CDs/DVDs
graham.rickson
The best Ealing comedies are surely the three darkest: specifically Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Ladykillers and The Man in the White Suit. The latter pair were helmed by Alexander Mackendrick, a cosmopolitan director who’d arrived at the studios with a thorough understanding of trends in mainstream European and American cinema.Take the final act of The Man in the White Suit: watched with the sound turned down: it’s an expressionist noir thriller, Alec Guinness’s naïve scientist Sidney Stratton pursued through the streets at night by a vengeful mob, cinematographer Douglas Slocombe making Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s seven years since the Belgian brothers Dewaele unleashed their fine, largely instrumental and foot-stomping Essential album on the world, but they’ve given short shrift to any ideas of sitting on their laurels in the intervening time. Their new album, All Systems Are Lying still points emphatically towards the dancefloor, but it brings plenty of new flavours to their sound and is considerably more song-based than its predecessor.This isn’t to say that Soulwax have gone down the standard guitar, bass and drums route on their new album. Their sound remains emphatically guitar-free in fact Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Eight years after Prodigy’s untimely passing, Mobb Deep are gracing our sound systems once again with unreleased vocals and brand new music. With production from both Havoc, Mobb Deep’s second half, and world-renowned hip-hop powerhouse The Alchemist, Infinite brings back a strong boom-bap essence that fans have been missing, with zero missteps. The duo have been an integral part of New York hip-hop history since their 1995 single “Shook Ones Part II” cemented itself in the rap hall of fame. Though their discography after that golden era had its highs and lows, Havoc continued to shape the Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Boz Scaggs rarely does a less than wonderful album. His latest is an exemplary collection of smooth and soulful standards and a few other choice items including a song he wrote for his first album Boz Scaggs (1969) “I’ll Be Long Gone” and an Allen Toussaint song that was a hit for Southern Soul diva Irma Thomas, “It’s Still Raining”.The first re-invented with brio and barely echoing the original, and the second – one of the highpoints of the album – in essence true to the New Orleans ballad, but sounding more chilled and jazzier, and there’s no harm in that. The trouble with this Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The history of experimental musicians from Europe and North America adopting Japanese aesthetics is … patchy. It got especially dodgy in the 1990s when every other electronica dork started flinging random kanji characters on their sleeves, writing soundtracks for imaginary Akira bike races and the like. And there are so, so many ambient producers who reference Zen gardens, minimalist interior design and bamboo flutes, you can’t go into a health spa without knocking over a pile of their CDs.Thankfully Catskills Mountains-raised, LA resident soundscaper Emily A. Sprague is a little bit more Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Hollie Cook was in the final line-up of post-punk groundbreakers The Slits. When singer Ari Up died in 2010 and the group ended, there was a flurry of interest in Cook for a while. She supported The Stone Roses and appeared on Jools Holland’s Later.Then the spotlight moved on, as it always does, but she continued and has become a well-liked festival performer, also turning out a series of reggae-stewed pop albums, of which this is the fifth (leaving aside dub reversions). It’s as genially approachable as its predecessors.There's always been a strong Lovers Rock flavour to Cook’s music, and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Pop Will Eat Itself deserve to be more celebrated. The Stourbridge outfit were one of the first 1980s bands to realise the potential of smashing punky indie-rockin’ into hip hop and electronic dance.They had hits, many great songs, and covered the same territory that later gave The Prodigy mega-success (Delete Everything contains a rackety reimagining of the two groups' 1994 collaboration, "Their Law"). Unfortunately, a combination of their major label stabbing them in the back, and being perceived by some critics as cartoonishly adolescent, faded them out in the mid-Nineties. But they Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It’s funny: people say a lot online that what you’re allowed to like and dislike in music is bounded by age, gender and so forth. “It’s not FOR you,” they say. And in many ways, when it comes to Taylor Swift, that’s fair enough.There are certainly quite a lot too many heterosexual men in their 50s opining on her in ways that are a bit off: angry that she’s not Joni Mitchell, or that she’s a bit full of herself, or that her melodies are simple… Angry with a passion they can’t find for any other pop music. And no, sir, this music IS not for you. However, for those of us that do care about pop Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This is quite a tale: Shooter, son of Waylon Jennings, discovers a tranche of his father’s personal multitrack tapes from the analogue years, dating between 1973 – when he wrestled artistic control from RCA – and 1984, when he had quit cocaine, joined The Outlaws and digital technology took over everything.The tapes were shelved for 40 years, until Shooter took them down, opened them up and brought them to Sunset Sound in 2024. He started digging through them, and found that rather than the demos he expected, many of these "lost" recordings were fully fledged tracks waiting for an album to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The 16-minute album opener “Between the Fingers the Drops of Tomorrow's Dawn” coalesces at the 12-minute point, when clattering percussion meshes with what sounds like a sitar to fashion a hypnotic, repetitive whole. It’s as if Slovenia’s Širom have used the time so far to work themselves into a trance-like state. Iztok Koren, Ana Kravanja and Samo Kutin have surrendered to the drone.In the Wind of Night, Hard-Fallen Incantations Whisper is Širom’s fifth album. Not only does it bear a characteristically mysterious cover image and title, it is also long. Over 74 minutes, there are just seven Read more ...
Tom Carr
In the age of streaming, it’s never been less clear knowing when you can safely say an artist is well known in the mainstream. But for the rising star of Olivia Dean, the neo-soul Londoner, if Spotify streams count for anything then with over 20 million listeners, you could argue she is arriving on centre stage.On her debut album, 2023’s Messy, Dean provided a respectful and worthwhile offering of a vintage sound with lo-fi stylings: horn arrangements, slightly de-tuned piano chords, and soulful ballds. There was also mega-hit, “Dive”, Read more ...