CDs/DVDs
DVD/Blu-ray: Mädchen in UniformTuesday, 23 March 2021
The late Weimar-era film Mädchen in Uniform (1931) was visionary – a delicate Queer love story set in a repressive girls’ boarding school that denounced the Prussian militarist creed as dehumanising. Like The Blue Angel (1930), another German early... Read more... |
Album: Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and The London Symphony Orchestra – PromisesMonday, 22 March 2021
My first (conscious) encounter with the music of American jazz saxophone legend Pharoah Sanders was 1970’s “Let Us Go into the House of the Lord”, a nearly 18-minute piece which, right until the end, sounds like it’s only just forming through an... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Restless NativesSunday, 21 March 2021
That a film has a cult following doesn’t mean it’s a masterpiece, and 1985’s Restless Natives is sweet but ephemeral, a Scottish crime caper that can’t hold a candle to Bill Forsyth’s sparky debut, That Sinking Feeling. Both are set in a period when... Read more... |
Album: Frida Hyvönen - Dream Of IndependenceSaturday, 20 March 2021
Track two on Dream Of Independence, the new album from Sweden’s Frida Hyvönen, is titled “A Funeral in Banbridge”. An account of attending a funeral in, indeed, Banbridge, County Down, Northern Ireland, it’s bright, melodically jaunty, piano-... Read more... |
Album: Lana Del Rey - Chemtrails Over the Country ClubFriday, 19 March 2021
Lana Del Rey has turned pop’s volume down, returning hushed intimacy to the music’s heart. Her collaborator Jack Antonoff was also heavily involved in Taylor Swift’s Folklore reinvention, but Del Rey’s idea of Americana remains very different. Its... Read more... |
Album: Black Honey - Written & DirectedThursday, 18 March 2021
Indie rock has taken a commercial back seat, even if the music press still hasn’t quite caught up. Sure, there have been hit-makers, and bands that sell out stadiums, but overall, indie’s tide is very slowly retreating. Like any genre, it will... Read more... |
Album: Ted Barnes - 17 PostcardsWednesday, 17 March 2021
Ted Barnes is an outsider by design. Not in the sense of being wilfully awkward or outré – the music on his first solo album in almost 13 years years is gentle, harmonically rich, extremely accessible – but in that he has sidestepped standard career... Read more... |
Blu-ray: CharadeTuesday, 16 March 2021
Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in Paris in the summer: Charade was the last word in old Hollywood’s glamorous cool. It was almost the last word for Grant, feeling if not looking his age. Its tricksy, trapdoor plot, with a baffled Hepburn hunted for a... Read more... |
Album: Gazelle Twin & NYX - Deep EnglandMonday, 15 March 2021
Deep England is Gazelle Twin’s reimagining, with the help of ambient drone choir NYX, of her 2018 Pastoral album. Based on their live reworking of the album from 2019, it is like the musical soundtrack to wandering through an unfamiliar English... Read more... |
Blu-ray: ViySunday, 14 March 2021
Released in 1967, Viy (Вий) was the first horror film to be produced in the USSR. Based on a novella by Gogol that draws from a multitude of folkloric tropes, Viy is more disquieting than chilling, though several sequences still unnerve. Konstantin... Read more... |
Album: Loretta Lynn - Still Woman EnoughSaturday, 13 March 2021
Last month Willie Nelson wowed us with a new album. Now comes Loretta Lynn, a year older (89 next month) with her 50th studio outing. It must be something in that proud Cherokee blood they share.Born in poverty, married at 13. Four children and... Read more... |
Album: The Anchoress - The Art of LosingFriday, 12 March 2021
What a very beautiful thing this is. From the off, this second album marks itself out as something most unusual. A piano-based instrumental opener ("Moon Rise") is reprised half way through the album ("All Shall Be Well" and "Paris") and at the... Read more... |
