CDs/DVDs
Joe Muggs
Muse are one of the best advertisements in the world for silliness. When the Devon trio came along in the late Nineties, they found a niche for people who wished Radiohead had kept writing big rock songs instead of tinkering with avant electronics – but they really found their feet with 2006’s Black Holes and Revelations when they started cutting loose with glam rock stomp, laser-zapping electronics, huge choruses and wild sci-fi imagery. Ever since, they’ve always been at their best when they drop any earnestness (not always possible, given singer Matt Bellamy’s penchant for doomy conspiracy Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Shadows opens with “The Lone West,” a short, desolate instrumental featuring a simple keyboard refrain with a flute-like quality and what may be an early Seventies drum machine. There’s a bit of Young Marble Giants in there. The Brian Eno of Another Green World, too. The Ghost Box label’s characteristic nebulousness is also apparent.The next track features a vocal. Sailing over a similar musical bedding, Cate Kennan’s voice on “Shadows” is distant, etiolated, devoid of colour. A twangy guitar plays single notes. There is some Santo and Johnny-esque lap steel and sparingly used castanets. The Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Beginning with “The Ground Above” and closing with “Otherside”, there’s an ambient, otherwordly, disembodied feel to Beth Orton’s new album on Partisan Records, a follow-up to 2022’s self-produced Weather Alive, which had its own spectral, dreamlike airs. “The Ground Above” is voiced by one of those unsettled spirits that rise out of one the hoary old Murder Ballads, but here, Orton is disembodied “among the choirs of the gods”, “ecstatic as a mother’s love” and lusty too: “And you kissed me and I knew what I was for, And it wiped me out like chalk off of a board.”Her voice is worn and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
La Sécurité are a Montreal supergroup… kind of; in that all members are involved in other projects which have had local success. In the case of bassist Félix Bélisle’s outfit Choses Sauvages and guitarist Laurence-Anne Charest Gagné’s solo career, cult success has spread further afield. “Cult” is the word, though, for La Sécurité’s tasty punk-funk stew is more-ish but likely too gnarly for mainstream success. Their second album is a smash’n’grab raid rife with pogo-party energy.At ten songs in around half an hour, it’s a set that makes its case with vim, then exits. The lyrics cover territory Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Lots of international superstar DJs end up making cosmic and exploratory records when they tire of – as the late Andrew Weatherall, albeit with tongue firmly in cheek, put it - “that ghastly oompty-boompty music.” Lots of them do quite well at it, too. But they are just daytrippers in the galactic expanse compared to Detroit hero Jeff Mills who is not only still bashing out the brain-jellifying techno to vast crowds week-in-week-out well over 40 years into his DJ career, but has been making out-there sounds for imagined futures in performances, collaborations and recordings for very Read more ...
Ibi Keita
Thirty years since the release of their breakthrough self-titled album and lead singer Bradley Nowell’s passing, sunburnt reggae punk rockers Sublime are back with an hour-long love-letter to their past, and their home. The band proudly states in their 1996 chill out track “Doin Time”, that they’re “qualified to represent the L.B.C”, a statement that has stood the test of time considering how little they have faltered. All of the same laid-back stoner rock, soaked in sunlight, Mexican beer and good times, but now, however, there’s a new man at the helm. Jakob Nowell, son of founding Read more ...
Graham Rickson
You’d watch Hamnet for the visuals alone, director Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal flooding the screen with lush greens and browns, 16th century rural England brought to physical life with an eye-popping attention to detail. We first meet Jessie Buckley’s Agnes in dense woodland gathering plants, a gift for falconry signalling her otherness. Though the locals whisper that she’s the daughter of a witch, she proves irresistible to glove maker and Latin tutor William (Paul Mescal). He charms her with his storytelling abilities and she reciprocates by reading his palm, hinting at a Read more ...
Erin Lewis
It’s tempting to focus on the peripheral aspects of Olivia Rodrigo’s career, dissecting who a particular song is about in relation to her personal life. However where Taylor Swift, an early source of inspiration for Rodrigo, overtly ties her music to her feuds and relationships, causing them to bleed into each other, Rodrigo has seemed keen to maintain a degree of separation between art and life. This means that even though you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love is widely believed to be about Rodrigo’s British actor ex Louis Partridge, the album doesn’t feel preoccupied with minutiae of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
I just don’t get it. Jon Batiste, deservedly, has a huge career as pianist, composer, inspirer. The prospect of his forthcoming extended residency in various formations at KOKO in London is an exciting one. But after several attempts to reach the opposite conclusion, I still have no clue why someone decided it was a good idea to “drop” Black Mozart – Batiste Piano Series Vol. 2.The narrative from Decca is that it is part of a series which started with Beethoven Blues, and which is set to continue with two more droppings, both of them albums inspired by Thelonious Monk, in just a couple of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As I started to write this review, I found that Tucker Zimmerman died in January this year. This was news to me, sad news, made worse by the fact he died in a house fire at his home in Belgium, alongside his wife of more than five decades, Marie-Claire. I’d no idea and, as a fan taken by unhappy surprise, it likely affects my writing and perspective on this, his final album. At 84, Zimmerman was not young, and had decades of sporadically released, underheard music behind him, starting with his Tony Visconti-produced 1968 debut, Ten Songs (which David Bowie listed in Vanity Fair in 2003 Read more ...
Guy Oddy
While it’s four years since the Bobby Lees’ excellent Bellevue album was released, they haven’t been stumbling around in the slow lane since then. Having gone on a burnout-enforced hiatus in 2023 with guitarist Nick Casa moving on to pastures new, singer and all-round Renaissance woman Sam Quartin has appeared in a couple of films, while rhythm section, Macky Bowman and Kendall Wind have been seen playing with veteran garage rocker, Jon Spencer of late. So, they’ve certainly been keeping themselves busy.This busyness may explain the brevity of their new disc, which only clocks in at a little Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There’s not – and never has been, really – that much discourse about commercial dance music as music. It’s either talked about by ageing doomers (“oh the kids just want to film on their phones, they don’t dance any more”), as spectacle or social phenomenon, without ever really differentiating EDM from big room house from bassline from whatever else. Not that musicians like Sonny Fodera probably care, mind. Over 13 years and now six albums, racking up quarter-billion stream songs at a time, and ubiquitous in pop radio as much as mega-raves, Fodera has constantly trodden an interesting line Read more ...