CDs/DVDs
Album: Spiritualized - Everything Was BeautifulMonday, 18 April 2022
The Covid pandemic’s various lockdowns may have been a living hell for some, but there were also plenty of people who thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to distance themselves from society. One of those to thrive during this time was Jason Pierce,... Read more... |
Album: Swedish House Mafia - Paradise AgainSaturday, 16 April 2022
Returning with their first new music in almost a decade, EDM supergroup Swedish House Mafia (the producer-DJ trio Steve Angello, Axwell and Sebastian Ingros) deliver their debut album with a sense of vaulting ambition and anything-is-possible belief... Read more... |
Album: Reef - Shoot Me Your AceFriday, 15 April 2022
I have a theory about Reef. In the mid-Nineties, when the Somerset outfit appeared, they were reviled by London music journalists. This was mostly because they sounded like a hoary, unreconstructed early-Seventies blues-rock band. Those same... Read more... |
Album: Earthen Sea - Ghost PoemsThursday, 14 April 2022
Kranky, run in Chicago for very nearly 30 years now, is one of the most remarkably consistent record labels around. They helped define “post-rock” in the Nineties with key releases from the likes of Labradford and God Speed You! Black Emperor, and... Read more... |
Album: Kurt Vile - (Watch My Moves)Wednesday, 13 April 2022
Although the term “hipster” has become degraded to well beyond cliché, Kurt Vile is one of those artists whose fans may indeed have that in-the-know smugness. With Vile, though, this is not a bad thing. Given the increasingly confidence-shedding... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Nineteen Eighty-FourTuesday, 12 April 2022
"Disgusting", "depressing", "sheer horror from start to finish", a "filthy, rotten, immoral play". Such were the comments from viewers published across a spectrum of British newspapers following the BBC transmission, on 12 December 1954, of Nigel... Read more... |
Album: Sirom - The Liquified Throne of SimplicityMonday, 11 April 2022
Expansive, free-form, handmade and improvised, the extravagantly-titled The Liquified Throne of Simplicity is the fourth album from this freewheeling Slovenian trio of multi-instrumentalists. They forage among the world’s musics as well as their own... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: West Side StorySunday, 10 April 2022
West Side Story’s cinema release crashed into Omicron and never recovered. Maybe Ariana DeBose’s Oscar will help the world wake up to this Spielberg masterpiece, which definitively betters 1961’s Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins version.Spielberg loves... Read more... |
Album: Camila Cabello - FamiliaSaturday, 09 April 2022
The global popularity of Latin music in the past few years is almost incomprehensibly huge. 2017’s “Despacito” by Puerto Rican Luis Fonsi was the point where it became clear that Latin America – like South Korea – was now operating entirely on its... Read more... |
Album: Jack White - Fear Of The DawnFriday, 08 April 2022
Jack White is still unsatisfied, and rock’n’roll still unfinished business for its most extremist exponent. His last pre-pandemic album, Boarding House Reach (2018), seemed a major blow to his career, its experiment in warped dynamics and Beat... Read more... |
Album: Let's Eat Grandma - Two RibbonsThursday, 07 April 2022
“You know you’ll always be my best friend” and “There’s no-one else who gets me quite like you” run a couple of the lyrics to “Happy New Year”, the opening song from Norwich duo Let’s Eat Grandma’s third album. And the whole is laced with love songs... Read more... |
Album: Wet Leg - Wet LegWednesday, 06 April 2022
Wet Leg’s self-titled debut album is one that has generated significant expectations over the past few months. Last year’s singles “Chaise Longue” and “Wet Dream” especially created all kinds of hype and led to plenty of media coverage.But now it’s... Read more... |
