CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
It’s been five years since the release of Malian musician and actor Fatoumata Diawara’s breakout album, Fento, and just short of a year since her magnificent headline appearance on the first day of 2022’s Womad Festival. So, it is with some anticipation that her star-studied follow-up has finally appeared – as expected though, it is an absolute peach. Contributions from Damon Albarn (who also produced half of the tunes here), Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca, Ghanaian rapper M.anifest, Angie Stone and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, to only name a few of her collaborators, result in a set Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
When is the right moment for a musician to step out of the shadows and release an album in her/his own name? Vicente Archer, one of the most in-demand NYC bassists around, has certainly taken his time. In his late forties, and with appearances on over 150 albums by others to his name, he explains: “I wanted to find something that’s more myself.” Short Stories will be released on the Canadian Cellar Live label. Bassist Archer grew up in upstate New York. His first instrument was the guitar, both in a teenage rock band, and sitting as a local jazz gig which happened to include Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In Mark Jenkin’s haunted Cornwall, time warps and bends. He is a child of Nic Roeg’s Seventies masterworks (Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth), whose kaleidoscopic slivering of time expressed an elliptical, sensual mind. Jenkin too has built his own time and space with self-described “seemingly crazy” antique techniques, limiting him to clockwork, 16mm film and post-synch sound.In this follow-up to his debut, Bait, a ship sunk in 1897's flotsam bobs into 1973, premonitory of a new sinking, remembered on a crackling radio report from now. The otherwise Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On Brian Christinzio’s sixth album as BC Camplight, he wants listeners to know about his recent experiences and their effect on him. Herewith, a mostly unembroidered account of how he sees things. When allusiveness arrives, the metaphors are easy to interpret. The last three tracks are titled “Going Out on a Low Note”, “I'm Ugly” and “The Mourning”.The Last Rotation of Earth follows-up 2020’s Shortly After Takeoff. That also drew from his then-recent past: being removed by immigration authorities from his adopted home of Manchester – he’s from Philadelphia; his father’s death, and the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
New Orleans “is not a music business city, it’s a music culture city,” says David Shaw of The Revivalists, one of the interviewees in Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story.This documentary sets out to describe that multiracial culture and heritage through the particular prism of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, known as “Jazz Fest”, which is held on the last weekend in April and the first weekend in May. It had a celebratory fiftieth anniversary edition in 2019 before being forced to close for two years by the pandemic.The film does a good job of explaining the festival’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Some rock bands base their career around being musically fluid, an ever-changing what-will-they-do-next? conundrum. Others, such as, famously, Motörhead and The Ramones, simply go on doing their thing, honing it, repeating ad infinitum, with an almost zen devotion. The results, at their best, are vigorously on-point.It’s not only rock bands, though. Some of those swept up in the 1990s rave-olution also knuckled down, stuck to the cause, purposefully focused. One such is Steve Mac and his new album combines aspects of old and contemporary production to salute the history and ongoing potency of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Aaron Jerome has always cut his own path through British music. After a few jazzy, groovy experiments under his own name in the 00s, he came dramatically to prominence at the end of that decade as SBTRKT. He was always associated with the post-dubstep moment where the UK bass subcultures of dubstep and grime folded back into house and techno, launching big names like Hessle Audio and Disclosure – but in fact he didn’t quite fit there.There was always something a bit restless about his music. As a British Asian producer coming to fame working with a Black singer (Sampha) yet making music that Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Those kooky ex-child-actors from Long Island are back again, all flares and mullets. And they’ve got something to tempt us. What kind of musical cake might you expect to savour if you mixed a little bit Simon and Garfunkel, a soupçon of Fleet Foxes, a dash of Bread, the occasional smattering of the Everly Brothers, a twist of Beach Boys and a dollop of the Carpenters? A Lemon (Drizzle) Twigs cake, that’s what. And it’s a bit sickly sweet.Deeply unfashionable as that concoction might sound, it doesn’t quite close the cool/not-cool circle as they’d probably hoped. The trouble is that it simply Read more ...
graham.rickson
I can still (just) remember Saturday morning cinema being a thing, only because my big brother was old enough to attend weekly sessions at the local ABC and I was too young to go. He would presumably have watched several of the films in this latest BFI collection, all produced by the Children’s Film Foundation.This state institution produced 55-minute features designed for Saturday screenings from 1950 up until the late 1980s, when dwindling audiences and the popularity of Tiswas rendered it obsolete. Funding came from the Eady Levy, a 5% tax on box office receipts intended to support Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Reuniting with Russ Titelman, the producer of her eponymous 1979 debut and its follow-up 1981’s Pirates, Rickie Lee Jones approaches the great American songbook as if she was reuniting with an old flame, the thrill of it smouldering and concentrating itself in 10 elegant, soulful jazz-blues performances. These Pieces of Treasure open with the shimmering vibes of “Just in Time”, takes in a very different realisation of “Nature Boy”, a languid version of “One for My Baby” that burns the midnight oil, and closes up shop with a walk on “The Sunny Side of the Street” and “It’s All in the Game Read more ...
peter.quinn
The seed for this wonderful third album on ACT from the Vancouver-born vocalist, pianist and songwriter Laila Biali was first sown in 2013 when, in advance of a gig in the Canadian port city of Hamilton, she opened up the floor and asked fans what songs they’d like to hear her sing. Cue a deluge of requests.A trio of these suggestions – beautiful reharmonisations of Coldplay’s “Yellow” and David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”, plus a ruminative take on Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today” – ended up on Biali’s impressive 12-song, self-titled ACT debut released in 2018, for which she Read more ...
joe.muggs
“If you’re going to do it, do it well” goes a chanted refrain in the opening title track here. And it’s words Jessie Ware clearly lives by – she is not someone who has time to do anything rubbish. From featuring on the cream of post-dubstep electronic dance production circa 2010 (SBTRKT, Joker, Disclosure), through creating a gorgeously brooding Eighties flavoured hinterland on her Mercury Prize nominated debut album Devotion, all the way to creating one of the brightest rays of sunshine during the Covid weirdness of 2020 with a magical video for her Rotary Connection indebted single “ Read more ...