CDs/DVDs
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... |
Album: Alice Cooper - Detroit StoriesThursday, 25 February 2021
A decade ago, Alice Cooper reconnected with his roots. He created a sequel to his 1975 album Welcome to my Nightmare with Bob Ezrin, the producer whose vision crystallized Alice Cooper, the band, and shot them to stardom in the early-Seventies. The... Read more... |
Album: Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains - Banane BleueWednesday, 24 February 2021
Frànçois Marry’s sixth album as Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains evokes warm days spent lounging in fields of clover reflecting on friendship, places visited and journeys which could be undertaken. Banane Bleue’s 10 tracks are unhurried and... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The AscentTuesday, 23 February 2021
There’s a striking interview among the extras for this Criterion edition of Russian director Larisa Shepitko’s fourth and final feature. The director was talking in 1978 to Bavarian Television at the Berlin Film Festival, where The Ascent had won... Read more... |
Album: Willie Nelson - That's LifeMonday, 22 February 2021
“That cat’s a blues singer,” Frank Sinatra famously said of Willie Nelson. “He can sing my stuff but I don’t know if I can sing his.” The two men sang together, on stage and on record, and Nelson, 87, is now older than Sinatra when he took his final... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Grand Budapest HotelSunday, 21 February 2021
Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig gets an acknowledgement in The Grand Budapest Hotel’s closing credits and if you’ve read Zweig’s Beware of Pity you’ll recognise why, Wes Anderson’s Mitteleuropa setting and penchant for flashbacks within flashbacks... Read more... |
Album: Maxïmo Park – Nature Always WinsSaturday, 20 February 2021
Composed in the first lockdown, and recorded remotely, the seventh album from Newcastle’s Maxïmo Park was produced by Ben Allen (Animal Collective, Deerhunter). But it is not so much a record of the times as a snapshot of a time in the... Read more... |
Album: Ghetts - Conflict of InterestFriday, 19 February 2021
Immersively arranged and intricately lyrical, Ghetts’ third full album further boosts grime’s takeover of British music’s front rank. Aged 36, he’s a contemporary of Kano, and similarly still evolving.Last year’s eerily mesmeric single, “Mozambique... Read more... |
