CDs/DVDs
Tim Cumming
Any Richard Thompson appearance comes with a hallmark guaranteeing quality produce – be that an album or a stage show. Indeed, Thompson's 75th birthday concert will land on 8 June at the Royal Albert Hall, with a dazzling range of musical guests to rival the same venue’s epic 70th birthday bash five years ago. Meanwhile, it’s been six years since his last album, 13 Rivers, an album he described on its release as “coming to me as a surprise in a dark time”.Dark times, you say? All rivers meet their end when they meet the sea, and Ship to Shore, featuring the same line-up of players in Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Brooklyn-based composer and bandleader Jihye Lee’s story really does take quite some telling. Having been an indie pop singer in her native Korea, she enrolled in 2011 as a Vocal Studies student at Berklee in Boston, also hoping to develop her composing skills. And then came the "coup de foudre". The sound of a large jazz ensemble completely transfixed her: “I looked through the window and saw a bunch of people just blowing their horns, and it was just so energetic and so enthusiastic and so lush…that was the moment when I knew large ensemble is for me.”And she has never looked back. She won Read more ...
Tom Carr
If there is one positive of the past decade, it must be the growing openness with mental health and wellbeing. Whether in the films we watch or music we listen to, there is much less of a stigma in addressing anxiety, depression, and mental health issues in general.For most of their career, pop-rock duo Twenty One Pilots, have focussed on these themes through frontman-vocalist Tyler Joseph’s rapped/sung/sometimes screamed lyrics over Josh Dun’s powerful drumming. Since 2015’s Blurryface, they have woven these into a conceptual arc that has run through their preceding albums (2018’s Trench and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Isobel Campbell has maintained a consistent career on the fringes of popular music for three decades. She's made a home in the area where indie, folk, rock and BBC 6Music merge. Aside from her 1990s involvement with Belle and Sebastian, she’s best-known for her trio of albums with the late Mark Lanegan, her gracefulness and crafted precision working well against his gruff world weariness. Following that, she was scuppered for a while by legal label entanglements, but since 2020 has been up and at ‘em again, following her own path. The best word for her latest album is “shimmering”; 13 head- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The final track of Samana’s third album is titled “The Preselis,” after the west Welsh mountain range – the place antiquarians suggested as the source of Stonehenge’s blue stones. The song’s opening lyrics are “The blue stones, they grow over me, Carved into mountains, the blood of need.” Later, the words “anima” and “animus” are repeated before the song ends with the recurring refrain “Lay the body down.”Dovetailing a tenet of Jungian psychology – anima, the female unconscious of a male, and animus, the male unconscious of a female – with notions of an evocative landscape firmly places Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The most striking thing about the 1976 documentary (restored and re-released by the BFI) is just how polite Billy Connolly comes across as. Not that he's impolite now, but the raucous stage presence and vibrant chatshow interviewee was yet to fully form.Murray Grigor's film, which follows Connolly's first gigs in Ireland in 1975, shows the comedian long before he achieved the national treasure status he now enjoys. The Dublin and Belfast dates came just after Connolly's appearance on Michael Parkinson's chat show had made him an overnight star, and backstage in Dublin the Glaswegian frets Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Always looking dapper and always sounding cool, Barry Adamson is a man who nevertheless seems to be perpetually of another time. Giving off the vibes of a one-man Rat Pack with a dash of the legendary Lee Hazelwood, his music certainly doesn’t have much in common with mainstream tastes.The former Magazine bassist and Bad Seed’s new album is a stylish and charismatic collection that draws on gospel, classic soul, blues and jazz through a widescreen cinematic lens that may be mature, but certainly isn’t square. Louche but sharp, Cut to Black is by turns atmospheric and soulful but wholly witty Read more ...
Tim Cumming
So Billie Eilish’s new album has had its worldwide midnight release, dropping at midnight wherever you are kiddos, and taken as a whole it’s like some dark, heavy, low-hanging semi-forbidden, semi-erect fruit that you want to bite into, chew and swallow.Eilish, who composes and records with her brother Finneas O’Connell, has said of this third album that she hopes all of us listeners would have the focus and linger time to be able to sit down and listen to its songs chronologically and all the way through so that it “hits you hard and soft both lyrically and sonically, while bending genres Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s a long way to the middle. Jack Savoretti has worked hard to get there. He’s grafted. His first album, 2007’s Between the Minds, hinted that his musical DNA bestrode early-Seventies Los Angeles, those Topanga Canyon strummers and such, but melded to something much more BBC Radio 2. It took a while for his core audience, the Dermot O’Leary mum-core massive, to find him. A nice fella and a looker, by about five years ago, they had. His last two albums were chart-toppers. But now he’s challenging the fanbase with an Italian language album. “Challenging” may be the wrong word. Miss Italia is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Claire Denis’ 1988 debut is a sensual madeleine to her Cameroonian childhood, with its taste of termites on butter, sound of birdsong and insect chitter, and the camera’s slow turn and rise into vast vistas. It’s also a colonial reckoning, setting out themes of violent incomprehension and fractured souls. Like the gaze of France (Cécile Ducasse), her child surrogate in this 1957 tale, Denis’ initial African vision is enigmatic and unblinking.Chocolat is framed by the adult France (Mireille Périer, pictured below), returning to Eighties Cameroon to seek her old colonial home. Modern Read more ...
graham.rickson
Glance at The Holdovers’ synopsis and you might suspect that Alexander Payne’s latest effort is a slice of lightweight seasonal schmaltz. Yes, it is set at Christmas, and contains tear-jerking moments, but Payne and screenwriter David Hemingson throw so much more.The period detail has been much commented on, the early 1970s setting recreated with unfussy aplomb. Even the opening credits look vintage, the film’s digital footage processed to look like grainy analogue. Early scenes give little sense of where Payne will take us; what looks like a high-school comedy with a large cast quickly Read more ...
Mark Kidel
It’s been a long while since Beth Gibbons released an album. Portishead’s Third was out in 2008. She has lived through so many changes since, and, even though her signature is still very much in glorious evidence, Lives Outgrown represents a step forward and deeper than the moody indie pop of Out of Season her last solo outing, made with with Rustin Man (Paul Webb) of Talk Talk.This is a brave mid-life album from a woman who doesn’t shrink from darkness. Beth Gibbons sang vocals for Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No.3 (“Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”) in 2019, as if that still and Read more ...