CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
When Mancunian trio Delphic appeared a couple of years back they said all the right things. They were modest about themselves but fiercely into the music, acknowledged their home city’s heritage but were keen not to use it as a tacky profile raiser, and they also adhered to an appealing and faintly Kraftwerk-ian deadpan visual aesthetic. The music on their debut album, Acolyte, however, while spirited and a blast in concert, had a job creeping out from under the shadow of New Order. It charted, nevertheless, and the band built a sizeable following.This time, in the wake of their song “Good Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The last proper Ulrich Schnauss album – there have been collaborations and pseudonymous outings since – was going to be hard to top. Goodbye, released in 2007, breathtakingly took shoegazing further out than ever before: although gossamer, its sonic depth inexorably pulled you in. Now, with A Long Way to Fall, the Berlin producer and remixer has finally returned, solo, under his own name. He’s moved on, but is as assured as before.Some of the collaborations between then and now took Schnauss into techno and drum & bass, elements of which cross over into A Long Way to Fall. Initially, the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
A confession: for much of this debut album from London fuzz-pop fivesome The History of Apple Pie, I have little to no idea what vocalist Stephanie Min is on about. Sweet and half-whispered, floating above crunchy bass and tuneful guitar riffage, it’s almost as if her vocals are there for effect rather than having something to say.But it’s not like contemporary pop is underrepresented by sloganeering and cheesy rhyming couplets, and when the music is this good who cares? Ten giddy teenage anthems thudding to earth packed with lust, heartache and the need to dance all night, Out of View is a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hawkwind: Space RitualAlthough it was released 40 years ago, Space Ritual sounds contemporary. Hawkwind’s repetition, simplicity and single-minded focus effectively created trance-inducing mantras. Now, they cast a shadow over Six Organs of Admittance, Om and other voyagers into inner space. Space Ritual was a statement of intent and there’s no excuse not to get this reissue should your life lack one of British art-rock’s supreme achievements.In its original form, Space Ritual was a double album with a spectacular fold-out sleeve designed by the late Barney Bubbles. It was recorded live – it Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Punky young girl needs a middle aged man/ Whose mid-life crisis you began/ …such a work of art…lift up your skirt, let me lick the alphabet/ …what’s under there? I hope to Christ it’s lingerie.” The voice is sinuous, cajoling. The creepy, ridiculously catchy Kate Moss-inspired “Punkyoungirl” immediately grabs the attention on the former dandy highwayman’s first album since 1995. Along with “Stay in the Game”, a spindly, eerie dirge which could have been in Adam and the Ants' repertoire circa 1977/78, it revisits an era when whips were withdrawn from the valise.Adam Ant is the Blueblack Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Aaron Neville’s ache-soaked voice was nourished by the romance of doo-wop tearjerkers and late 1950s black rock’n’roll: the Drifters, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters and other silken-toned purveyors of proto-soul. It’s hardly surprising that he should record an album that recreates the glory of repertoire classics such as “Money Honey”, “Under the Boardwalk", “Bye Bye Baby” and other much-covered hits of an era whose innocence we have definitively left behind.Neville’s signature success, “Tell it Like it Is”, demonstrated how much mid-'60s soul owed to an Read more ...
Graham Fuller
One of the triumphs of the decade so far, Leos Carax’s fifth feature, and his first since 1999’s Pola X, takes the form of a day-long limousine ride around a gloomy Paris. Before it starts, a dreamer (played by Carax himself) breaks through his apartment wall into a cinema and conjures into existence Mr Oscar (Denis Lavant once again playing the director’s alter ego), apparently a business tycoon who sets off in the morning to do his daily work of mastering the universe.He soon casts off that guise. As he’s ferried from appointment to appointment by his elegant lady chauffeur (75-year-old Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There is a distinct art to following up an album that established an artist. Of the many possible paths, perhaps the most astute is delivering a twist on what came before, similar enough to satisfy those that liked it but different enough to seem fresh. Moby, for instance, successfully tweaked the sound of his multi-million-selling Play for the intriguing but accessible 18, whereas The Klaxons fluffed it completely when they followed up the fantastic Myths of the Near Future with what appeared to be a pastiche of it. Esben and the Witch, the gloom-rock trio from Brighton, drew attention with Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Writing about True without naming the elephant in the room was always going to be a challenge, even if the younger Ms Knowles’ next move had built on the more experimental sounds of her earlier work or “Stillness is the Move”, her 2009 collaboration with Dirty Projectors. But then “Losing You” dropped in October, and it just so happened to feature one of the greatest female R&B vocals since, well...The song is a gripping opener to this seven-track mini-album, Solange’s first release on Grizzly Bear’s Terrible imprint. Fusing choppy, tribal beats with an understated vocal performance, the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Like the Will Hay classic Oh! Mr. Porter and the droll BBC miniseries Love on a Branch Line, Charles Crichton’s 1953 Ealing comedy, the first shot in Technicolor, celebrates the English love of rural railways run by unworldly eccentrics in whose hands ancient locomotives are objects of love, and sometimes dangerous weapons. A slight but ineffably charming pipedream, it was both nostalgic for pre-war village life and prophetic of the Beeching railway cuts that slashed branch lines in the mid-1960s, ending a way of life. When a greedy bus company threatens the fictional Titfield Read more ...
peter.quinn
On this debut album for Blue Note, Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter José James effortlessly blends the beat-driven mien of hip-hop, the surprising transitions of jazz and the raw emotion of classic R&B to produce his strongest statement to date. Following three critically acclaimed albums for the Brownswood and Verve labels, James seems to have discovered the key to making the simple resonate.With its oh-so-smooth foundation of bass, Fender Rhodes and tight horn stabs, the single “Trouble” sees him channelling the spirits of Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke. The singer is blessed with the very Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Marianne Faithfull: Broken EnglishIn 1979, there was no obvious place for Marianne Faithfull. Identified with the Sixties and the baggage which came from her relationship with Mick Jagger, she had spent part of the decade living on a wall in Soho, a drug addict with few prospects, a period harrowingly detailed in her autobiography. There was an album in 1976, the humdrum, country flavoured Dreamin’ my Dreams, but punk, surprisingly, offered a life line. She appeared on stage with pop-punkers The Boys and, in 1979, issued the extraordinary Broken English, which sounded of its time yet Read more ...