sun 08/06/2025

CDs/DVDs

Album: Death In Vegas - Death Mask

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away called the late 1990s, there was a scene known as “big beat”. It consisted of club culture sorts making music closer in flavour to rock, and easier to drink beer to than house and techno.It gave us both...

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Album: Nick Mulvey - Dark Harvest Pt.1

Nick Mulvey’s first two albums, First Mind in 2014 and Wake Up Now in 2017, are among the loveliest singer-songwriter fare released this century. With his last album, 2022’s New Mythology, his ayahuasca-fuelled search for spiritual meaning went full...

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Album: Marina - Princess of Power

Marina Diamandis is a proper pop star, brilliantly full-on, off on her own thing. The Welsh singer is primarily known for success 10-15 years ago as Marina and the Diamonds, but she’s retained global heft as an album artist, including in the US,...

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Album: Van Morrison - Remembering Now

When Van Morrison last released an album of original songs, during the Covid pandemic, it didn’t go down well. Indeed for many, 2022’s What’s It Gonna Take squats in Morrison’s catalogue like a toad in a fruit salad.“A self-absorbed descent...

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Album: Pulp - More

While the Gallagher brothers scrabble around in the dirt for their rich pickings, an altogether more dignified experience is on offer from Sheffield. More is Pulp’s first album for 24 years, which is a sobering fact for those of us who...

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Album: Turnstile - NEVER ENOUGH

Turnstile’s NEVER ENOUGH is a vibrant, shape-shifting album that proves the Baltimore-based band is fully committed to evolution. Since their formation in 2010, Turnstile have been known for injecting a fresh, genre-blurring energy into hardcore...

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Album: Little Simz - Lotus

Little Simz clearly believes in meeting situations head on. Her sixth full-length album kicks off, in every sense of the phrase, with “Thief”: unambiguously a lyrical barrage at her childhood friend and frequent collaborator Inflo, who Simz is...

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Blu-ray: Eclipse

What constitutes a “lost classic”? I guess we can’t say it’s an oxymoron, since we readily accept the concept of “instant classic”? Either way, the “classic” aspect may be in the eye of the beholder, but “lost" is more easily quantified. Simon Perry...

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Album: Miley Cyrus - Something Beautiful

A couple of months ago, I wrote here that Lady Gaga was the godmother of the new generation of ostentatiously “theatre kid” pop stars – but actually, perhaps I was wrong and Miley Cyrus deserves that title. Ever since her teens, she has consistently...

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Album: Sally Shapiro - Ready to Live a Lie

Ready to Live a Lie is so sonically vaporous it almost isn’t there. While the album’s 11 tracks draw from continental European musical archetypes – specifically Italian disco and Eurovision-styled balladry – there is little solidity which can be...

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Blu-ray: Strange New Worlds - Science Fiction at DEFA

DEFA was East Germany’s state film studio, operating between 1946 and 1992. Among its vast output were four lavish science fiction adventures, released between 1960 and 1976 and shown here in gleaming new transfers. Each one, to varying degrees,...

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Album: Anna Lapwood - Firedove

This album Firedove (Sony Classical), surely, has to be seen as part of a bigger story: that of organist, choir director and broadcaster Anna Lapwood, who, still in her twenties – just – has become an essential part of the (often cautious and...

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