wed 24/04/2024

CDs/DVDs

DVD/Blu-ray: Padre Pio

Faith and damnation frequently collide in Abel Ferrara’s films, drawing fiery performances from often starry casts. The New York master who made The Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant now lives in Rome and, like his Pasolini, Padre Pio is a political...

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Album: Sheryl Crow - Evolution

During the mid to late 90s, Sheryl Crow and other grunge lite-friendly female artists like Alanis Morrisette were all over the airwaves. Sheryl’s particular schtick being a soft rock stew of pop/country/folk that threw up monster hits like “All I...

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Album: High Llamas - Hey Panda

Hey Panda is unlike any previous High Llamas album. While the characteristic traces of late Sixties and early Seventies Beach Boys, Van Dyke Parks and Steely Dan are here, they have become melded with a sensibility lead-Llama Sean O’Hagan has...

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Album: Waxahatchee - Tigers Blood

Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield never set out to play country music. In her teens, she performed in a high school power pop band, The Ackleys, alongside her twin sister Allison. A few years later, the siblings formed PS Elliot, a riot grrrl group....

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Album: The Jesus and Mary Chain - Glasgow Eyes

Jim and William Reid’s musical trajectory has been extraordinary. They started out by out-punking punk with terrifying noise barrages and wilfully clumsy three-chord thrashing, but quickly revealed a deep love of classic pop song structures which...

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Blu-ray: Beautiful Thing

Beautiful Thing’s opening scene plays out like a sweary take on Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl, Meera Syal’s potty-mouthed PE teacher lambasting her Year 11 pupils with language that would now have her hauled up in front of a professional conduct...

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Album: Elbow - Audio Vertigo

On this, their 10th album, the melodious Mancunians started at the drum kit and built from there. This is no bad thing. The overall effect is wide-ranging, surprising and altogether more uplifting than either the delicious despairing ...

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Album: Julia Holter - Something in the Room She Moves

Julia Holter has created a long line of albums that trade on sophisticated poetry, both lyrical and musical, and her latest, perhaps the most adventurous of all, inhabits a world where nothing is certain, narratives are disjointed, and the...

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Album: Kim Gordon - The Collective

Some icons sit back and bask. Kim Gordon does not. She has occasionally intimated that her New York cool and relentless work rate may be down to a smidgeon of imposter syndrome, even after all her years on the frontline. Whatever the truth of it,...

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Album: The Dandy Warhols - Rockmaker

Just as it’s not the best idea to judge a book by its cover, it’s also not advisable to judge an album by its insipid title. Led Zeppelin IV and Leonard Cohen’s Ten New Songs being obvious cases in point.To the list of uninspired album titles which...

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Album: Sarah Jane Morris - The Sisterhood

Released yesterday to coincide with International Women’s Day, The Sisterhood will surely prove to be one of the brightest jewels in Sarah Jane Morris’s varicoloured discography.A labour of love which Morris has been contemplating for two decades,...

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Album: Ariana Grande - Eternal Sunshine

Ariana Grande is the seventh most-followed Instagram account in the world (nearly 400 million). She has worked in promotion and/or “brand ambassador” positions with Reebok, Givenchy, Apple and many others. She is a successful film/TV star (about to...

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