The Straight Story is the slowest of road movies, its elderly protagonist crawling 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin at just five miles per hour. Screenwriters John Roach and Mary Sweeney based their script closely on a true story, that of 73-year-old Alvin Straight, who made his journey riding a lawnmower upon hearing that his estranged brother had suffered a stroke. Sweeney’s then-partner David Lynch was intrigued and took on directorial duties. This is a real outlier in his output, a colleague describing it as “the one Lynch film that isn’t perverse in some way”, the finished product deemed Read more ...

The first time I heard Wuthering Heights I felt a bit like I’d walked into the wrong room – one lit by firelight rather than LEDs. Is this the sound of an artist in retreat? Away from the dancefloor, from self-scrutiny, from the lime-green glare of her hyperpop Brat era? Or a clean break from the terms that used to define her?When film maker Emerald Fennell asked for one song last year, Charli was on the brink of burnout. But the more she got into the creative world of Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights adaptation, the more she realised how much she wanted to escape into someone else’s 177-year- Read more ...

One of the smaller but more passionately enduring subcultures in the world today is that around slow dance music. The core of its audience is a Gen X crowd, a good number of whom have stuck with club culture since the mid Nineties or earlier, with others who’ve rekindled their love of electronic music in middle age: people whose knees might not be up to stomping to techno for hours, but are still deeply committed to the experience of deep and prolonged immersion in repetitive beats.Belfast’s Phil Kieran is a key mover and shaker in this scene. Though his career began 25 years ago as a Read more ...

Jill Scott is neo-soul royalty, without any doubt whatsoever. In fact, her debut album, Who Is Jill Scott? remains a monumental release over quarter of a century since it first saw the light of day.Nevertheless, Scott has continually refused to be boxed-in as a singer but is a true Renaissance Woman who has also made her mark as a spoken word artist, poet and actor. Hence, she can easily be forgiven for making us wait 11 years since her last album, Women. That said, any fans approaching To Whom This May Concern with a degree of trepidation due to its long gestation can be rest assured. Jill Read more ...

After leaving my headphones elsewhere, I plugged my wired earphones into my laptop and sat cross-legged on my bed. It felt like the universe wanted me to rewind time, back to when 2014 Forest Hills Drive first dropped, a teen in my room, listening to tinny rap through cheap speakers, imagining myself on some apartment rooftop in New York. The Fall Off took me straight back there, safe and familiar, as J. Cole carries that same boom bap spirit into his latest, and possibly last, 24-track album.From the opening moments, the album feels like home. Cole’s voice sounds like countless artists and Read more ...

Edward Simon shows again on this new album of re-imagined songs from Venezuela what a very fine pianist he is. His touch and inventiveness, his command of counterpoint and voice-leading are never short of jaw-dropping, and what he does remarkably well here is to create a succession of specific, authentic moods from songs that have a personal resonance.Simon is from that golden generation of musicians who studied as teenagers at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA) – Christian McBride, Kurt Rosenwinkel and the late Joey De Francesco. Simon arrived there as a Read more ...

Mandy, Indiana are a Mancunian four-piece with a French singer who's based in Berlin. They make a lot of noise. Their second album is a take-no-prisoners amalgamation of electronic squall, thrashy rap (a distant cousin of Dälek), and tints of deranged hyperpop. In an age when ever-increasing quantities of people seek soothing music, they are outliers. URGH is too cacophonic to be the making of them but those after a solid, catalytic bash around the brain may want to tune in.The album was flavoured by multiple operations undergone by frontwoman Valentine Caulfield and drummer Alex Macdougall Read more ...

Another interesting thing about the endless flux of the streaming era is that, for all that it’s supposed to homogenise and flatten things out, sometimes it ends up allowing more interesting things to belatedly get their due. Look at the way once-obscure musicians like Julius Eastman, Alice Coltrane or Arthur Russell have snuck into the vocabulary of alternative and even mainstream music. But also, acts who weren’t short of success or acclaim but were nonetheless perhaps considered a bit cultish, nerdy or niche have gradually achieved a sort of cross-generational depth and universality of Read more ...

Nothing about this album suggests that it’s a debut. Shaking Hand’s eponymous introductory shot is so assured it sounds as if an awful lot of groundwork has preceded its appearance. As it happens – beyond live shows – the only thing paving the way was a single issued last June.Shaking Hand are a Manchester trio: Ellis Hodgkiss (bass), Freddie Hunter (drums) and George Hunter (guitar, vocals). They deal in a guitar-centred art-rock with touches of Slint and Tortoise, and a muted math-rock feel. There are also hints of Field Music around the time of their 2010 Measure album and a muzzy, out-of Read more ...

The Weaving is an Ango-Irish trio of accordion, voice, fiddle and piano. The voice belongs to Méabh Begley, from Kerry’s prominent musical family – she sings one of her father  Séamus Begley’s songs, “Dán Lae Breithe”, further in this superb debut set of 12 songs and tunes. Cáit Ní Riain from Tipperary is on piano, and the fiddle player is Leeds-born Owen Spafford, of the acclaimed British folk-ambient duo Spafford Campbell, whose second album, Tomorrow Held, on Real World, was my album of the year in 2025.Owen Spafford describes Warp and Weft (Dlúth & Inneach) as “a cultural Read more ...

In the 1990s, the world of electronic music was a frontier where the unimaginable often happened. These were the days of early Aphex Twin, Basic Channel, Autechre and many more pushing at the vanguard, challenging what we might even consider to be music. A golden time, Musique Concrète’s underlying principles were reborn for a chemically enhanced generation of clubbers.Quarter of a century into this millennium, while there are still outliers (such as, say, Oneohtrix Point Never or Simo Cell), the zeitgeist has moved on and, since the advent of dubstep, the sonic frontiers feel well Read more ...

One of the great problems with modern music criticism is that it hasn’t got past the models of the second half of the last century, and this leads to some very serious seeing-the-woods-for-the-trees oversights. In particular “we” still haven’t left behind the conception that a movement only exists if it has a moment: an Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show, a be-in at Haight Ashbury, a Sex Pistols at the 100 Club. Which means that, because it can’t be pinned down to a particular time and place, a very, very recent shift that is way bigger than rock’n’roll, psychedelia or punk doesn’t even have a Read more ...