CDs/DVDs
Katie Colombus
It would be really easy to get hung up on the definition for this album. Is it a new sexuality term? A holiday genre of technopop? A planet that will align with the others on January 29th?English singer Tahliah Debrett Barnett, aka FKA Twig, describes via X, that "eusexua is a practice, eusexua is a state of being, eusexua is the pinnacle of human experience".Conceptually, this is certainly an album that seeks a transcendental state of purity and perfection, through almost psychedelic experimentation in electronica, pop and progressive house via tinkling, abstract vocals and a mellifluous Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This is Tunng’s ninth album, their first in five years, and marks their 20th anniversary by consciously going full circle to the gentle sound sculpture and folk melody of their earliest work. It is also thrown into fascinating relief by arriving just as the world is reeling from the loss of David Lynch.Their aesthetic has rarely if ever been compared to his – perhaps because they are so firmly rooted in a very English pastoral, while he has always been about wide-horizons Americana – but in fact listening to this record as social media is flooded with his pronouncements and creations, it Read more ...
John Carvill
The blurb that accompanies this Criterion Blu-ray calls Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which co-stars John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as scuzzy, low-ranking gangsters on the run from their bosses, “an unsung masterpiece of American cinema”. For once, that doesn’t feel like hyperbole.The film opens with Nicky (Cassavetes) holed up in a flophouse hotel, itching with paranoia and convinced his mob bosses have a hit out on him. He calls his fellow gangster and lifelong best friend Mikey (Falk), but then refuses to open the hotel room door and let him in. It’s a metaphor for the whole story, the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s been five years since the last studio album by the inestimable Mary Chapin Carpenter, the lyrical and intimate The Dirt and the Stars, recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Bath, the second of two projects with producer Ethan Johns released towards the end of the first lockdown. One of the delights of that grim period was Carpenter’s weekly livestreams from her Virginia farmhouse, Angus the Golden Retriever a frequent on-screen presence. While they were never curated and released on CD, she did record a live album at Wolf Trap, a 26-song solo set with no audience Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Lovell sisters Rebecca and Megan can be heard supporting Ringo Starr on his new album of country songs, while at the same time their seventh album hits the shelves, and with some heft and punch, too, on the raw strength of the scuzzy guitar-led opener, “Mockingbird”. As raw-edged guitar ballads with big choruses go, it’s a strong opening account for a duo who have delivered fine albums stirring together a pungent one-pot meal of Southern rock, electric blues and Americana. Their last, 2022’s Blood Harmony, won a 2024 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album (2018’s Venom & Faith Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Of the big UK indie bands of the 00s wave, Bloc Party were always the most austerely art-rockish. Where Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons, Franz Ferdinand all to some degree or other had a dose of the vaudevillian and a bit of party “woohoo!”, BP adhered way more to the seriousness, alienation and introspection of their post-punk inspirations.This certainly didn’t do them any harm in the first instance – they were, frankly, huge – but maybe stopped them having quite so much crossover appeal, and you’re less likely to hear them now on Noughties nostalgia shows on mainstream radio and suchlike.It did, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Four of Humanhood’s 13 tracks are short, impressionistic mood pieces. Between 48 seconds and just-over a minute-and-a-half long, they mostly lack singing. Instrumentation is jazzy, leaning on piano and wind instruments. Drones and white noise evoke ocean spray or wind. In one case, a wordless vocal edges towards articulating recognisable syllables.While these harmonise with the whole of Humanhood so are not discrete musical sketches, they point to the feelings of disassociation and fragmentation informing Tamara Lindeman’s seventh album as The Weather Station (the multiple selves seen in the Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Ethel Cain’s Perverts is a dark and experimental follow-up to her debut album, Preacher’s Daughter. It takes listeners on a haunting journey through unsettling soundscapes that blend elements of drone, slowcore and dark ambient music.Exploring heavy themes like religious guilt, sexual shame and emotional trauma, Perverts is an intense and ambitious project that’s both captivating and difficult to digest. The album aims to combine dark, confessional storytelling with eerie, atmospheric sounds. But while there are moments of real beauty and emotion, the execution sometimes feels uneven and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Rooted in South African electronic styles such as kwaito, amapiano and gqom, the music of Moonchild Sanelly also shows a rich in awareness of US and European hip hop and pop.Initially a product of Durban’s poetry scene, Sanelly, born Sanelisiwe Twisha, spent years building a reputation there and in Johannesburg, before coming to wider attention when Beyoncé featured her on her Lion King soundtrack. She signed to the forward-thinking Transgressive label in 2020, and her second album for them, her third in total, bounces with her trademark sex-positivity and booty-shaking beats’n’bass.There are Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Phoebe Lunny and Lilly Macieira are furious. Livid with the rapist cops, sleazy men, gentrifying landlords, nepo babies and, to be fair, a significant chunk of mainstream society.The Lambrini Girls’ eminently quotable debut album, Who Let the Dogs Out, has all of these people, and a good deal more in its crosshairs and doesn’t hold back with putting the boot in. Their fiery and indignant howls of righteous anger, such as “Officer, what seems to be the problem? Or can we only know post-mortem?” on “Bad Apple” and “Michael, I don’t want to suck you off in my lunchbreak” on “Company Culture” Read more ...
Tom Carr
Travel back in time to the mid 2000s and you would be hard pressed to escape "Take Me Out" by Franz Ferdinand on the air waves. On the radio, music channels, in discos and clubs, what felt like overnight, the track catapulted frontman Alex Kapranos, guitarist Nick McCarthy, bassist Bob Hardy and drummer Paul Thomson into a household UK name with its tension building first section, and iconic riff.Ever since, the band have striven to reinvent themselves and their sound. The post-punk rock sound of their debut self titled album has since evolved to take on dancier tones and stylings. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title Cold Blows The Rain encapsulates it. A mournful, unembellished female voice sings of loss. The musical backing is sparse. Rhythms are measured. Nothing is hurried. If this album was a weather forecast, it would predict impenetrable mist followed by cold rain and wind. Then, more mist.This is Bridget Hayden’s first album which can clearly be defined as folk. Since the late 1990s, her music has been experimental, impressionistic – most often made with Schism and Vibracathedral Orchestra. She has also played and recorded with edgy shoegazers The Telescopes. Tellingly for Cold Blows The Read more ...