CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
In Finland Tarja Turunen is an institution. There, she’s regarded as a kind of heavy rock-flavoured fusion of Sarah Brightman and Maria Carey. She first came to prominence as the multi-octave singer for symphonic metal kingpins Nightwish but, since they rancorously parted ways with her in 2005, she’s still maintained a strong career.This is her third Christmas album. She also did another album all about winter, so she clearly has a thing for this time of year. However, her bombastic cod-classical take is very much an acquired taste.Critiquing Christmas albums is not the same as everyday album Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The regular appearance of Kate Rusby’s folkie Christmas albums have almost become a Yuletide tradition in themselves at this time of the year. 2023’s Light Years being, somewhat incredibly, the seventh in the series.Festive albums are generally, of course, planted in the family friendly end of things – unless an artist really wants to make a statement – and Kate’s wintery discs stick firmly to the programme. There’s definitely nothing snarky or Grinch-like here and even “Arrest These Merry Gentlemen” is more a case of light humour than “Bah Humbug!”. Not that this particularly marks Light Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This six-track EP on Verve/UMG brings the breakthrough year of 2023 for Samara Joy to a neat close. In February she won two Grammys, as Best New Artist and Best Jazz Vocal Album for “Linger Awhile”. In July she was Downbeat’s Critics’ Poll’s Rising Star Female Vocalist of the Year and Rising Star Artist of the Year. And just a couple of weeks ago she passed the mighty age of… 24.The first four tracks do exactly what the press release states so comfortingly. We hear “an extension of her latest album”, recorded at Sear Sound in NYC and with Matt Pierson again as producer. The opener is “Warm in Read more ...
Katie Colombus
I honestly never thought I'd add a Cher song to my painstakingly curated Christmas Spotify playlist. But after listening to the ultimate diva's new album entitled simply, Christmas, as we decorate the tree (much to my children's chagrin – they'd much rather it be Sia's Every Day Is Christmas), "DJ Play A Christmas Song" slides its way onto the end like a Baileys on ice.It's a kitsch, disco-synth dancefloor banger with a rampant, bauble-swinging beat, in which Cher merrily belts out "I want to be dancing all night long" that is sure to melt away all seasonal affective blues. " Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The cat in the hat with the mellifluous voice delivers his Christmas Wish for the festive season, his first Christmas album, and it sounds more or less as you would imagine it – tasteful, discreet, soulful, reined in, but richly expressive, and celebrating the spirit of a sharing, caring Christmas.It comes with some fine orchestral settings arranged by album producer Troy Miller, recording with the Kingdom Orchestra at Abbey Road, while Porter and his excellent band – pianist Chip Crawford, bassist Jahmal Nichols, drummer Emmanuel Harrold, saxophonist Tivon Pennicott and Ondre Pivec on Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Boxing Day release of Michael Mann’s first feature in eight years, Ferrari, finally follows up Blackhat, a Chris Hemsworth-starring cyber-thriller dismissed on its 2015 release in a manner he hadn’t experienced since The Keep (1983). This two-disc, 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray Arrow release reveals many memorable virtues, alongside surprising inertia and superficiality.Blackhat applies Mann’s great film intelligence and capacity for research to early cyber-crime, gleaning the apocalyptic consequences of malignant zeroes and ones. Rendering a keyboard transparent so he can shoot its hammering Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Down memory lane, taking us back some six decades to the Buffalo Springfield, the latest Neil Young album's almost 50 minutes of continuous music, each song segueing into the next.“Songs from my life, recently recorded, create a music montage with no beginnings or endings,” Young has stated. “The feeling is captured, not in pieces, but as a whole piece, designed to be listened to that way… This music presentation defies shuffling, digital organisation, separation. Only for listening. That says it all.”Well, that’s the idea at least. Getting up from the sofa to move the tone arm was always a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The realisation that Shirley Hurt is the name assumed by Canada’s Sophia Ruby Katz for recording helps explain why her debut album is so oblique. As well as the cloaked identity, what seem initially to be direct songs cleaving to familiar musical forms have winding structures which don’t end up where they seem to be heading. Similarly, the lyrics are tough to parse.Take “Problem Child.” Beginning in a vaguely Rickie Lee Jones manner, its jazzy undertone is bolstered by minimal, shuffling drums. Then, there’s some equally muted and unexpected “Do you Know the Way to San Jose” trumpet-like Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Ghost Woman’s 2022 self-titled album and this January’s swift follow-up Anne, If were both fairly laidback and spaced out affairs, with echoes of Beak’s free form motorik grooves and the Byrds’ pastoral psychedelia. Now that multi-instrumentalist Evan Üschenko has recruited the forceful percussion of Ille van Dessel to gang, however, their third album in 18 months, Hindsight Is 50/50 presents a considerably heavier prospect.In fact, with the duo seemingly taking pointers from Spacemen 3’s superlative monster trip soundtracks on the head-spinning trance of “Alright Alright”, it might well be Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A deathless trend in pop is taking great songs, slowing them down, doing orchestral versions, or rendering them raw acoustic. This, ostensibly, reveals their genius and/or brings them a new audience. Rarely, it can work, as on Johnny Cash’s final albums, but usually it simply renders sonic perfection as bland, naff slop. Such is the case with Trevor Horn’s latest.Horn is a great and visionary pop producer. He’s also performed in bands, notably his breakthrough group Buggles and prog behemoths Yes. In 2019 he released Reimagines the Eighties, which featured star singers on hits of the relevant Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Some 28 years in gestation, Peter Gabriel’s eighth studio album of wholly original songs – his first since 2002’s Up – will delight his fans and top the charts. Gabriel’s best instrument remains his voice, that husky marvel, which is at its most resonantly tender, vulnerable, and intimate here.Gabriel has always been a humanitarian, earth-friendly artist, but on my initial listenings to I/O – overly tasteful and scarcely risk-taking in its immaculate production, songwriting, and autumnal sentiments, a clear sign of mellowing – I missed the bite and foreboding that shaped much of the music on Read more ...
Graham Fuller
British anti-war films inspired by “the war that” failed “to end all wars” include Oh! What a Lovely War, The Return of the Soldier, A Month in the Country, Regeneration, Mrs Dalloway, The Trench, Testament of Youth, the different versions of Journey’s End, and Terence Davies’s haunting swansong Benediction. For simplicity of form and style in rendering the pity of war – and the war waged by officers on their men – none improves on King and Country (1964).Joseph Losey’s desolating film, which stars Dirk Bogarde and Tom Courtenay at the peak of their powers, is set in a rat-infested British Read more ...