-a-half, has consistently taken her albums Top 10 in the UK and US Read more ...
joe.muggs
We are in – it needs to be shouted from the rooftops every day – a golden age of British soul and jazz. It isn’t just about a few quality artists, either, but a movement. Londoner Yazmin Lacey is key within that: in the past year, she’s featured on stupendous albums by both Ezra Collective and that band’s keyboard wizard Joe Armon-Jones.On her second LP she shares producers with Joy Crookes, Little Simz and Kokoroko, all of whom have also recently dropped glorious records – and with Joel Culpepper, who is about to. Many of these acts share other personnel too, a lot of whom came up through Read more ...
Miriam Figueras
From its opening scene, Le Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows,1938) feels like a reverie, a period of sustained waiting, during which the characters stand at a threshold knowing that a tragedy will occur if they cross it.As mist settles over a highway at dawn, a deserter (Jean Gabin) from the French colonial army gets a lift from a lorry driver heading to Le Havre. As they pull into the city, the driver notes the heavy fog. The soldier says he knows all about fog – the fog in his brain. He’s weary and burdened by trauma and an unspoken sense of disillusionment. Marcel Carné’s film is a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Lemonheads were one of the original punk-pop outfits and have been an on-off going concern for 40 years. However, singer, guitarist, bandleader and loveable slacker, Evan Dando’s well-documented relationship with Class A drugs also made them the kings of underachievement – even if there is plenty of gold to be found among their recordings that did see the light of day.In fact, it’s been almost 20 years since the band put out their last set of original songs, the excellent Lemonheads, even if there have been a couple of unmemorable discs of cover versions since then. However, it seems that Read more ...
Tom Carr
Anxiety and self-doubt have been constant themes for Kevin Parker, the Australian musician who now finds himself among the highest echelons of modern music. With his project Tame Impala, these themes have provided an almost unending source of inspiration, even while musically the project has transitioned from pyschedelic/Indie rock, and into a pop and a dance-oriented sound.Parker and his project resonated quickly with an audience who were captivated by his profound creativity on the first two albums (2010’s Innerspeaker and 2012’s Lonerism). But with 2015’s Currents, the Pandora's box was Read more ...
joe.muggs
A key part of Chrissie Hynde’s brilliance and longevity has always been her ability to keep multiple musical personas going at once. She’s the grizzled but urbane street poet in the Bob Dylan / Lou Reed mould. She’s the pop craftswoman, always in search of that three minutes of perfect sweetness, even through the punk years. And then there’s the one that creates the real alchemy, that elevates the other characters, and makes something greater than the sum of the parts: there’s Chrissie Hynde the unabashed romantic. That’s been expressed, of course, in her own songs like “I’ll Stand by Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Before we get into it, reader, can you accept that The Last Dinner Party are a band born of privilege and high academic study? Of poshness, classical composition, private education, master’s degrees in music? No? Might as well stop reading then. That’s where they’re from. Let's have a valid debate somewhere else about the arts shutting out those with less money. Right now, though, The Last Dinner Party are fab live, look great, and, in From the Pyre, deliver a worthy follow-up to their vibrant debut.They’re preposterous, of course, but wonderfully so, their music Chantilly-laced through with Read more ...
Tim Cumming
A mix of tradition and Afrofuturism, acoustic and electronic, east and west fumigating in a cauldron of rhythms, chants, solo explorations and full ensemble blow-outs, Saha Gnawa (on New York's Pique-Nique label) draws on the example of Essaouira’s annual Festival Gnaoua, which brings together jazz masters and Gnawa maalems on stage.Here, Maalem Hassan Ben Jaafer from Fes, Amino Belyamani from Casablanca and Ahmed Jeriouda from Sale join forces with drummer Daniel Freedman and a host of other musicians on guitars, sax, keys and synths, raising contemporary electronic sound across the Read more ...
graham.rickson
The best Ealing comedies are surely the three darkest: specifically Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Ladykillers and The Man in the White Suit. The latter pair were helmed by Alexander Mackendrick, a cosmopolitan director who’d arrived at the studios with a thorough understanding of trends in mainstream European and American cinema.Take the final act of The Man in the White Suit: watched with the sound turned down: it’s an expressionist noir thriller, Alec Guinness’s naïve scientist Sidney Stratton pursued through the streets at night by a vengeful mob, cinematographer Douglas Slocombe making Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s seven years since the Belgian brothers Dewaele unleashed their fine, largely instrumental and foot-stomping Essential album on the world, but they’ve given short shrift to any ideas of sitting on their laurels in the intervening time. Their new album, All Systems Are Lying still points emphatically towards the dancefloor, but it brings plenty of new flavours to their sound and is considerably more song-based than its predecessor.This isn’t to say that Soulwax have gone down the standard guitar, bass and drums route on their new album. Their sound remains emphatically guitar-free in fact Read more ...