CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Just before the five-minute point, a Mellotron’s distinctive string sound is heard. Three minutes earlier, a guitar evokes Robert Fripp’s characteristic shimmer. Uniting these might result in King Crimson but, instead, these are just two elements of “I Cover the Mountain Top,” the wild, 22-minute opening track of Catching Fire, a studio-quality live album recorded on 20 January 2017 at Oslo’s Nasjonal Jazzscene.At the show, a union of prodigious Norwegians, Elephant9 were collaborating with guitarist Terje Rypdal. As it has been since Nikolai Hængsle (bass), Torstein Lofthus (drums) and Ståle Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Londoner Ayman Rostom has been around the block and then some. For some 25 years he’s been a hip hop producer as Dr Zygote, for the past decade he’s made wiry and weird house music as The Maghreban – both of these aliases are still, it seems, fully functioning. Before that still he made jungle and drum’n’bass in the initial 90s boom. And now he’s got a new alias to write, as you may guess by the album title, some very sad songs.There has always been a deep strand of outsiderdom, of being the odd one out, of not doing things in the typically correct order, to his music. So it’s no wonder that Read more ...
graham.rickson
František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1966) has been voted the best Czech film ever made, a visionary 13th century epic whose expense prompted its director to shoot the shorter, lower-budget The Valley of the Bees (Údolí včel) back-to-back with it.Recycling Marketa Lazarová’s lavish sets and costumes proved impossible, though both films share a vivid sense of time and place. Zdeněk Liška again provided a stark, haunting score, though large stretches of The Valley of the Bees are devoid of both music and dialogue. We first meet Petr Čepek’s Ondřej as a taciturn adolescent, incurring his Read more ...
Guy Oddy
MC5 were the original proto-punkers who led the charge against wafty hippy music in the late Sixties and early Seventies. They were touted by Lemmy as the blueprint for Motörhead’s early sound and their initial release Kick Out the Jams arguably deserves the title of greatest live rock album ever recorded.However, they fell apart after only three long-players in a mess of hard drugs and bad business decisions. That might have been that, save for the odd heritage tour from the Nineties onwards, which featured fewer and fewer of the original members as their health failed, sometimes fatally. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Sweet Release opens up a landscape of redemption by riding the rails of a classic blues, the title track talking of messages of peace and songs of sweet release, wrapping itself around a typically lean and potent riff conjured by guitarist Justin Adams.On this sweet release, he’s reunited with singer, tamburello frame drummer and violinist Mauro Durante, leader of the potent southern Italian band Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, a band renowned for the furious, transformative music of Pizzica Tarantata, which in folklore has the power to cure the bite of the legendary Taranta through Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Immanuel Wilkins’s third Blue Note Album – Blues Blood – has a big concept behind it. According to the album blurb, we are offered “a multimedia performance about the legacies of our ancestors and the bloodlines connecting us...”. It features “distinctive voices tapping into different aspects of heritage”… and "meals are cooked onstage during the live performance.” The basic idea behind it is that the healing properties of music can be applied to dealing with historic trauma.The album is the result of a commission from and a residency at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, an Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
With Warped Tour anniversary rumours in the air, Green Day and blink-182 touring the world, and 20 huge new tracks from Sum 41, The Offspring’s latest contribution to the thriving Pop Punk scene couldn’t have been timed better. Supercharged is landing in the open arms of an already excited fanbase, and the legends of the genre do not disappoint.Having helped to shape the distinctive Skate Punk sound of the 90s and early 2000s, it’s no surprise that The Offspring recreate that energy effortlessly with Supercharged, but it is impressive nonetheless. Opening track “Looking Out For #1” Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This record keeps you guessing. It starts off with “Hybrid Romance”, an ambient piece that’s very pretty but has swooping glassy synths that crack and fracture and could easily be about to break into some super jagged Berlin deconstructed club music at any minute.But less than two minutes later and we’re into “Chlorine”, a song in the modern country-inflected pop style which wouldn’t sound out of place on most daytime radio channels, and you could easily imagine the Californian Ded Hyatt performing as a support act for Taylor Swift or Harry Styles.The thing is, though, “Chlorine” has lots of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
While it does get very cold in the north of Norway, it’s likely that Permafrost’s chosen name reflects a fondness for Howard Devoto’s post-punk outfit Magazine as much as it does their home country’s environment. “Permafrost” was a track on Magazine’s second album, 1979’s Secondhand Daylight. And, with respect to the title The Light Coming Through, the penultimate track on Magazine’s 1978 debut album was “The Light Pours Out of me.”The ostensible Magazine references point to aspects of where Permafrost are coming from. There is also a large dose of Faith-era Cure in play, along with smidges Read more ...
Guy Oddy
With the Pagan festival of Mabon and the Autumnal Equinox only just past us, it seems appropriate for Scandi psychedelic rockers, Goat to provide a soundtrack of celebration as we head towards the colder months. And, as expected, Goatman and his crew have not let us down with their completely wigged out set of funky vibes and transcendent rhythms.Lively shamanic grooves fill the band’s third album of new songs in as many years, as our favourite mask-wearing mystics channel uplifting, yet primal chants and mind-blowing cosmic jams with some serious verve after last year’s considerably more Read more ...
Tom Carr
From the very first chords of "Yellow" in 2000, Coldplay have been an ever present at the summit of popular music's hierarchy. Their uncanny knack of crafting sickly sweet melodies and soundscapes that dig deep and stay with you, willingly or not, has seen them through different styles in their now over 25 year long career.Having begun with a more straight-laced indie rock sound in their early days, the London quartet have shifted through modes and accents. With 2008's Viva La Vida, the group embraced a theatrical and expansive theme, while Mylo Xyloto saw the band delve into a Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Dan Snaith’s career has been a joyous thing to watch. Almost a quarter of a century the Canadian started out as Manitoba (soon renamed to Caribou) making a giddy mixture of dreamy ‘60s psychedelic pop, glitchy electronica and then cutting-edge dance music.Since then, much like his friend and contemporary Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden – latterly joined on their journey by Sam “Floating Points” Shepherd – he’s refined and tightened his sound, reaching bigger and bigger crowds, while impressively retaining the same fundamental character and inspirations. This is his 11th full album – eighth as Read more ...