CDs/DVDs
Album: New Age Doom & Lee 'Scratch' Perry - Lee 'Scratch' Perry’s Guide to the UniverseThursday, 28 October 2021
It seems totally appropriate that Lee “Scratch” Perry’s last recorded album before his death earlier this year, is a collaboration with a Canadian experimental noise outfit and that it is several musical lightyears away from his legendary 1970s... Read more... |
Album: Tori Amos - Ocean to Ocean, reviewWednesday, 27 October 2021
A “sonic photograph” is how Tori Amos describes her sixteenth album, recorded at her home in Cornwall during the spring and summer of Britain’s third lockdown, when, travel, her usual mode of coping with “troubling things”, was not an option. Living... Read more... |
Blu-ray: I Never CryTuesday, 26 October 2021
In Piotr Domalewski’s I Never Cry, newcomer Zofia Stafiej excels as sullen Polish schoolgirl Ora, who resentfully travels to Dublin to collect the body of her estranged father, Krzysztof, who has been killed on the unsafe waterfront site where he’d... Read more... |
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... |
