CDs/DVDs
Liz Thomson
Shania Twain describes her sixth studio album as “a song of gratitude and appreciation. I was inspired that I still had air in my lungs” – and it certainly is a hi-energy affair, a long way from The Woman in Me, the sophomore outing that established her as “the queen of country-pop”. Twain’s come a long way from the mining and lumbering towns of her Ontario childhood – literally and metaphorically, for home is now on Lake Geneva.It's surprising to pause and consider that she’s made so big an impact with so few albums over almost 30 years, though of course Twain has also been busy with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Waeve is the debut album from life partners Rose Elinor Dougall (long ago in The Pipettes) and Graham Coxon (of Blur), working with James Ford (of Simian Mobile Disco), who co-produces and provides occasional bits of instrumentation. Their album is a woozy thing, underpinned with analogue synths and elegant Krautrockin’ rhythms, emanating a mystic melancholia. The sound is luscious but the whole could maybe do with a little more oomph.Perhaps that’s not the point. Perhaps this listener’s opinion has been skewed by expectations based on the garage sneer of their great debut single, last Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lisa O’Neill is a part of the new wave of Irish contemporary folk artists, one that encompasses the likes of Lankum, Ye Vagabonds and John Francis Flynn, all of them putting their albums out on Rough Trade, which makes the venerable English Indie label something of a centre for what the present and future of Irish folk music sounds like. (Lankum’s Radie Peat and O’Neill have also sung together, on the excellent “Factory Girl”, part of the showcase This Ain’t No Disco.)All of This Is Chance is O’Neill’s first release through Rough Trade, and her fourth album since the self-released Has An Read more ...
graham.rickson
Watching these harrowing films in rapid succession allows us to watch a great director’s confidence develop at close hand; though 1955’s A Generation (Pokolenie) is an impressive debut for a 27-year old director, both Kanał (1957) and 1958’s Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament) really show Wajda’s technique taking flight.The three films are thematically linked but don’t share any characters, tracing life in Nazi-occupied Poland from 1942 until the end of the European conflict in 1945. The opening sequence of A Generation shows a bombed-out Warsaw slum. Tadeusz Łomnicki’s teenage anti-hero Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Reflections on how the past relates to now suffuse The Candle and the Flame. The album’s closing track is “When I Was a Young Man.” When he was 21, sings Robert Forster, “I wrote songs, I was unsung, unheralded and undone”. His figurative brothers David and Lou showed him the way. Now in his mid-Sixties, he has a considerable artistic inventory to look back on. Including The Go-Betweens, solo albums, his writing. Messrs Bowie and Reed would be proud of what they helped initiate.However, this is not the source of such retrospection. The Candle and the Flame’s opener “She’s a Fighter” lays it Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A Short Diary, a duo album for piano and drums, contains music of astonishing directness, calm and concentration. The story of how it came into being is fascinating, but it also stands on its own as pure music of luminous quality, and is bound to be in quite a few year-end lists.The full title is “a short diary (of loss)”. Drummer Sebastian Rochford found consolation after the death of his father, the Aberdeen poet Gerard Rochford (1932-2019) in writing music. He has said: “music just seemed to come to me, sing inside me every, day, sometimes even as I woke.” The album is dedicated to the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ambient is everywhere now. After a quiet (lol) 2000s, when it rather disappeared into the cracks, perhaps tarred with the sense that the more cosmic sides of the Nineties rave experience were passé, beatless music steadily rose in profile through the 2010s – aided by the rise of “post-classical”, increased accustomisation to home cinema and immersive gaming soundtracks, the wellness movement. Finally came lockdown isolation and a slew of former dance artists finding they’d always had an ambient side, and we reach the point where you can’t move for pulses, throbs and audio floatation.Formerly Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Let me start by being pretentious and self-referential, spending ages doing that rather than reviewing the album. My theory is that most male music journalists aged between 45-65, like me, don’t PROPERLY love the music of 21st century female pop stars – Gaga, Dua Lipa, Beyoncé, Britney, MØ, Kesha, whoever – for reasons that are idiomatic. In fact, possibly most males of that age, full stop (and a good few women too).They cannot get beyond the form, beyond timbre, beyond cultural notions of authenticity or lack of it connected to the innate sound, rather than the song. If the same song Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
I can’t help enjoying the continuing elevation of the jazz pianist Oscar Peterson (1925-2007) to national monument status in Canada. A park or a square here (Montreal), a boulevard there (Mississauga), a school, a concert hall, a statue, a commemorative one-dollar coin. Now Barry Avrich’s 2021 documentary Oscar Peterson: Black + White, which is being released on DVD.It tells Peterson's story well. A wide range of archival footage, notably several interviews with the pianist, has been trawled, carefully assembled, and juxtaposed with new interviews and specially commissioned Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Velvet Underground’s music is hardly heard for 45 minutes in Todd Haynes’ film on the band. The director’s debut documentary instead sinks deep into the early Sixties New York underground culture they rose from. It is as much a loving tribute to the cinema of Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol as the songs of Lou Reed and John Cale.A premonitory, violent sliver of Cale’s “Venus In Furs” viola jolts the titles, then Haynes splits screens like Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, paralleling his Sixties screen test portraits of Reed (high-strung stillness) and Cale (sensuous) with imagery signifying their Read more ...
Guy Oddy
During the late Seventies and early Eighties, Robin Dallaway was one of the prime movers behind both dada punks the Cravats and art-pop weirdos the Very Things. His new outfit, Silverlake are ploughing a distinctly different furrow though – one that has more in common with Kylie’s more sophisticated disco tunes and dreamy trip hop grooves than anything of his previous outings in fact.Drawing from a similar well as Saint Etienne, when they are at their best, Jim Rockford’s Smile brings psychedelic soul, disco and luscious poppy sounds into play and is far more concerned with encouraging hips Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Rock'n'roll rejuvenators, Eurovision winners with more of their songs streamed online than there are people in the world, the glammy young Roman rockers have opened for The Stones in Las Vegas, delivered a city-stopping sold-out show at Rome’s historic Circus Maximus and been hailed as “America’s New Favorite Rock Band,” in the Los Angeles Times. They recorded a lovely interpretation of Elvis’s late-Sixties hit “If I Can Dream” for Baz Luhrmann last summer, and their raucous, gritty, upbeat and confrontational third album, emerging from that audience explosion of the past year or two, is a Read more ...