CDs/DVDs
DVD: WayfinderSunday, 28 August 2022
Road movies in England work better by foot. Slowing down finds the scale to explore our small island, tramping Chaucer’s pilgrim paths, not Kerouac’s roaring highway.Visual artist Larry Achiampong’s debut feature accordingly sends its heroine from... Read more... |
Album: Muse - Will of the PeopleWednesday, 24 August 2022
From three young lads making music to escape adolescent boredom, inspired by heavy doses of Nirvana and Deftones, Muse now regularly make stadiums around the world their own with seas of thousands adoring fans their home. Since 2006’s Black... Read more... |
Album: Gabriele Mirabassi and Stefano Zanchini - Il gatto e la volpeTuesday, 23 August 2022
The clarinet-player, clarinet-owner or clarinet-lover in your life is going to want and need this record. The combination of a glorious sound, lyricism that is lived and (okay, obviously) breathed, contrasted with insane finger-busting at crazy... Read more... |
Album: Ezra Furman - All of Us FlamesMonday, 22 August 2022
The third track of All Of Us Flames is titled “Dressed in Black.” Its protagonist “come[s] to me by night beneath my window sill…you leave before the sun comes up. Haunted eyes, you’ve got those haunted eyes.” Though tortured, this relationship... Read more... |
Album: Fisherman's Friends - One and AllSaturday, 20 August 2022
A decade or so ago, I imagine if I’d run in to Fisherman’s Friends while enjoying a beer and a nice fat crab sandwich in a Port Isaac pub I’d have passed a happy evening and possibly returned the next night.Sea shanties – indeed, any good close-... Read more... |
Album: Demi Lovato - Holy FvckFriday, 19 August 2022
Demi Lovato doesn’t do things by halves. She has one of the most powerful voices around, as suited to the yang of punchy hard rock as it is to the sensual yin of R&B or or the contagious sweetness of girly pop.Self-professed gender fluid, her... Read more... |
Album: Aitch - Close to HomeThursday, 18 August 2022
22 is a pretty young age to be jaded. But this album starts out with Mancunian rapper Aitch detailing how tough it is at the top, and how traumatised he is by life: "sitting on my throne with an open stare / 'cause to me it's just a broken chair".... Read more... |
Album: Hot Chip - Freakout/ReleaseWednesday, 17 August 2022
You know those people who claim to literally only like the very first music a band does at the start of their career, then kind “Meh” decades-worth of solid later stuff? Ridiculous, right?That’s me and Hot Chip. 16 years ago I fell in love with “... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The SapheadTuesday, 16 August 2022
Buster Keaton made his name in a series of two-reel shorts made from 1917 onwards; The Saphead, from 1920, was his first starring role in a feature film.It’s in no way comparable to the classics which Keaton produced and directed in his mid-... Read more... |
Album: Loudon Wainwright III - Lifetime AchievementMonday, 15 August 2022
Celebrating, if that is the right word, his 75th year, Loudon Wainwright III offers us his 26th studio album in 52 rollicking years, Lifetime Achievement. Though he does have one Grammy on the shelf, for 2009’s double set, Charlie Pool Project,... Read more... |
Album: Cass McCombs - HeartmindSaturday, 13 August 2022
Cass McCombs has something of the detailed, opaque depth of his late peer Jason Molina, with more taste for pop shapes under a broader musical canvas, while still in the Americana underground. The Dead’s Bob Weir, Blake Mills, Tinariwen, Noam... Read more... |
Album: Hudson Mohawke - Cry SugarThursday, 11 August 2022
The journey of Ross “Hudson Mohawke” Birchard has been truly one of the most extraordinary in modern music. From teenage scratch DJ champion and happy hardcore raver in some of Glasgow’s more feral club environments, in the late Noughties he quickly... Read more... |
