CDs/DVDs
Liz Thomson
Having moved out of her mother’s apartment aged 15 to become “an emancipated minor” and set up her own record label, Righteous Babe, just four years later, every step of Ani DiFranco’s life has been determinedly – some might say ferociously – independent. Alt-folk, alt-rock – the labels don’t matter. What counts is her commitment and steadfastness during the course of a career that’s seen her on the righteous side of so many battles, in the US and beyond. She raised $47,500 to enable New Orleans musicians to replace their lost instruments after Hurricane Katrina. She’s worked with the Guthrie Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Anniversary is Canadian singer-songwriter Abigail Lapell’s sixth album (if we include last year’s lengthy EP of lullabies). Her success has not reached much beyond her native land, as is often the way with Canadian acts, but she’s a proven talent, one who deserves a higher international profile. Anniversary consists of 11 poetic folk-country meditations on love. However, anyone seeking musical representations of euphoria, joy and lust should look elsewhere for, lovely as it often is, the default setting here is a rich melancholia.The album is co-produced by her countryman Tony Dekker, of Read more ...
joe.muggs
The buildup to this album offered quite a bit of hope. The promo blurb with it talks about “cutting loose, trying new things… hark[ing] back to their gritty origins… freed from any expectations.” Most glaringly, it says it’s “the album the band says they’ve always wanted to make” – perhaps, along with the plaintive album title, a tacit admission that their heart hasn’t really been in the modern day AOR they’ve been pumping out every since the strained “woah-woahs” (“millennial whoops”) of “Use Somebody” and “Sex on Fire” blasted them into the mainstream in 2008.The thing is, the Nashville Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Bab L’Bluz are a French-Moroccan four-piece that play a tasty blend of fiery psychedelic rock backed up with hypnotic North African gnawa rhythms. Featuring electric awisha lute, guembri, percussion and castanet-like qraqeb rather than more mainstream instruments, they tackle subjects like gender inequality and call for unity and tolerance – while getting hips swinging and feet stomping in a frenzied groove.Swaken is Bab L’Bluz’s second album and features Yousra Mansour’s emotive vocals and riff-heavy awisha lute backed by a giddy trance-rock sound that owes as much to Led Zeppelin’s heavy Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Pokey LaFarge has always defied categorisation. He likened his 2020 album Rock Bottom Rhapsody to a mix tape, with elements of bluegrass, barrelhouse, doo-wop, jazz, rockabilly, country blues, the great American songbook and even hints of movie music. In the Blossom of Their Shade, his lockdown album, was an exhilarating ride in the ghostly company of the likes of Hank Williams, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers.In the three years since Blossom was released, LaFarge has decamped to Maine where he worked long days on a farm. “I’d be pushing a plow [sic] or Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Parentheses, I is an album title – (I) – that’s a hieroglyph of the self, the brackets like shields facing opposite ways; and as an artist and performer, Josienne Clarke knows how to use a shield, and how to use a sword, too.In her albums, especially her recent trio of solo releases, she has taken up arms to redefined her self as an artist, a female singer-songwriter and a woman extricating herself from a duo partnership that may have brought her a BBC Folk Award, but seemed to have brought her to her knees, too. But that was then. Her current standing is to be among the most Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album has a lot to live up to. Its predecessor Future Nostalgia came along just as the Covid crisis was properly kicking into gear, and it became, in its way, era defining. As we said at the time, it was “the sound of a musician finding their own voice and revelling in it”: Lipa hitting a groove as a very charming avatar of disco/house glitterball vibes, just at the point we most needed them in our lives. Though she was no obscurity before, it catapulted her into the megastar firmament, with its singles achieving streams in the billions, and its status as a classic Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Sia has well and truly stepped into her power. Gone are the days of releasing songs that were pitched to megastars but turned down (“This Is Acting”), or hiding behind collaborations and Christmas albums.In her first solo album for eight years, the Australian singer-songwriter is explicitly telling us “this time I won’t run – I wanna be known” in a song titled, “Wanna Be Known” to really land the point.Here are 15 songs of soaring notes, bonkers lyrics, intensely technical yet mellifluous vocal skills, butt-shaking beats and unforgettable melodies. Partnered with this, is Sia’s songwriting Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Skirting along the peripheries of doom metal, unbeknownst to almost everyone, there existed a band called Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard. Hailing from Wrexham, Wales, they created four albums that stand alone in their originality, combining massively bonged-out sludge-riffing with Cocteau-Twins-ish vocalising and Seventies space rock vibes.They sounded magnificently like no-one else. Now their lead singer, Jessica Ball, reappears with her new band, EYE. The good news is that they righteously match and expand on what came before. MWWB, as their name was eventually abbreviated to, are now on Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Isabelle (Eva Green) leans over, her long hair catches fire from a candle, and Matthew (Michael Pitt) devotedly snuffs it out. She doesn’t miss a beat at this real-life accident, consumed already by The Dreamers’ closed world of a Left Bank apartment in May ’68, where sexual transgression stands for the barricades and baton charges outside.Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaptation of Gilbert Adair’s novel The Holy Innocents emphasises straight over gay sex, and further infuses it with cinephilia. Naïve American Matthew, bee-stung lips pursed and head tilted towards adventure, crosses the Seine to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Lemon Twigs aren’t shy about telegraphing their inspirations. A Dream is all we Know, their swift follow-up to last May’s Everything Harmony, is stuffed with references. “Sweet Vibration” is rooted in The Left Banke’s “She May Call You up Tonight.” “In the Eyes of the Girl” draws from The Beach Boys’s “Girls on the Beach.” Album opener “My Golden Years” nods to second album Big Star. Todd Rundgren looms large over the album’s title track.Brian and Michael D’Addario’s bold fifth album needs, though, to have more going for it than good taste and evidence for a cool record collection to make Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Justice are a couple of super-suave rock star analogues. Leathers and aviators, yes, but with a very Parisian insouciance. Their music is the same. It has a rocker-friendly je-ne-sais-quoi, but air-brushed with the glitzy sci-fi futurism one might expect from a couple of guys whose origins lie in design. Their new album, their fourth and first in a leisurely eight years, retains their usual slightly-gnarly-but-smartly-turned-out vibe, but reaches towards new and entertaining musical directions.Justice blew up with Noughties monster remix “We Are Your Friends”, then rode the proto-EDM wave, Read more ...