CDs/DVDs
Katie Colombus
First Aid Kit have grown up and moved on. So says the cheerful conglomeration of lockdown-emergent pop sounds that makes up their fifth studio album.The record has the movement of a road trip around the USA with kitschy Americana, echoes of Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty, folk and acoustic country. It makes you feel as though you’re driving down open highways under warm starry skies with the roof down. But Palomino is actually the first album Swedish sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg have recorded in Sweden since their debut, The Big Black & The Blue 12 years ago.Written during the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Much of Amateurs is observational. “Folk Festival” ponders appearing at said event: is the place on the bill right; would fitting in be easier if the lyric’s subject were a different age? During “Market on the Sand”, it’s wondered while browsing whether there is “something here that is meant just for me”.Amateurs, by Australia’s Laura Jean Englert, feels as if it’s the result of a period of contemplation. The album begins with “Teenage Again”, an acoustic guitar-driven mid-tempo folk-rocker with a Neil Young feel. “When I was 17, my mama couldn’t handle me” are the opening lyrics. Approaching Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In 1970, the coffin of America’s new vampire count travels to his lair in the hills of LA on a pickup truck. A giant billboard for John Wayne in True Grit observes his passage through Hollywood’s urban bustle, as this Gothic monster enters the then modern world.Soon retiring the increasingly cosy familiarity of Hammer’s period-set Dracula series, the two Count Yorga films restored the ferocity of the 1958 original, when Christopher Lee’s lofty aristocratic veneer hid feral violence. They played to a late hippie crowd hip to camp and the put-on, and drive-ins demanding date-squeezing shocks. Read more ...
joe.muggs
There is now a kind of “leftfield mainstream” in electronic music. It’s populated by people a decade or more younger than the original acid house generation, but who take their core inspiration from post-rave experimentation of the early-mid Nineties. Dusky, Bicep and to an extent people like DJ Seinfeld, Four Tet and Jon Hopkins all channel the rich melodies and textures of Future Sound of London, Orbital, early Aphex Twin, Underworld and co to arena-filling effect. And Daniel Avery has been chief among these. Running through his work from the beginning have been tones and Read more ...
Tom Carr
Queens of the Stone Age. The Dead Weather. The Raconteurs. For those who know these bands intimately, Dean Fertita is no stranger. But to those less familiar he might need a little introducing.Fertita has long been a prominent, yet, background figure in the American rock and hard rock scenes. An invaluable member of both QOTSA and The Dead Weather, he has also worked with Iggy Pop, The Kills, Beck amongst many others.Until now he has been content to avoid the spotlight. But the pandemic gave him time to turn his attention to the demos he had built up over the years. The result is Tropical Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The British folk horror wave of the late Sixties and early Seventies wasn’t impervious to American influence. Though Roddy McDowall (1928-98), the director of The Ballad of Tam-Lin (1970), was born in Herne Hill, he was as Hollywood-steeped as its London-based star Ava Gardner.McDowall is best-known as a prolific actor (How Green Was My Valley, The Planet of the Apes films) and photographer than for his only foray into filmmaking. He can't be faulted for dynamism and sensitivity, even if some of the inexperienced actors needed more guidance.The medieval Scottish Border romance Tam Lin (Child Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s a song by Kevin Ayers called “The Lady Rachel”. It was on his 1969 debut solo LP Joy Of A Toy. Play it alongside “This Still Life”, the second track on the second album from Ireland’s Aoife Nessa Frances and the aesthetic kinship is clear. The differing genders of the singer-composers aside, one could swap with the other and snugly fit onto either release.It’s not that the Kerry-recorded Protector sounds like it seeks to recreate the past, but that Frances has a sensibility – whether innate and instinctive or intentional – tapping into a seam of archetypal yet idiosyncratic Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Taylor Swift’s transitions have become imperious, from the woody hush of her collaborations with The National’s Aaron Dessner, Folklore and Evermore, to the remade reclamations of her early work. Working at pace, she has assembled an impregnable coalition of critical acceptance and creative range.Her contemporary country roots remain in her focus on relatable personal stories, pushed now into a hyper-realm of total fame and universally pored-over relationships, dropped like paper trails in her lyrics. She confesses with wry assertion, a female star taking everything in her messy stride. Like Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s now six years since Goat last released an album of new songs and, despite a live disc and one of B-sides and other odds and sods that have appeared in the meantime, its Requiem title suggested that it might have been their last call to arms. However, do not fear, our favourite pagan psychedelicists are back in the ring and on top form with a lively soundtrack that is more than enough to drag even the most dancefloor phobic up on their feet to shake a leg.Yet again, these mysterious mask-wearing Scandinavians defy any easy classification though, taking in 70s funk grooves, Afrobeat Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Witch Fever are a seething punk outfit from Manchester whose debut album rampages at the patriarchy with unbridled fury. The tone throughout is summed up in “Sour”, wherein grimy, gloomy riffin’ is accompanied by oblique references to Christianity, before the whole slams into a chorus of shrieked outrage, “They won’t take no for an answer/As if they ever fucking ask/Yeah, we incite this violence/Nothing ever changed in silence.”Frontperson Amy Walpole draws from her past, growing up in a family that was part of an evangelical sect (the Charismatic Church). Her lyrics take God as the ultimate Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Who could really make head or tail of Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino? It was weird. Interesting, occasionally brilliant, but definitely weird. Now it’s time to almost come back down to earth (but not Sheffield earth, obviously). Alex Turner’s move from LA to Paris has surely levelled things a tad, and the result is a supremely confident, more mature creation with diverse musical references, orchestration by Bridget Samuels and a lot of falsetto.Is it any good? Yes. Is it a return to form? If you’re looking for the bangers of yore, no. It’s not pop, it’s not rock n roll Read more ...
joe.muggs
You’ll want to love Loyle Carner. There’s so much about what he gives and how he delivers it that’s disarming, charming, brilliant even. His lyrics across this album are very obviously from the heart and took real courage to hammer into shape. He talks about his sense of self as he’s struggled to form it in the battlegrounds of race, class, masculinity and nationality, in clear and direct language that leaves you in no doubt that he’s telling the truth. He tells the kind of stories that are all too often completely pushed to the side in UK pop culture by the sellability of the slick brutality Read more ...