CDs/DVDs
johncarvill
Akira Kurosawa coulda been a contender. He used to be canon. Some of the critical sheen flaked off a while back, though. He hasn’t had a film in the top 10 of the Sight & Sound critics’ poll since 1982, the cognoscenti having pivoted to other Japanese masters such as Ozu, or Mizoguchi. Kurosawa is docked points for being too grabby, too Western, too prone to bourgeois sentimentality. His films commit the ultimate sin: they pander.No polemics here, but if you wanted to take up a critical katana on Kurosawa’s behalf, you could do worse than adduce Red Beard. The director himself called it “ Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone doubting Venom’s place on the highest level of the pantheon of Rock Gods might want to check out Sunn O)))’s recent, self-titled album. Their track “Does Anyone Hear Like Venom?” may not ape the Geordie trio’s black metal sound, but it’s clear that the Seattle ambient metalheads are seriously keen to pay homage to their huge influence on heavy music.Venom have never been renowned for bothering the top end of the charts, despite having been on the metal scene for pushing 50 years, and yet they show absolutely no sign of throwing in the towel. Into Oblivion, their first album in seven Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It’s not uncommon to suggest that we live in a post-genre musical era – but all too rarely does the discussion then move on to how we might find alternative coordinates to collectively describe sounds. If you did want to do that, though, you could do worse than take lessons from club music. For a long time before the streaming era sent everything off in every direction, DJ-led culture was adept at finding patterns in flux. The best known example is the “Balearic” aesthetic – originally music played by DJs in Ibiza and other Mediterranean party zones in the 1980s – which was completely unbound Read more ...
Tom Carr
For Basement, the post-hardcore rockers hailing from Ipswich, their story is one of promise and unpredictability. With their debut, 2011’s I Wish I Could Stay Here, they took the scene by storm, only to disband after their second album the following year. They had left their mark so deeply though, in a sense it didn’t feel like they went away. And after their mid-2010's return, their sound shifted subtly across their next two albums, settling on a blend of their original style with a straight-up alternative rock foundation. What had really stood them out was an ability to cut Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Rick Rubin has revivified many late-career musicians, most notably Johnny Cash, whose quartet of American Recordings achieved both universal praise and commercial success. Twenty years ago, he worked with Neil Diamond, applying his trademark unplugged approach to Diamond’s distinctive spregesang style. The result, 12 Songs (2005), was one of the singer's most successful studio recordings, charting at #4 on Billboard. James Bassett of PopMatters considered it “an album of rare beauty, grace, and eloquence that captures Diamond in all his plain-spoken and big-hearted glory.” Home Before Read more ...
Ibi Keita
In 1999, American Football pioneered a brand-new genre with their self-titled album, and while they didn’t gain much recognition from their odd style of music, it soon grew into something beautiful, widely loved and imitated. Midwest-Emo is a genre that relies on the foundations that American Football set on that record, a slurry of twinkly melodies and precise, often off beat rhythms, I personally think it’s beautiful mess, but unsurprisingly, it’s an acquired taste. Vocals are the third piece to the Midwest-Emo puzzle, always conversational, strained and unbothered, almost shouted from Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
London band David Cronenberg’s Wife, a grimy stew of Eighties indie and folk trimmings, deal in the abject; shame, sadness and lust gone rotten. Their new album, for instance, contains a song called “Mermaid’s Tale” wherein the first-person narrator, a morose divorcee, comes across a gorgeous mermaid while sailing near the Greek island of Hydra. She needs him for sex, but things soon turn grubby, forlorn and prosaic. Also funny, in a twisted way.There’s a storied tradition of abjection in the arts, from Iain Banks’ Wasp Factory to Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” to the paintings of Francis Bacon Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Cast your mind back to the release of “Never Be The Same Again” (1999), which seemed to come out of nowhere and turned Sporty Spice’s image on its head. For the least pushy of the fabulous five, it was something of a turn up for the books. And now, at the ripe old age of 52 (whipper-snapper), she’s pulled off what could be considered another volte face.Ask me to name the female artist with the most songs at number 1 in the UK chart’s history and I wouldn’t have plumped for Ms Melanie. But that’s what the blurb claims, alongside this mega fact: “she is he only female performer to top the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I first saw country singer songwriter Kacey Musgraves perform at the Arts Club on Dover Street back in 2013 for the launch of her first major-label album, Same Trailer Different Park, which won her the first of her eight Grammies, and she was a great performer and an even more striking songwriter – witty, concise, memorable, with great turns of phrase and a great clarity in her storytelling and characters. She was/is a superior version of the uber-megastar that is/was Taylor Swift.She’s funnier and filthier than Taylor; I can’t see gazillions of preteens bawling out her lyrics without Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ostensibly, Jesca Hoop’s music is categorised as folk. How to square this with “Big Storm,” the fourth track from the singer-songwriter’s seventh album, Long Wave Home? The percussion sounds like – but, it turns out, actually isn’t – a drum machine. Hoop’s voice is close-miked, intimate. The choruses are gospel-esque. Brass instruments stab. Overall, there’s a country music lilt. Just before it abruptly stops, Hoop says “OK.” Odd, and folk-adjacent rather than folk, but it coheres – and makes sense.After this, “Love is Salvation.” Here, notwithstanding the jazzy arrangement, a kinship with Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It must be exhausting to be a member of Belfast hip-hop crew, Kneecap. Having already recorded a debut album and fistful of fine singles like “H.O.O.D.” and “Get Your Brits Out” in the late 2010s, during the last couple of years they’ve participated in a semi-autobiographical film and its soundtrack, put out the splendid Fine Art, toured relentlessly and then had to endure the circus of being named pop’s latest bogymen because of their support for the Palestinian people.Not ones to retreat into moneyed exile, however, their new album tries to make sense of the situation with a barrel load of Read more ...
peter.quinn
This first full-length album from K-pop sextet NCT WISH – one of a number of NCT sub-units including NCT 127, NCT Dream, WayV, and NCT U – is a 10-track delight, with not a filler in sight.A multilayered, widescreen banger, album opener “2.0 (TWO POINT O)” channels the bassline-driven, vocally rich melodic pop of SM Entertainment labelmates SHINee. The immaculately produced title track is an up-tempo, 130+ BPM anthem with strong UK Garage influences, delicious harmonic motion, and an abundance of ear candy, not least the way in which it reimagines the opening earworm vocal hook from The Read more ...