fri 27/06/2025

CDs/DVDs

Album: Lorde - Virgin

Lorde’s trajectory is continually fascinating. From the minimalist, sparse electropop of Pure Heroine to the similar but more grandiose production of Melodrama was a linear progression, but then came the acoustic...

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Album: Bruce Springsteen - Tracks II: The Lost Albums

It’s somewhat surprising to read that The Boss wasn’t happy with Born in the USA. After all, it was – remains – his most iconic album, the LP (for that’s what it was originally) that jet-propelled Bruce Springsteen into the mainstream. A...

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Album: BC Camplight - A Sober Conversation

A Sober Conversation is the work of a master songwriter, one who knows how to achieve their goals. As the album’s nine tracks pour from the speakers, comparisons come to mind: 20/20 and Smiley Smile-era Beach Boys, Lindsey Buckingham, the early solo...

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Album: Durand and the Indications - Flowers

Neo-soul devotees Durand Jones and the Indications mine a vein of sensuous sounds, at the soft end of a genre that's partly defined by the raw passion of gospel. Their roots draw from vintage Curtis Mayfield and the smooth vocal harmonies of the...

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Album: Yungblud - Idols

Yungblud has declared his fourth album, Idols, to be a “a project with no limitations”. This is quite a claim.So, what musical wonders has Dominic Harrison created in collaboration with his team of producer Matt Schwartz, composer Bob Bradley and...

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Album: Loyle Carner - Hopefully!

Loyle Carner’s Hopefully! is a luminous, deeply personal exploration of fatherhood, identity, and artistic reinvention, marking the south London rapper’s most tender and experimental work yet. Building upon the introspection of Hugo (2022), this...

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Album: HAIM - I Quit

Haim’s profile just grows and grows. Since their last album, youngest sibling Alana’s starring role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s whimsical Seventies L.A. nostalgia-fest, Licorice Pizza, has done them no harm. I Quit is, the band says, thus titled...

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Blu-ray: Darling

A look at Darling on its 60th anniversary offers a sobering reality check on the "Swinging Sixties", a reminder of the fallacy of the decade’s gaiety and supposed liberation, especially for women. This attractive 4K restoration...

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Album: Yaya Bey - do it afraid

One of the great untold stories of the past decade is just how potent a cultural force R&B has been. It might not have had the wild musical innovation it did in the 2000s when the likes of Neptunes, Missy Elliot, Timbaland and Rodney Jerkins...

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Album: The Young Gods - Appear Disappear

Swiss electro-rockers, Young Gods have been around for 40 years, but this in no way should suggest that they’ve gone soft in their old age. These days, vocalist Franz Treichler looks like the psychopathic Bob from David Lynch’s original Twin Peaks...

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Album: Sam Binga - Sam Binga Presents Club Orthodontics

When I was writing the introduction to my book, Bass, Mids, Tops: An Oral History of Soundsystem Culture, I came up with a phrase, which I ended up putting on promotional badges: “BASS CULTURE IS FOLK CULTURE”. It referred to the way riffs, refrains...

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Album: Neil Young & the Chrome Hearts - Talkin' to the Trees

When Neil Young releases a new album, you can be reasonably sure that you’ll get either a disc of melancholy singer-songwriter fare or a set of blistering rock’n’roll. His debut album with the Chrome Hearts, however, gives a bit of both – and it...

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