CDs/DVDs
Barney Harsent
You’d be within your rights to imagine that Direction of the Heart, the follow-up to 2018’s patchy-but-decent Walk Between Worlds, would see the Simple Minds twin engine of Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill pull on billowing white shirts and head for the nearest massive windswept stadium, filling it to the brim with widescreen synths, anthemic singalong choruses and a staggering extravagance of emotion.And you’d be about right. After all, when you get to album number 18, no one’s expecting a volte-face, and no one particularly wants one either. Similarly, however, no one expects a classic. So it Read more ...
Mark_Kidel
The release of each box-set in the BFI’s Blu-ray four-volume collection of Ingmar Bergman films is a delight. Volume 3 provides some of the Swedish master’s essential works.Most of them are as dark as they come. The Scandi Noir that has flooded our screens in the last few years is black in its own way, and despair is seldom absent from it, but "Bergman noir" is something else. Relentlessly – and the eight films in this set, from The Virgin Spring (1960) to The Silence (1963), from Through a Glass Darkly (1961) to Persona (1966), are equally relentless Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There are many reasons that I am obsessed with Florence Shaw. It's not just that as a long time sufferer of Resting-Bitch-Face I identify hard with her deadpan nonchalance, it's also pure props that she's brought spoken-word-set-to-music into the mainstream.Shaw fronts the band Dry Cleaning, a foursome with talent as luscious as their combined hair condition. The group's speech/song style occupies similar territory to Wet Leg, Sleaford Mods, Black Country and Yard Act. Their tracks consist of totally random musings that swing between barbed, bewildered, sarcastic and exhausted, and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Does the world need to hear more from Red Hot Chili Peppers? Outside the bouncin’ bro’ fanbase, a regular consensus is that, despite being one of the biggest bands in the world, doing their global stadium rock thing – with free added funk! – achieving the highest level of commercial success, they're not of actual interest.Then they release two very long albums within six months of each other, Return of the Dream Canteen being the second. Who the hell needs that? Turns out that anyone with an ear for joyously executed West Coast-flavoured pop-rock just might.The twofold keys to its Read more ...
Tom Carr
Last year, Brightonian metal outfit Architects were propelled into new territory with For Those That Wish to Exist, achieving their first UK number one album. In all measures a roaring success, they sonically edged into the uncharted too. Their first album recorded entirely without Tom Searle’s influence since his passing, with For Those… Architects bridged their metalcore style into something cinematic and larger-than-life.Freed of covid restrictions they return already with their 10th effort: The Classic Symptoms of a Broken Spirit. For Those… saw the band turn their gaze to existential Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The 1975 are always looking for a way to corral Matty Healy’s ambition, to bring focus to his scattershot mind, to perhaps after all manage a generational address commensurate with his half-serious dreams of what a band can still be.It was telling how easily their previous, sprawling double-album Notes On a Conditional Form (2020) tallied with lockdown’s insular alienation, Healy and co-writer George Daniel surrendering to a sense of rudderless drift with archly shrugged shoulders, seeing deficient attention and affectless ennui as promising themes. Being Funny in a Foreign Language is, after Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
They've been away for a long time, not just due to that virus. Sisters Rachel and Becky have been busy with other projects including a score for Mackenzie Crook's Worzel Gummidge and works inspired by Emily Bronte and Molly Drake. So this album feels overdue. There are many who will revel in this delicious scoop of accessible and enjoyable folk. There is no fustiness here, no shanties or jigs. But the anticipated harmonies are as moving as ever – cutting through 2022's nonsense to deliver something achingly pure. Opener "The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry" is an old song from Orkney Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Antonioni was a poet of enervated alienation, sold, like early Godard, by profoundly beautiful actors, and perfected in the sun-bleached lassitude of Monica Vitti’s search for her missing friend in L’Avventura (1960).He wandered the world after 1964, applying his hip imprimatur to cultures in flux, from a fantastic, sexy, paranoid Swinging London in Blow-Up (1966) to Communist China in Chung Kio, Cina (1972), and drew Jack Nicholson into his games of existential ennui in The Passenger (1975). Returning to Italy for one last Vitti film, The Mystery of Oberwald (1980), which he dismissed, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
“Our only hope of saving our planet is if we begin to have different feelings about it,” Brian Eno writes in introduction to his new album in five years, Foreverandevernomore (the first featuring his own vocals since 2005’s Another Day on Earth). “Perhaps if we became re-enchanted by the amazing improbability of life; perhaps if we suffered regret and even shame at what we’ve already lost; perhaps if we felt exhilarated by the challenges we face and what might yet become possible.”Not, he adds, that this is a preachy album of propaganda songs. And it isn’t. Its mood music. It intimates, not Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Not content with having released one of the best hip-hop albums in recent memory (Cheat Codes, alongside Black Thought), producer Brian Burton has rekindled his partnership with The Shins’ James Mercer for the first Broken Bells album in almost a decade.Into the Blue is described as “an ode to the pair’s shared musical influences”, a phrase that can, let’s be honest, raise eyebrows and alarm bells. However, far from being a lengthy synonym for painful pastiche, the pair manage to plunder the past with remarkable panache.One thing no one can accuse Into the Blue of is limited range, and that’s Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Nitram is an object lesson in how to make a responsible film about a mass shooting, right down to not using the fame-seeking perpetrator’s real name as the title but the mocking ananym given to him by bullies at school.Scriptwriter Shaun Grant has drawn on accounts of the 1996 gun rampage at the heritage site Port Arthur in Tasmania. The 19th century convict colony became infamous as the scene of the worst massacre in modern Australia's history, leaving 35 people dead and another 23 injured. We don’t see the killings – there is no vicarious, visceral horror on screen. Instead Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s fair to say that The Cult have taken on a number of identities since their mid-80s’ transformation from Goth also-rans the Death Cult to the chest-beating rockers we've come to know. They’ve been the Native American-influenced post punks of Dreamtime, the neo-hippies of Love, and the Rawk Gods of Sonic Temple, to name but a few.Under the Midnight Sun, their first album in six years, sees them still rocking, maybe just not as forcefully as in the past. In fact, there’s more than the odd dash of AOR present on both “Knife Through Butterfly Heart” and the title track, which also basks in Read more ...