CDs/DVDs
Album: Charles Lloyd & the Marvels - Tone PoemWednesday, 10 March 2021
Charles Lloyd is too graciously, fully alive to set in iconic aspic, his latest golden era still in mid-flow aged 82, when his surviving sax peers, Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter, can no longer blow. The worlds he’s passed through beyond jazz... Read more... |
Blu-ray: LinkTuesday, 09 March 2021
Man’s strange relationship with other species haunts this freaky simian horror film from Psycho II director Richard Franklin. Terence Stamp is Dr Phillips, an archetypal, lab-coated mad scientist, grumpily testing the limits of ape intelligence, and... Read more... |
Album: The Underground Youth - The FallingMonday, 08 March 2021
What the Rose of Avalanche were to the mid-'80s Sisters of Mercy and Singapore Sling are to the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Underground Youth have, bit by bit, become to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ sound. An undoubtedly fine band to be sure, but don’... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Marlene Dietrich at Universal 1940-1942Sunday, 07 March 2021
Her glory years as the muse of Josef von Sternberg long gone, Marlene Dietrich had been labelled “box-office poison” and was sulking on the French Riviera when the producer Joe Pasternak summoned her back to Hollywood to star opposite James Stewart... Read more... |
Album: Genesis Owusu - Smiling With No TeethSaturday, 06 March 2021
The debut album by Australian-Ghanaian artist Genesis Owusu is so musically restless it’s exhilarating. What’s clear is this guy doesn’t want to be placed in a box, marked hip hop or anything else. Over a wild variety of music, he adopts multiple... Read more... |
Album: Zara Larsson - Poster GirlThursday, 04 March 2021
Best known for winning Sweden's version of Got Talent, at the tender age of 10, Zara Larsson is a shining example of a prodigious young female talent being groomed by the music industry into the perfect pop icon.Her third album Poster Girl is... Read more... |
Album: Kings of Leon - When You See YourselfThursday, 04 March 2021
Over the course of seven albums and nearly two decades, Kings of Leon have gone from spiky, short bursts of adrenaline-fuelled garage rock to swollen stadium pomp, full of big builds and grandiose gestures. Following on from 2016’s WALLS (We Are All... Read more... |
Album: Arab Strap - As Days Get DarkWednesday, 03 March 2021
Shortly after Arab Strap split up in 2006, Malcolm Middleton was quoted saying “I don’t think we should ever get back together”. That’s the sort of fighting talk that’s just begging to be cast up by tired old hack music writers tasked with reviewing... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with TeaTuesday, 02 March 2021
Jindřich Polák ’s 1963 film Ikarie XB-1 (also available from distributor Second Run) still seems fresh, a cerebral, visually arresting sci-fi which clearly influenced 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s surprising to read that Polák was actually a comedy... Read more... |
DVD: T S Eliot - The Search for HappinessMonday, 01 March 2021
“How it went with the women,” Martin Amis’s phrase for what most straight men are likely to contemplate in the evenings of their lives, would have made an ideal alternative subtitle for the 50-minute documentary T S Eliot: The Search for Happiness.... Read more... |
Album: Jane Weaver - FlockSaturday, 27 February 2021
Flock ends with “Solarised”, a glorious five-plus minutes excursion into retro-futurist pop with the artistic smarts of Saint Etienne and Stereolab. Snappy, toe-tapping drums and bubbly, funky bass guitar move it along. “Stages of Phases” is another... Read more... |
Album: Blanck Mass - In FerneauxFriday, 26 February 2021
John Benjamin Power (formerly half of Fuck Buttons) opens his new opus with glittering synth arpeggios – reminiscent of the Seventies electronica of Tangerine Dream, Manuel Gottsching or Steve Hillage: cosmic dance floor bliss that just keeps coming... Read more... |
