CDs/DVDs
Album: Imagine Dragons - LoomSaturday, 29 June 2024
Having propelled to stardom with their debut album Night Visions back in 2012, the Nevada pop-rock giants Imagine Dragons have reigned supreme on charts and airwaves.Their blending of elements from a wide range of genres into one melting pot, from... Read more... |
Album: Camila Cabello - C,XOXOFriday, 28 June 2024
Oh this is sad. Up until this point Camilla Cabello has been a good pop star. Her biggest songs were loaded with familiar-to-the-point-of-cheesiness retro Latin samples, or angsty mini-dramas loaded with the musical theatre-style chops that had made... Read more... |
Album: Johnny Cash - SongwriterThursday, 27 June 2024
Wow, this is a trip back in time. A visit from "The Man in Black" 21 years after he passed away, just a few months after his beloved wife, June Carter Cash, who stood by him through thick and thin as together they made such beautiful music.I saw him... Read more... |
Album: Linda Thompson - Proxy MusicWednesday, 26 June 2024
She has one of the most distinctive voices in folk and contemporary British music, impossible to forget once heard, and impossible to ignore. Even – or especially – as Linda Peters, singing, aptly enough, “I’ll Show You How to Sing” on a fairly... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Army of ShadowsTuesday, 25 June 2024
One of those rare films that leaves you speechless after the closing credits, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (L'Armée des ombres) sounds on paper as if it shouldn’t work.Melville’s penultimate film (it was released in 1969), this World War 2... Read more... |
Album: Madeleine Peyroux - Let's WalkMonday, 24 June 2024
Madeleine Peyroux made her name with her second album, 2004’s Careless Love. It consists almost completely of cover versions, delivered in a quiet, jazz-bluesey shuffle redolent of singers from the 1930s. She’s never flown as high again but has... Read more... |
Album: Zara McFarlane - Sweet Whispers: Celebrating Sarah VaughanSaturday, 22 June 2024
When Zara McFarlane sang the National Anthem at this year’s FA Cup Final, it served as a reminder of quite how adaptable she is, how suited so many different contexts. Other work in recent years has been with the Royal Shakespeare Company and... Read more... |
Album: Wytch Pycknyck - Wytch PycknyckFriday, 21 June 2024
Out on the perimeters where there are no stars, in a void full of bong-smoke and synesthetic noise… there, in a greasy biker hovel full of gigantic amps, there live Wytch Pycknyck. Some say that place is called Hastings. Whatever it’s called, this... Read more... |
Album: Pepe Deluxé - Comix SonixThursday, 20 June 2024
Pepe Deluxé are no exemplars of the puritan work ethic. Comix Sonix is only their sixth album in almost 30 years – but while they aren’t concerned with quantity, they certainly know how to produce electronic psychedelic weirdery of seriously high... Read more... |
Album: Naomi Bedford & Paul Simmonds - Strange News Has Come to TownWednesday, 19 June 2024
Almost exactly five years ago, I was transported by Singing It All Back Home, the third album from Naomi Bedford and Paul Simmonds. I gave it four stars, which in retrospect was perhaps a little ungenerous. Now at last comes a new opus from the duo... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Small Back RoomTuesday, 18 June 2024
Powell and Pressburger’s least remembered Forties film is shrouded in Blitz darkness, deepening in the warped flat where alcoholic weapons expert Sammy (David Farrar) stares at a whisky bottle as if it’s a bomb. Following the vivid English fantasias... Read more... |
Album: Kehlani - CRASHMonday, 17 June 2024
The noise in the international mainstream in recent years might be about dance-pop, hip hop beefs and the serious balladry of Taylor, Billie and Lana – yet at the same time, R&B has been strange, brilliant, ultra-popular, but generated a tiny... Read more... |
