California
Album: Santana - Blessings and MiraclesMonday, 11 October 2021
Some guitar sounds are instantly recognisable. Carlos Santana blazed a trail in the late 1960s, with incandescent licks that made him world famous. He has traded on that brand – as brand it inevitably is – for more than half a century.He is in a way... Read more... |
Clickbait, Netflix review - fiendishly cunning thriller keeps everybody guessingSaturday, 04 September 2021
It seems Covid-19 may not be the only plague threatening mankind. The virus is nowhere to be seen in Netflix’s grippingly twisty mystery Clickbait, but it’s the use and abuse of social media that drives its tale of malice, murder and deception.The... Read more... |
The Beach Boys: Feel Flows - the Sunflower and Surf's Up Sessions 1969-1971Monday, 23 August 2021
“Add some music to your day,” the Beach Boys urged in their song of the same name, from their 1970 album Sunflower. There’s far more than a day’s worth of music included on this immense five-CD package, which scrutinises the turn-of-the Seventies... Read more... |
Album: Billie Eilish - Happier Than EverFriday, 06 August 2021
Billie Eilish was shot through fame’s looking glass with increasing force right through her teens. A girl’s hopeful artistic dreams exposed her to infinite judgement of her body and soul, social and mass media magnifying every blemish and... Read more... |
Album: Tomu DJ - FeministaWednesday, 04 August 2021
The endless circles and spirals that dance music moves in can take you to some strange places.It is, after all, a little peculiar that a producer from California, who was first turned on to DJing by the edgy, claustrophobic, ultra-modernist sound of... Read more... |
Album: Wavves - HideawayFriday, 16 July 2021
Wavves’ Nathan Williams found you can go home again. Following a deteriorating decade on a major label, and 2017’s raucous retrenchment You’re Welcome (2017), the punk-pop Californians have returned to their first label, Fat Possum. Williams then... Read more... |
Physical, Apple TV+ review - too much pain, not enough gainTuesday, 22 June 2021
It’s not easy to sum up Physical in a pithy soundbite, though “quasi-political misanthropic comedy” might be vaguely in the right ballpark. It’s set in San Diego, California in the early Eighties, in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s election to the... Read more... |
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young: Déjà Vu 50th Anniversary Deluxe EditionTuesday, 11 May 2021
With over eight million copies sold in its 50-year lifespan, Déjà Vu was, as Cameron Crowe writes in the booklet accompanying this compendious four-CD edition, “one of the most famous second albums in rock history”. It was originally released in... Read more... |
Album: Tune-Yards - SketchyFriday, 26 March 2021
Tune-Yards have been much-feted for bringing an original sound to pop. Quite rightly so. Over the last decade the Californian duo, led by singing percussionist Merrill Garbus, have fired out four albums (and a film soundtrack) that amalgamated... Read more... |
Album: Skyway Man - The World Only Ends When You DieFriday, 15 January 2021
When the concept album first properly took flight, in the late 1960s, before it became slave to the bloated artifice of prog-rock, it was an extension of the LSD-soaked times: “Songs aren’t big enough, man, I need a bigger canvas!” Famed albums by... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Lost Innocence - Garpax 1960s Punk & PsychSunday, 03 January 2021
An old saw relating to The Doors says their ambition when they formed was to be as big as Los Angeles-based garage-psych sensations The Seeds. After listening to Lost Innocence – Garpax 1960s Punk & Psych, it’s hard not to wonder where the bands... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Visual AcousticsTuesday, 29 December 2020
One of the world’s leading architectural photographers, Julius Shulman was the subject of a show at London’s Photographers’ Gallery this autumn, “Altered States of America”. That title surely alluded to the visual modernism that changed the face of... Read more... |
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