New Music Reviews
ReMastered: Tricky Dicky and the Man in Black, Netflix review - dynamic saga of music and politicsFriday, 03 April 2020
Netflix’s ReMastered series is one of the streaming channel’s undersung gems. Read more... |
Elton John’s iHeart Living Room Concert for America, YouTube review - the real star was a Mayo Clinic doctor named ElvisTuesday, 31 March 2020
Available in Britain now on YouTube for only a couple of days, Elton John’s iHeart Living Room Concert for America was put together in less than a week and was broadcast in the US on Sunday evening. In normal circumstances, the slot would have been occupied by the iHeart Radio Music Awards, which were to have been carried live from the Shrine Auditorium in LA. Read more... |
Christine and the Queens/Instagram review - musical missives during lockdownTuesday, 31 March 2020
Since she burst onto the global scene in 2014 with her debut album, Chaleur humaine, Christine and the Queens' (aka Chris, real name Héloïse Letissier) work has been difficult to pin down. Is the French pansexual singer-songwriter-performance artist's music synth-pop, alt-pop or, as she describes it, “freakpop”? Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Recording Is The Trip - The Karen Dalton ArchivesSunday, 29 March 2020
“My favorite in the place was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it. I sang with her a couple of times.” Read more... |
Single: Bob Dylan - Murder Most FoulSaturday, 28 March 2020
A combination of chopped-up newsreel and fever dream, “Murder Most Foul” is Bob Dylan’s most striking piece of work in years. This is the author of “Desolation Row” populating a 17-minute song with a lifetime of remembered cultural fragments, zooming out and panning back and forth from the single pivotal event of the Kennedy assassination, plucking references out of the heavy air. Read more... |
ReMastered: Devil at the Crossroads, Netflix review - a story well told but marred by clichéd styleSaturday, 28 March 2020
Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson’s reputation was much enhanced by the story – never substantiated – that he’d met with the devil one night at a crossroads, and was miraculously taught exquisite guitar licks that astounded his juke-joint audiences and later the world. Read more... |
Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, BBC iPlayer - an intimate, insider's account of his life and musicFriday, 27 March 2020
Miles – where to begin? Some 21st century revisionists find his art fatally tainted by his personal life, and his violent behaviour in relationships. Read more... |
Sinatra: All Or Nothing At All, Netflix review - epic two-parter on pop's first superstarThursday, 26 March 2020
Coming in at around four hours, in two parts, this 2015 documentary is ostensibly about Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, but really, via the prism of his existence, it’s as much about America’s journey through the first two thirds of the 20th century. Read more... |
Slipknot Unmasked: All Out Life, BBC iPlayer – masked metalheads reveal allMonday, 23 March 2020
There aren’t many metal bands like Slipknot. For a start, the nine-piece line-up consists of the standard vocalist, two guitars, bass and drums – but then there are also two percussionists, sampler and decks. Their music is consistently ferocious, with a hardcore, high-speed, ragging thump and semi-comprehensible lyrics that leaves no room for chart-friendly power ballads. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: A Slight Disturbance In My MindSunday, 22 March 2020
Two of the 84 tracks on A Slight Disturbance In My Mind: The British Proto-Psychedelic Sounds of 1966 are covers of songs from Revolver. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Lazy Susan, Soho Theatre On Demand review - sketch duo'...
You may have seen Lazy Susan's excellent BBC pilot last year; now a series has been commissioned from Freya Parker and Celeste Dring so we can...
ReMastered: Tricky Dicky and the Man in Black, Netflix revie...
Netflix’s ReMastered series is one of the streaming channel’s undersung gems. Launching in 2018, when Tricky Dick and the Man in...
The Turn of the Screw, Opera North, OperaVision review - cla...
Feeling stir-crazy right now? Imagine being confined to one room with a half-crazed housekeeper, two dysfunctional kids and two increasingly...
Mark Kermode's Secrets of Cinema, BBC Four review - the...
Mirrors and windows, looking at ourselves or out into the world, reflecting the culture or making it: compare and contrast. This was the...
Album: Ren Harvieu - Revel In The Drama
Filmic. Lushness balanced with intimacy. Ren Harvieu’s follow-up to 2012’s Top Five Through The Night is crammed with wide-screen aural...
Wild, Hampstead Theatre online review - timelier than antici...
“The whole world is just tilting at the moment,” we’re told near the end of Wild, the Mike Bartlett play from summer 2016 that is...
Four Kids and It review – a family friendly yarn that needs...
With over one hundred books to her name and several hugely popular TV spin-offs, including the Tracy Beaker adventures, Jacqueline Wilson takes a...
'Most significant is the experience of being confronted...
How fast the world can change. What seemed unimaginable just weeks ago, the effective shuttering of our societies, is now a reality in many...
Oliver Craske: Indian Sun, The Life and Music of Ravi Shanka...
Ravi Shankar was one of the giants of 20th...
Bacurau review – way-out western
After his two mysterious, tightly-coiled and idiosyncratic first features, Neighbouring Sounds and Aquarius, the...