CDs/DVDs
graham.rickson
Strongroom is a film to be endured as much as enjoyed, Vernon Sewell’s low-budget thriller almost unbearable to watch in its final stages. Released in 1962 as a supporting feature, Strongroom depicts what happens when a bank heist goes badly wrong, leaving the branch manager and his secretary locked in a vault with just 12 hours of air. Unfolding over a long Easter weekend, the three gang members realise that if the bank staff suffocate, they’ll face a murder charge and capital punishment. Colin Gordon and Ann Lynn spend most of their screen time in perspiring in their cramped, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Solo albums by musicians from established bands can be interesting beasts - not least when discovering which route they’ve decided to take with their own music. Will they be conservative and carry on with no deviation from the normal; will they run for the hills and bring something completely different to the table; or will they take a middle road and just fiddle around the margins of their day job?Flea – former Beavis and Butthead favourite and bass player for US rock megastars, Red Hot Chilli Peppers – has very much jumped ship from the day-to-day with his first solo album. For Honora is by Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The title is, of course, typically British understatement. This Music May Contain Hope has not just irresistible confidence and optimism but also real originality about it. All the way from a spoken film noir-ish intro, right through to the final track, in which everyone, yes everyone involved in the album is thanked, including every single member of the London Symphony Orchestra, with all of its section members individually named from front to back.Raye’s moment has definitely arrived, and the future looks very bright indeed. “Where is My Husband?”, her co-write with Mike Sabath, first Read more ...
Joe Muggs
If you’re supposed to be in touch with pop culture as part of your professional life, there’s not much that can sharpen the lines of your ignorance like having teenage kids. Of course, not everyone can know or like everything, especially not in this era of unimaginable abundance. But my kids reaching the age of proper fandom has really brought me up on how I’ve lazily treated huge sections of the global mainstream as homogenous blocs, when musically and culturally they are really anything but. This has particularly been the case with the arena rave sounds of American EDM, and with the factory Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There was a surreal moment in February when, scrolling through my feed, I became briefly convinced that Sting had cult-napped Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso.The evidence was a deadpan video of the "Every Breath You Take" singer welcoming two traumatised-looking Argentine pop stars into something called the Free Spirits Wellness Centre. It took a sec to work out that this announced the new album from the smooth-voiced, mulleted, snarly-pouting Ca7riel and his friend since childhood, gravelly sounding and perpetually wide-eyed Paco Amoroso. What was going on?If you're not yet acquainted, the duo Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In this most challenging of times, we need music to lift our spirits and relieve the gloom. Step forward, in all their retro-chic, cabaret-burlesque splendour The Puppini Sisters, with their perfect harmonies and songs that cheer and distract. Their style, and sometimes the songs themselves, are drawn from the dark days of the 1940s, when The Andrews Sisters filled the crackling airwaves with songs such as “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”, their style heavily influenced by an earlier close-harmony sister act, The Boswell Sisters, who came out of the Jazz Age and enlivened the years of the Great Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Mother Pearl is not direct. While sixth track “Checking In,” with its rising-falling cadences and verse-chorus structure, is its most immediate, the dominant impression of the new LP by the Iceland-born Gyða Valtysdóttir is that it’s about creating an atmosphere and then nurturing it to generate an enveloping aural milieu.According to Gyða, quoted in the promotional material, “Mother Pearl is a seed, is potential, is a gift, is an aragonite, is a jewel created from an irritation from a grain of sand, is iridescent, contains all the colours, is vibrant, it is a fertile egg waiting to become.” Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Once upon a time, albums of cover versions were something of a “go to” (along with hastily assembled live records or compilations with one or two new tracks) when an artist’s creative juices were running a bit dry. In recent times though, these stop-gaps seem to have been replaced with the remix album – because who really wants to give away all that lovely publishing income?However, it seems that the covers album might be making something of a comeback in 2026. Already this year, the Damned have put out Not Like Everybody Else and even Willie Nelson has released Last Leaf on the Tree. The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The best of Ladytron should be on everyone’s playlists. Over 27 years, the Liverpudlian synth-pop act have established themselves as a well-loved international cult act. They’re heading for (underground) heritage status, despite a quarter of the band leaving three years ago (Reuben Wu departed to focus on his successful photography career). The good news is that, on their eighth album, they’re still up for exploring new musical pastures.On Paradises, the trio revel in retro-Balearica, indie-goes-house songs redolent of Brits-on-hols-on-Doves groovin’, mostly sung by Helen Marnie and Mira Read more ...
Guy Oddy
After a career of constant line-up churn, the video for recent single “Profane Prophecy” would suggest that the Black Crowes are now down to brothers Chris and Rich Robinson and whatever session musicians might be required for the moment. However, nothing much else seems to have changed on the band’s 11th album – which like all of their previous discs, sounds like it could have fitted in snuggly with the release schedule of 1973 and headed straight for the Hot 100.That said, Black Crowes fans clearly aren’t looking for anything particularly innovative when they press play on any of their Read more ...
Joe Muggs
For anyone to create a whole, new, recognisable – and kick-ass – musical style in this day and age is no small achievement. To do so as you enter your 70s is pretty mind boggling. Yet somehow, that’s what sometime Sonic Youth-er Kim Gordon did on her second solo album The Collective in 2024. She’d already made a huge splash with No Home Record in 2019, where she smashed all kinds of dance, electronic and hip hop elements into distorted alt-rock with uncommon panache, but The Collective tightened the focus, building a whole language around mutations of the modernist drum patterns and bass Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In recent years, noisy Canadian experimentalists, New Age Doom have shown themselves to be unafraid to engage with musical genius from all parts of the sonic pallet and have collaborated with the likes of Norwegian singer/songwriter Tuvaband and, on one of his final albums, the great Lee “Scratch” Perry. This is as well as having been remixed by musical mavericks from South Africa’s BLK JKS to US post-hardcore types, Quicksand.Their new disc, however, sees them go directly to the source and team up with the mighty HR, long-time vocalist of US hardcore punk originators Bad Brains – a group Read more ...