CDs/DVDs
Tim Cumming
It’s been 14 years since Alison Krauss and Union Station released an album – 2011’s Paper Aeroplane. The world’s shed a few skins since then, and little resembles the way it was. The ten songs on their new album, Arcadia, recorded in studios across Nashville, are tied up in that cat’s cradle of time, of the past and how it is remembered.“The stories of the past are told in this music,” Krauss has written. “It’s that whole idea of ‘in the good old days when times were bad.’ There's so much bravery and valour and loyalty and dreaming, of family and themes of human existence that were told in a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tobe Hooper changed cinema with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) for pennies in rancid Southern heat, but came closest to a mainstream Hollywood career a decade later, following the hit Spielberg collaboration Poltergeist (1982) with his biggest budget from hack mavericks Cannon Films. He characteristically determined to “make it as wild as I can”.Based on British Beat writer Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires, Lifeforce (1985) is indeed one of its decade’s most unhinged, far out films. Infamous and too easily dismissed for 18-year-old French ballerina Mathilda May’s mostly nude queen Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On the cover of her eponymous debut album, the Bolton-raised Toria Wooff reclines on a church pew located in Stanley Palace, a 16th-century mansion in her adopted city of Chester. In her hand, a Celtic Cross. Such imagery implies that what will be heard on the grooves within the sleeve might cleave to forms of gothic-inclined British folk. This, though, is not the case.It’s clear from the album’s second track that Wooff is aware of dark Texas country singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. “Lefty's Motel Room” is an open nod to his totemic composition "Pancho and Lefty.” As Wooff’s song picks up Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Selena Gomez is the enormously successful Disney child star who grew up to be a Hollywood actor and global pop sensation. As notably, she’s the third most followed person on Instagram, the most popular woman, with 421 million followers. Benny Blanco is the golden boy American producer-songwriter whose many, many hits run the gamut from Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” to Ed Sheeran’s “Happier” to Kesha’s “Tik Tok”. The pair got engaged last December.This, then, is a monster album. It’s also better than its icky title and tacky celeb status suggest. I admit I came to I Said I Love You First Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For fans of The Horrors, the headline here is that, 20 years into the career, for their sixth album, the band have lost two of their founding members. Original keyboard player Tom Furse has gone, as has drummer “Coffin” Joe Spurgeon, to be replaced, respectively, by Amelia Kidd of Scottish synthy post-punkers The Ninth Wave and Jordan Cook of alt-indie Welsh outfit Telegram. Happily, these changes have not scuppered their overall dynamic. Indeed, the five-piece is now imbued with an encompassing darkness that harks back to their beginnings.This is not to say the The Horrors have reanimated Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There was a telling remark in Wynton Marsalis’s recent interview with Katty Kay for the BBC show “Influential”. Talking about how jazz functions in real time as a democracy, he said: “Our music requires you to be in balance with other people”, contrasting it with unnamed but all-too-obvious examples in the US of the rise of cultures based on principles diametrically opposed to that, i.e. the search for victory and 'greatness' through bullying and subjugation.As I listened to Just, the new ECM album from the quartet of octogenarian drum icon Billy Hart, I became rapidly convinced that this Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Going by the sounds of her new album, it wouldn’t unreasonable to assume that Greentea Peng enjoys sucking on a spliff every once in a while. Tell Dem It’s Sunny is certainly Gold Seal gear with a distinctly smoky atmosphere, that’s for sure.Dubby trip hip and woozy neo-soul are the order of the day with lyrics that are sometimes political, sometimes spiritual and sometimes absurd but which always flow with the loops and basslines that she’s dreamed up with collaborators from Earbuds to Samo and Wu-Lu, to name only a few. However, even at its most heavy and forthright, as on the Dälek-like “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Sitting on a sofa, cigarettes and beer, ten years disappear…agreeing to agree, just to get along.” By going into the difficulties of resuscitating the past, the lyrics of “Ten Years,” the fourth song on The Loft’s first album, neatly sum-up the band’s current situation. The final line gives the 10-track set its title: “Everything changes, everything stays the same.”Everything Changes, Everything Stays The Same is, indeed, the first album by The Loft, a band integral to the early days of Creation Records which fell apart on stage in June 1985. Forty years ago. A long time. Before that rupture Read more ...
Joe Muggs
America – the pro-wrestling-ass nation, the ultimate society of the spectacle – famously likes things big, and modern country and western music has gone along with that. Big hats, big trucks, big sentiment, big pop production, very big sales indeed, and not a lot in the way of subtlety. But country also has a parallel history, of course: as music of the little guy, the theatre of the domestic, a place for preservation of simple folk traditions in the face of the overwhelming scale of modernity. And it’s into this that through this century the Alabaman singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, whether Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Steven Wilson’s cinematic concept album The Overview is named for the cognitive shift required of astronauts and others who’ve observed Earth from space and been humbled by both its beauty and its – and their – inconsequentiality. Wilson’s grappling with the existential questions raised by what he calls “cosmic vertigo” evidently inspired him musically. The eighth solo record by the Porcupine Tree frontman consists of two infectiously melodic tracks, “Objects Outlive Us” (23 minutes) and “The Overview” (18 minutes). Each is comprised of sub-tracks that give the LP a stop-start Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
The Father of Make Believe is the latest instalment in the cinematic fantasy world that Coheed and Cambria have meticulously crafted over the last 30 years. It’s openly more personal in nature than previous albums but The Amory Wars storyline and Sci-Fi emo prog rock atmosphere that the band are known for are still as present. The catchy, anthemic tracks that are scattered amongst both the delicate and spacey, and the heavier prog metal that make up the rest of the album, are some of the strongest moments. “Goodbye, Sunshine” and “One Last Miracle” in particular stand out as highlights Read more ...
graham.rickson
One of The Barnabáš Kos Case’s incidental pleasures lies in its relatively accurate depiction of orchestral life. Much of the action in Peter Solan’s 1964 Slovak black comedy (originally title: Prípad Barnabáš Kos) takes place in a rehearsal studio, one filled with real, non-miming musicians. Actor Milivoj Uzelac, playing one of the conductors, was also a composer and actually looks convincing on the podium.If I’m allowed to be pedantic, the most glaring false note is the role played by the titular antihero; you’d never find a percussionist who only plays the triangle, let alone one who Read more ...