CDs/DVDs
Album: Pixies - The Night The Zombies CameMonday, 28 October 2024
The ongoing trickle of quirky rock by Pixies reassuringly continues with 2024’s offering, The Night The Zombies Came. The album is the first with bassist and co-vocalist Band of Skulls’ Emma Richardson, who comfortably fits right into the existing... Read more... |
Album: Halsey - The Great ImpersonatorSaturday, 26 October 2024
For many performers, flirting with death is a pose or a distant metaphor, or simply don’t-give-a-damn insouciance. This is not the case with Halsey on her fifth album. She’s been assaulted, in recent years, by a range of serious illnesses and... Read more... |
Album: Underworld - Strawberry HotelFriday, 25 October 2024
Purveyors of extraordinary energy and euphoria, Underworld never miss a beat. The new album – 30 years on from their debut, and their exposure in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting – once again features music that will always be better live, in the... Read more... |
Album: Bastille - &Thursday, 24 October 2024
Grandiloquent indie-synth-pop outfit Bastille have been around for over a decade. Three of their four albums have been chart-toppers (the other one still made Top 5 and went Gold). They are no flash in the pan.Head honcho Dan Smith now presents a... Read more... |
Album: Amyl and the Sniffers - Cartoon DarknessWednesday, 23 October 2024
Amy Taylor’s lyrics on Amyl and the Sniffers’ previous discs could hardly be described as demure – especially with song titles like “Don’t Need a Cunt (Like You to Love Me)”. So, it’s encouraging to hear that the band hasn’t decided to censor... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Michael Powell - Early WorksTuesday, 22 October 2024
The missing element is magic, the swooning sense of the romantic, spiritual and supernal which Michael Powell’s partnership with Emeric Pressburger found in the British and especially English soul, sharpened by Hungarian Pressburger’s fascinated... Read more... |
Album: Tess Parks - PomegranateMonday, 21 October 2024
Tess Parks’ fourth solo album is suffused with otherness. When lyrics are direct, they are destabilised by the etiolated, freeze-dried voice delivering them. “Sometimes it feels like everyone should be dancing, maybe I should be dancing,” she sings... Read more... |
Album: Laura Marling - Patterns in RepeatSaturday, 19 October 2024
If there’s a rough-hewn tinge to Laura Marling’s eighth album, then there’s a wildly valid reason for it. It was written shortly after the folk singer-songwriter had her daughter, and was recorded in a home studio with the baby ever present – either... Read more... |
Album: Kylie Minogue - Tension IIFriday, 18 October 2024
There’s a real bind for Kylie Minogue. Her core audience want disco pop, people like me slag her off if she branches out from disco pop and goes country, she does disco pop well… but it’s really, really hard to do disco pop relentlessly well all the... Read more... |
Album: Elephant9 with Terje Rypdal - Catching FireThursday, 17 October 2024
Just before the five-minute point, a Mellotron’s distinctive string sound is heard. Three minutes earlier, a guitar evokes Robert Fripp’s characteristic shimmer. Uniting these might result in King Crimson but, instead, these are just two elements of... Read more... |
Album: Mystery Tiime - Maudlin Tales of Grief and LoveWednesday, 16 October 2024
Londoner Ayman Rostom has been around the block and then some. For some 25 years he’s been a hip hop producer as Dr Zygote, for the past decade he’s made wiry and weird house music as The Maghreban – both of these aliases are still, it seems, fully... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Valley of the BeesTuesday, 15 October 2024
František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1966) has been voted the best Czech film ever made, a visionary 13th century epic whose expense prompted its director to shoot the shorter, lower-budget The Valley of the Bees (Údolí včel) back-to-back with... Read more... |
