CDs/DVDs
Album: They Might Be Giants - BOOKMonday, 25 October 2021
“We’ve always tossed in some super-dire, high-voltage, death-trip lyrics that offset the merriment of a melody,” John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants explained recently. And that, in essence, has been a substantial part of the band’s unchanging... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The DamnedSunday, 24 October 2021
One German writer found a neat yet teasing way to sum up the difference between Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), the first film in the Italian director’s “German trilogy”, and the two films that followed it.The Damned, known in Italian as La... Read more... |
Album: Nightmares On Wax - Shout Out! To Freedom...Saturday, 23 October 2021
George Evelyn is one of British music’s more interesting characters. With equal parts Yorkshire bluntness, hip hop swagger and cosmic dreams, he has filled Nightmares On Wax’s beat collages and soul grooves with soundsystem heft and endless... Read more... |
Album: Lana Del Rey - Blue BanistersFriday, 22 October 2021
Lana Del Rey’s eighth album would tell her story “and pretty much nothing else”, she teased, as her planned, near instant follow-up to Chemtrails Over the Country Club slipped back from spring to autumn. Del Rey has often claimed autobiography at... Read more... |
Album: Elton John - The Lockdown SessionsThursday, 21 October 2021
I always thought those celebrity duets albums, recorded across the miles – or sometimes with someone who had long since passed to the great arena in the sky – were generally fraudulent, always cheesy and sometimes mawkish. Now Covid and 18 months of... Read more... |
Blu-ray: La Dolce VitaTuesday, 19 October 2021
One of those films weighed down by a considerable reputation, La Dolce Vita (1960) is rarely taken as seriously as it should be. From the very first sequence in which a figure of Christ sails across Rome’s skies, suspended from a helicopter, a... Read more... |
Album: Young Thug - PunkMonday, 18 October 2021
From underground curiosity to cult icon, now label head and superstar, Atlanta’s Young Thug has continued to reinvent himself, as well as rap at large, for the better part of a decade. After being announced over two years ago, his new album Punk is... Read more... |
Album: Jarvis Cocker – Chansons d’Ennui Tip-TopSaturday, 16 October 2021
Wes Anderson and Jarvis Cocker do 1960s French pop – this frothy confection couldn’t be any more “art school” if it were smoking a gauloise in a black polo-neck. Truly, what a match made on the Eurostar! For one so thoroughly Sheffield born-and-bred... Read more... |
Album: Coldplay - Music Of The SpheresFriday, 15 October 2021
Chris Martin has talked, not for the first time, of this finally being the Coldplay era of “no rules or fear”. Swedish pop producer Max Martin (The Weeknd, Taylor Swift) gives Music of the Spheres a contemporary, EDM-pumped veneer, with further... Read more... |
Album: Finneas - OptimistThursday, 14 October 2021
This record is a heck of a metatextual experience to listen to. In releasing his debut album, 24 year old Finneas O’Connell is attempting to step out of the shadow of one of the biggest pop cultural behemoths of our time – his own sister,... Read more... |
Album: Pokey LaFarge - In the Blossom of Their ShadeWednesday, 13 October 2021
Oh boy, there’s nothing like slipping on an old pair of jeans and cowboy boots. That’s the comfy feeling you get from the opening notes of Pokey’s new road trip in the company of some great musical ghosts. Hank Williams, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins –... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Lighthouse (Mayak)Tuesday, 12 October 2021
Mariya Saakyan’s 2006 debut feature is bookended by grainy footage of what looks like a fire-ravaged diary, the distressed, crumbling scraps of paper torn and charred. The missing pages and unfinished sentences spill over into what follows, Saakyan... Read more... |
