CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
There I was, gleefully prepared to give this a good kick-in but, annoyingly, it’s defied my expectations. I’ve come to associate James Blake’s singing with the worst excesses of I’m-so-vulnerable-me, post-Jeff Buckley, falsetto-voice-breaking, and his public persona with joylessly prescriptive and enfeebled ultra-wokeness. While Friends That Break Your Heart closes with three tracks, including the title song, that fulfil my Blake stereotype, ie translucently wet Bon Iver-tronica, there’s also much on board that is impossible not to admire.Blake did, after all, begin his career with huge Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The ghost of Phil Spector’s mixing desk looms large over the new album by the Danish/Brazilian garage rock revivalists the Courettes. There’s even a cry of “Look out! Look out! Look out! Look out!” to accompany the rocking go-go surf beat of “Hop the Twig”.The influence of the Shangri-Las in particular, is even more explicit on likes of “Want You! Like a Cigarette” and “Hey Boy”, with its “Give me a kiss before you go” reprise. Saxophones, tambourines and spoken lyrics join Flavia and Martin Couri’s twanging guitar and strident drumming in the echo chamber to make some serious teenage Read more ...
joe.muggs
Grand, sweeping romanticism with strong Celtic leanings is the order of the day lately, in a way it hasn’t been since the 1980s heyday of U2, Waterboys, Bruce Springsteen, Dexys and Simple Minds. The likes of Lewis Capaldi, Dermot Kennedy, Declan McKenna, Ed Sheeran in “Castle on the Hill” mode and Fontaines D.C. when they show their softer side are all taking yearning songs of big dreams colliding with small realities all the way to the bank. The Manic Street Preachers too have turned up the Van Morrison-ish swoon to 11 on their new album – and indeed The Waterboys’ Room to Roam and Dexys’ Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“How concerned are you?” asks a looped sample on “Alert Level”, the opening track on Ministry’s new album, and it is immediately clear that fans of the current economic and political status quo may not be the target market for this disc. That said, the optimal volume for playing Moral Hygiene would probably scare off most mainstream audiences too – as it really should be heard very loudly with the bass suitably jacked up for maximum enjoyment.In fact, while other musicians like Eric Clapton, Van Morrison and Ian Brown embarrass themselves by releasing reactionary anti-vaxxer anthems, these Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen left me dumbstruck in the cinema in 1998 with its brilliant depiction of an incestuous, viciously glamorous family imploding over a family celebration. At the time, I hoped that my Danish mother never saw what looked, to all intents and purposes, like a home movie about her former life in Copenhagen. More than 20 years on, Vinterberg did it again with Another Round, a black comedy about four high-school teachers navigating their mid-life crises by drinking their way through routine lessons and boring family suppers. The result was an Oscar-winning masterpiece Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Windflowers showcases Efterklang at their most direct, its sixth track “Living Other Lives” is its most instant, most straightforward composition. However, the Danish art-poppers’ sixth studio album does not instantly makes its case as a full-bore adoption of up-front dynamics. Windflowers opens with “Alien Arms”, an understated reflection where vocalist Casper Clausen ponders whether the highpoints of the past can be reproduced in the present. Despite the restraint – and an intimate, Blue Nile-esque atmosphere – the flow is linear, the melody precise. “We’re moving through the Read more ...
graham.rickson
This weighty box set contains all 52 episodes of the BBC’s take on George Simenon's Maigret, four seasons of which were made and broadcast between 1960 and 1963. Given how much vintage BBC material has been wiped, that this series can now be watched on Blu-ray is little short of miraculous.Decently restored from the monochrome originals, the majority of the instalments stand up pretty well, despite the spartan sets and bewildering range of accents on display. The amount of Parisian location footage is a surprise, adding to the series’ authenticity. Studio sequences were shot live, leading to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Jazz’s most popular expressions today stand on or just over its borders: Thundercat’s rubbery bass virtuosity and dreamy laptop soul, Robert Glasper’s improv R&B, Squarepusher’s spontaneous electronica, Snarky Puppy’s jam-band anthems, GoGo Penguin’s rave piano trio, or The Bad Plus’s rock covers. Jazz and hip-hop’s relationship was meanwhile deep-rooted long before Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) became the decade’s most important album for jazz, lifting collaborators such as Kamasi Washington into the stratosphere, and awakening popular interest in analogue instrumental Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Along with Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis is a key figure in the development of - to be loosely colloquial about it – trance and chill-out electronica. His 1970s work was proggy trip music, laced with classical aspirations that later came into their own. Artists from Sven Väth to Air to Enigma owe him a debt, as do those involved in the current boom in soothing electro-classical sounds. His output over the decades has teetered between overblown orchestration and ear-pleasing, pulsing synth symphonies. Happily, on Juno to Jupiter, the balance is mostly likeable.Of Vangelis’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When The Specials returned with their chart-topping 2019 album Encore, it was a wonderful surprise. As well as being their first in nearly four decades (excluding material by alternately named intermediary incarnations), it proved they were more than an endlessly touring heritage night out for ageing rude boys. Critics of their reappearance on the tour circuit claimed they were washed up without the band’s original driving force, Jerry Dammers. Encore, full of musical pep and socially conscious vim, proved this was not the case. Protest Songs 1924 – 2012 is an apt sequel.With the band now Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Tony Bennett has just turned 95, so it is no small miracle that this album has happened at all. Apparently he rang up Lady Gaga shortly before his 92nd birthday and said “let’s get this record done before I run out of birthdays.”The good thing about the new album Love for Sale (Streamline) is that it has a unifying theme. All ten tracks on the album – there are 12 on the “de luxe version” – are by Cole Porter. True, Bennett recorded less Cole Porter than Sinatra, but he is such an appealing character, and he can give such wonderful empathy to a lyric, that is perhaps the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Watching this restored print of Nicholas Ray’s delirious Western reminded me of the discovery that those pristine white statues of the Ancient World had once been painted in gaudy colours. When I first saw Johnny Guitar, it was one of those movies that played the repertory and art house cinemas in a battered, faded 16mm print. Seeing it on a modern TV screen in all its original lurid glory, the film is so shockingly garish it’s as if it had been reconfigured in 3-D. Although it did well enough at the box office in 1954, American critics hated it and its producer-director Nicholas Ray, rated Read more ...