CDs/DVDs
DVD: Jazz Fest - A New Orleans StorySaturday, 06 May 2023
New Orleans “is not a music business city, it’s a music culture city,” says David Shaw of The Revivalists, one of the interviewees in Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story.This documentary sets out to describe that multiracial culture and heritage... Read more... |
Album: Steve Mac - Bless This Acid HouseFriday, 05 May 2023
Some rock bands base their career around being musically fluid, an ever-changing what-will-they-do-next? conundrum. Others, such as, famously, Motörhead and The Ramones, simply go on doing their thing, honing it, repeating ad infinitum, with an... Read more... |
Album: SBTRKT - THE RAT ROADThursday, 04 May 2023
Aaron Jerome has always cut his own path through British music. After a few jazzy, groovy experiments under his own name in the 00s, he came dramatically to prominence at the end of that decade as SBTRKT. He was always associated with the post-... Read more... |
Album: The Lemon Twigs - Everything HarmonyWednesday, 03 May 2023
Those kooky ex-child-actors from Long Island are back again, all flares and mullets. And they’ve got something to tempt us. What kind of musical cake might you expect to savour if you mixed a little bit Simon and Garfunkel, a soupçon of Fleet Foxes... Read more... |
DVD: Children’s Film Foundation Bumper Box Vol. 4Tuesday, 02 May 2023
I can still (just) remember Saturday morning cinema being a thing, only because my big brother was old enough to attend weekly sessions at the local ABC and I was too young to go. He would presumably have watched several of the films in this latest... Read more... |
Album: Rickie Lee Jones - Pieces of TreasureMonday, 01 May 2023
Reuniting with Russ Titelman, the producer of her eponymous 1979 debut and its follow-up 1981’s Pirates, Rickie Lee Jones approaches the great American songbook as if she was reuniting with an old flame, the thrill of it smouldering and... Read more... |
Album: Laila Biali - Your RequestsSaturday, 29 April 2023
The seed for this wonderful third album on ACT from the Vancouver-born vocalist, pianist and songwriter Laila Biali was first sown in 2013 when, in advance of a gig in the Canadian port city of Hamilton, she opened up the floor and asked fans what... Read more... |
Album: Jessie Ware - That! Feels Good!Friday, 28 April 2023
“If you’re going to do it, do it well” goes a chanted refrain in the opening title track here. And it’s words Jessie Ware clearly lives by – she is not someone who has time to do anything rubbish. From featuring on the cream of post-dubstep... Read more... |
Album: The Damned - DarkadelicThursday, 27 April 2023
The Damned could have been bigger contenders. As anyone who’s seen Wes Orshoski’s feature film biog, Don’t You Wish We Were Dead, will know, their career has been blighted by chaos, line-up changes, catastrophic business decisions and just plain bad... Read more... |
Album: Lonnie Liston Smith - JID017Wednesday, 26 April 2023
It’s 25 years since Lonnie Liston Smith last released an album. But this a man who earned his musical stripes with Miles Davis and Pharaoh Sanders, pretty much invented Jazz Funk with the Cosmic Echoes in the 1970s and then helped to reboot hip-hop... Read more... |
Blu-ray: EOTuesday, 25 April 2023
The ne plus ultra of donkey films remains Robert Bresson’s heartbreaking Au hazard Balthazar (1966). Veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, premiered at last year’s Cannes Festival, is a very loose variant, Skolimowski revealing in a... Read more... |
Album: Susanne Sundfør - BlómiMonday, 24 April 2023
From Icelandic, blómi translates as “bloom” or “flower”. Other song titles from the new album by Norway's Susanne Sundfør also look Icelandic. Actually, it’s Old Norse, which informs modern Icelandic. Although one track is recited in German the... Read more... |
