CDs/DVDs
Album: The Coral - Coral IslandSaturday, 24 April 2021
Merseyside rock’s taste for glowing lysergic locales defines The Coral’s tenth LP, Coral Island, a double concept album which makes them the house band in a seedy fairground full of sepia memories and sawdust spirits. Put this Island on the map with... Read more... |
Album: Gojira - FortitudeFriday, 23 April 2021
Chances are many will not have heard of Gojira. At best, as a music lover, theirs may be a name seen among the line-up of metal festivals. As ever with metal, perceived as niche but with a vast audience, this is misleading. Gojira are globally... Read more... |
Album: Tom Jones - Surrounded by TimeThursday, 22 April 2021
“I'm growing old,” laments Tom Jones as his 40th studio album draws to a close. Sir Tom is “growing dimmer in the eyes” and “drowsy in my chair”. These blunt observations are not sugared with the mordant humour that, say, Randy Newman or the late... Read more... |
Album: Dinosaur Jr - Sweep It Into SpaceWednesday, 21 April 2021
When Laurence Binyon wrote: “Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn…” he was, of course, talking about the fallen soldiers of World War One, not Amherst’s premier hardcore grunge punks. However, on hearing Sweep It... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Straight Shooting / Hell BentTuesday, 20 April 2021
There are moments in Straight Shooting (1917), the first feature directed by John (then "Jack") Ford, when its star Harry Carey (1878-1947) exudes a naturalism that the famous Western actors who followed him, most notably John Wayne, strove to... Read more... |
Album: Field Music - Flat White MoonMonday, 19 April 2021
Although it is not solipsistic, Flat White Moon is Field Music’s most personal, most revealing, warmest-sounding album so far. David and Peter Brewis have opened up. Their ninth studio album together opens with a seeming declaration. “Orion from the... Read more... |
Album: Toumani Diabate and the London Symphony Orchestra - KôrôlénSaturday, 17 April 2021
Toumani Diabate, master of the 21-string kora, along with some other Malian musicians, collaborated on a symphonic concert at London's Barbican Centre in 2008. The orchestra in question were the London Symphony, who have often been open to working... Read more... |
Album: AJ Tracey - Flu GameFriday, 16 April 2021
AJ Tracey is one of Brit rap’s aristocracy now. Along with the likes of Stormzy, Dave, J Hus and lately Headie One, he is massively bankable, with streams in the tens of millions for singles, sellout shows in Alexandra Palace, and radio ubiquity. It... Read more... |
Blu-ray: I Was at Home, But...Thursday, 15 April 2021
The term most often used about Berlin director Angela Schanelec’s filmmaking seems to be “elliptical”, and her latest film, I Was at Home, But..., which won the Best Director award at Berlinale 2019, is no exception. Approaching it is like an... Read more... |
Album: Imelda May - 11 Past the HourTuesday, 13 April 2021
11 Past the Hour opens with its title song, a delicious, twangy, string-laden Nancy Sinatra Bond theme that never was. The album closes with a lyrically empowered torch song, “Never Look Back”, which rises and rises over a marching band drum tattoo... Read more... |
Album: Lady Dan - I Am the ProphetMonday, 12 April 2021
There’s a line in “No Home”, the staggering centrepiece of Lady Dan’s debut album, that perhaps sums up the project. “Wolves will never be my masters again,” the artist, real name Tyler Dozier, sings as the strings swell, in a voice like the... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Catch Us If You CanSunday, 11 April 2021
Catch Us If You Can, the 1965 road movie starring Barbara Ferris and the eponymous drummer and guiding force of the Dave Clark Five, proved a more trenchant satire of capitalism in the embryonic Swinging ‘60s than did the box-office smash it was... Read more... |
