CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
On Tell Tales's opening cut, The Cornshed Sisters declare “If bombs were love, then you could call mine Dresden”. Their debut is allusive, with literary leanings. But the emphasis on the words doesn’t drown out the music, a slinky confection that’s not too far down the road from Dory Previn, Tom Rush, Kate and Anna McGarrigle and even Brian Protheroe.Tell Tales isn’t folk – it’s a folk-influenced singer-songwriter album with a distinct whiff of 1972 to 1975. Sunderland’s Liz Corney, Marie Nixon, Jennie Redmond and Cath Stephens harmonise like a dream and have more on their mind than the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Richard Norris has been mucking about making strange noises and joining the dots (and sometime microdots) in electronic dance music’s shadowy regions for 25 years. He's had multiple incarnations, from NME writer to creator of proto-acid house with Psychic TV’s Genesis P Orridge (on the 1988 M.E.S.H. single and Jack The Tab album). He was one half of The Grid (with Soft Cell’s Dave Ball) and is one half of Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve (with DJ Erol Alkan); he also worked with Joe Strummer, not to mention having some part in the whole narcotic band-gang messiness that resulted in Screamadelica. Read more ...
howard.male
With the subject of the legitimacy of the label “world music” having just had another airing in The Guardian, it seems fitting that Mali’s favourite musical couple should be releasing their least “world music” album to date. For essentially, Folila (which translates as "music" in Bambara) is a blues/rock album. Yes there’s an occasional appearance of a politely plucked kora between blasts of distorted electric guitar, or the distant patter of African percussion discernable behind the workman-like rock drumming, but they seem almost like a token nod towards their roots when measured Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Alright, I admit it - I fell halfway in love with multi-instrumentalist Laura Kidd, the London-based artist known as She Makes War, from the first time I met her heavily made up panda eyes in the Groundhog Day-esque horror video for “Exit Strategy”. It’s not quite a title track, as the only little battles Kidd is fighting are the ones that punctuate the wrong sort of relationship’s implosion, but as a stage-setter it’ll do nicely.Be it the stage make-up, the pseudonym or the titles like “Minefield” and “Shields and Daggers”, there’s an edge to Kidd’s music; defensive layers built up around a Read more ...
peter.quinn
This fourth album from Scandinavian/British jazz trio Phronesis is the follow-up to their much-lauded 2010 release Alive, chosen as 'Jazz Album of the Year' by both Jazzwise and MOJO magazines. It's also the first in which all three of its members – Danish bassist Jasper Høiby, British pianist Ivo Neame and Swedish drummer Anton Eger – contribute to the writing and arranging duties. And it's all the richer for it.The album opener and title track is a typically Høibyesque creation, beginning with a pointillistic riff that gets tapped out, Morse code style, by all three players before it Read more ...
theartsdesk
Biz Markie: The Biz Never SleepsJoe MuggsThere are plenty who talk about hip hop's “golden age” as being circa mid-1980s to mid-1990s. This tends to be done out of snobbery or nostalgia and ignores all kinds of incredible musical developments that have taken place since. However, while this 1989 album is playing it's extraordinarily easy to get sucked into feeling like it is as good as it got. It's such a good-natured, infectiously joyful and straight-up funky gem, you may very well find yourself wondering why all rap albums can't be like The Biz Never Sleeps.Biz Markie is possibly the most Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Not sure about the title. Is it inspired by the place Graham Coxon used to finish up in each night during his drinking years? Not sure about the cover. Who wants to see a scabby knee? But there are no quibbles about the music. While Damon Albarn continues to scour the global undergrowth for inspiration like a musicological David Bellamy, Graham Coxon goes back to scratchy alt-punk, lobbing in some alto sax jazz noodling for good measure.Things kick off briskly, with the itchy "Advice" reflecting on boredom past: ”I wrote a new song while I was touring/ Man it was no fun, totally boring”. Read more ...
graham.rickson
De Falla: Nights in the Gardens of Spain, The Three-Cornered Hat, Homenajes Jean-Efflaum Bavouzet (piano), Raquel Lojendio (soprano), BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena (Chandos)Spanish conductor Juanjo Mena has recently succeeded Gianandra Noseda as the BBC Philharmonic’s principal conductor. You trust that the choice of repertoire on this release was driven by Mena himself, and this disc has loads to commend it – playing of real verve, and the more-than-decent acoustic of the BBC’s much-maligned Media City in Salford. The Three-Cornered Hat isn’t heard enough in its complete form; Mena’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In 2009 Orbital returned too soon. Dance music icons Paul and Phil Hartnoll only called it a day a little over four years previously so it was hardly a magnificent comeback. The resulting live shows smelt more of tax bills than art. Fair enough, we all have to live, but it was a shame to see such a great creative pairing fizzle rather than shine.Orbital ruled dance music throughout the Nineties. Their self-titled “brown” album remains an all-time great and the decade’s other four albums were also astonishing, even beautiful - lush listening music that turned into a driven foot-moving sonic Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not hugely to the advantage of Hugo that its release on disc opens with a trailer for The Artist. The two homages to cinema’s silent age slugged it out for supremacy at this year’s Academy Awards. Where Martin Scorsese’s first foray into both 3D and children’s narrative justly cleaned up in all the technical categories, on the small screen there is less disguising the frailties of a redemptive story adapted from Brian Selznick’s breezeblock novel.Hugo Cabret’s clockwork lair remains a sumptuous visual treat, as is the bustling world of the Parisian station whose timepieces he Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Before I came to what I was surprised to discover is a fifth album from hard-rock six-piece Lostprophets, there were two things I knew about the band: firstly, that they are Welsh; and secondly, that they showed up in magazines like Kerrang! a lot back when I was in high school.Alternative rock in the 1990s wasn’t well known for either its staying power or its crossover appeal, so for a band to still be filling mid-sized venues 15 years on they must be getting by on more than tattoos, skateboards-as-accessories and misguided rap interludes (although I’d maybe steer clear of track seven). At Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The 1972 Jethro Tull opus Thick as a Brick was offered by Ian Anderson as a parody of progressive rock concept albums. Its sub-Pythonesque packaging proclaimed the record’s lyrics to be an epic poem composed by an eight-year-old swot, Gerald Bostock, who was disqualified from winning a literary prize after swearing during a BBC interview. Anderson talks up the jape to this day, neglecting the Oedipal struggle central to the album’s opaque narrative, its layered, intricate musical motifs, and its cinematic sweep. Never given its critical due, Thick ranks beside its predecessor, Aqualung, as a Read more ...