CDs/DVDs
joe.muggs
What a time to be alive it is for fans of late Eighties, early Nineties indie – the proverbial 6 Music Dads – with so many of the best acts from the era on the form of their lives. Even in just the last year we’re spoilt for choice of quality albums by those who’ve kept on keeping on (J Mascis, Kristin Hersh), those who’ve come back but sound like they never went away (Slowdive), and those returned and completely revivified (The Jesus And Mary Chain). It’s into this latter category that Ride fit. The Oxford band reformed in 2014 and since then have made three albums with Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
Sum 41 honour their 27-year career with Heaven :x: Hell, a 20-track double album, due to be their final, without a single skip. Harking back to their widely acclaimed debut All Killer No Filler, the album that gave us “Fat Lip” and “In Too Deep”, the band have maintained their commitment to making every track count with Heaven :x: Hell.“Waiting On a Twist of Fate” opens Heaven with as much energy as you can cram into 2 minutes and 46 seconds, and the early-2000s Pop Punk summer nostalgia does not falter in the 19 tracks that follow. Although Hell aims to dive deeper into heavy metal than Pop Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Faith and damnation frequently collide in Abel Ferrara’s films, drawing fiery performances from often starry casts. The New York master who made The Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant now lives in Rome and, like his Pasolini, Padre Pio is a political period film set in his adopted land.With some chronological sleight of hand, Ferrara splices the life of the titular Franciscan priest, a mystic visionary eventually beatified for receiving the stigmata in 1918, and the October 14 1920 massacre of San Giovanni Rotondo, where 14 villagers protesting landowners’ overturning of their first free Read more ...
Guy Oddy
During the mid to late 90s, Sheryl Crow and other grunge lite-friendly female artists like Alanis Morrisette were all over the airwaves. Sheryl’s particular schtick being a soft rock stew of pop/country/folk that threw up monster hits like “All I Wanna Do”, “If It Makes You Happy” and “Everyday is a Winding Road”.Thirty-odd years on and Sheryl seems to have been relatively quiet for some considerable time. So, it is something of a surprise to hear that Evolution is her 12th album and in 2023, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But then, she had announced that her previous Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hey Panda is unlike any previous High Llamas album. While the characteristic traces of late Sixties and early Seventies Beach Boys, Van Dyke Parks and Steely Dan are here, they have become melded with a sensibility lead-Llama Sean O’Hagan has absorbed from multifaceted US hip hop producer J Dilla – whose approach to rhythm and song structure rewrote standard linear templates.In the promotional material for the first High Llamas album – the title comes from a panda seen on TikTok during the coronavirus pandemic – in eight years, O’Hagan is quoted saying “when I heard J Dilla in the early 2000s Read more ...
Cheri Amour
Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield never set out to play country music. In her teens, she performed in a high school power pop band, The Ackleys, alongside her twin sister Allison. A few years later, the siblings formed PS Elliot, a riot grrrl group. They even nabbed a support slot with explosive punks Ceremony in their hometown of Birmingham, Alabama (ruffling a lot of feathers in the hardcore scene at the time).But more recently, Katie Crutchfield has been leaning into the country thing. In 2017, she toured solo with her partner and Kansas City troubadour Kevin Morby. Heading out onto the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Jim and William Reid’s musical trajectory has been extraordinary. They started out by out-punking punk with terrifying noise barrages and wilfully clumsy three-chord thrashing, but quickly revealed a deep love of classic pop song structures which became ever clearer as they sonically mellowed in the early stages of their career.From there, in the early 90s, they managed to catch a wave as elder statesmen of alternative rock – but suffered from creative and personal diminishing returns, eventually acrimoniously breaking up at the end of the decade. They reconciled in 2005 and very Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beautiful Thing’s opening scene plays out like a sweary take on Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl, Meera Syal’s potty-mouthed PE teacher lambasting her Year 11 pupils with language that would now have her hauled up in front of a professional conduct panel.Originally a stage play, writer Jonathan Harvey’s screenplay drew upon his own experiences as an English teacher in South East London, and the banter, as funny as it’s cruel, struck me as painfully accurate. 1996 seems like another world – a time when Clause 28 forbade local authorities from "promoting" homosexuality, and the age of consent for Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
On this, their 10th album, the melodious Mancunians started at the drum kit and built from there. This is no bad thing. The overall effect is wide-ranging, surprising and altogether more uplifting than either the delicious despairing Giants of All Sizes (2019) or gentle, soulful Flying Dream 1 (2021).We kick off with “Things I’ve Been Telling Myself For Years”, (for instance, “Of course I’ll live to 96 and fix the welfare state”) a self-deprecating piece of analysis that packs in the influences without ever being derivative. As Garvey puts it, “We referenced The Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Julia Holter has created a long line of albums that trade on sophisticated poetry, both lyrical and musical, and her latest, perhaps the most adventurous of all, inhabits a world where nothing is certain, narratives are disjointed, and the imagination of the listener is left to run free.Los Angeles, so grounded in showbiz commerce, is also the city of angels, and the place where dreams can be transformed into reality. Perhaps not surprising that the city should often produce music – from the warm embrace of dream pop to the edgy experimentalism of avant-garde experiment – that has the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Some icons sit back and bask. Kim Gordon does not. She has occasionally intimated that her New York cool and relentless work rate may be down to a smidgeon of imposter syndrome, even after all her years on the frontline. Whatever the truth of it, her output since Sonic Youth (and her marriage) dissolved in 2011 has been prodigious. It’s ranged from new band projects Body/Head and Glitterbust, to film roles, to art exhibitions, and more. But perhaps most dynamic are her solo albums with producer Justin Raisen, of which this is the second. The Collective successfully continues their journey Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Just as it’s not the best idea to judge a book by its cover, it’s also not advisable to judge an album by its insipid title. Led Zeppelin IV and Leonard Cohen’s Ten New Songs being obvious cases in point.To the list of uninspired album titles which hide a fine bunch of songs, we can now add the most recent disc by the Dandy Warhols. For within the grooves of Rockmaker, there is a cracking collection of lively and snarky Power Pop tunes. There are also a stella group of mates on board, including Slash, Black Francis and everybody’s favourite American Nan, Debbie Harry, who clearly aren’t just Read more ...