CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
Ozzy Osbourne stands on the front cover of his new album grinning mischievously in a horror-style bowler hat and cane. Look into the eyes, though, and there's also a hint of sadness. The Prince of Darkness (71) has been beset by a series of health problems, and this, his 12th studio album, may also be his last. If so, what a way to bow out. Ordinary Man's songs look back at the singer’s life with a mix of trademark lunacy and wistful regret, topped off with guest appearances that range from rapper Post Malone to Rocket Man, Elton John. Like many of rock's best recordings, Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Moonlight Benjamin, the fierce and deep-voiced vocalist from Haiti, is a powerful presence on stage. On her second album, she is once again supported by a tight cohort of French musicians led by guitarist Matthis Pascal, who has written the music for Moonlight’s Creole lyrics. The band play raunchy yet sophisticated blues, tinged with the bounce of Guadeloupean Zouk, as on the opening track "Nap Chape" and a good dose of pile-driving heavy rock, ably demonstrated on songs such as "Tchoule" and "Belekou".Moonlight Benjamin has a rich contralto voice, at time seductively soft and at others Read more ...
Mark Kidel
8 ½ is one of the classic films about the art of cinema. There is something about the make-believe of movies, and our buying into the dreams they foster, which suggests reflection and self-referencing, as if films offered a mirror to our inner lives and the stories we tell on the big screen. Truffaut’s La nuit américaine (Day for Night) and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard both play with this rich material in their own very distinct ways. Fellini’s film is altogether different, as it is about himself and the story describes his inner turmoil and creative stasis with great brio and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Spook The Herd concludes with “A Fitting End”. In a cracked, reflective voice, Hazel Wilde sings: “I want a door to the Nineties…what a fitting ending, what a perfect scene.” By hoping for a portal into the recent past, it seems an attempt is being made to escape into – or even bring back – times when there was less negativity to deal with than today. A form of nostalgia maybe. Or a criticism of where things are now.Up to this point, the first eight tracks on the fourth album from Newcastle’s Lanterns On The Lake have tackled extremes of view expressed via the internet (“Baddies”), being Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
From This Place (Nonesuch) is a complex, meticulously produced and many-layered album which demands concentrated and repeated listening. In many ways, it is all the better for it. Pat Metheny himself has written an essay or “Album Notes” of no fewer than 2,020 words to explain how the concept of the album evolved, as it went through a several-stage process of conception, recording, arranging, production. He also explains its significance in his oeuvre: he calls it “a kind of musical culmination, reflecting a wide range of expressions that have interested me over the years.”There Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
What’s going to make you fall in love with Tami Neilson? Will it be the way she cackles her way through the chorus of “Ten Tonne Truck”, her foot-stomping rags to riches daydream about a down-on-their-luck performing family who head for Nashville with dreams of country stardom? Will it be the cheeky euphemistic “woo-hoo” that punctuates the litany of women’s work that is never done on “Queenie Queenie”? Or perhaps the little smile she gives when she stumbles, all high heels and higher hair, into the model village representing the view from the back of a tour bus in the “Hey, Bus Driver!” Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Huey Lewis and the News were an unlikely mid-Eighties phenomenon. Their Sports album was a mega-success for a band already approaching early middle age. Their Fifties feel, given a contemporary polish and boosted by association with cinematic juggernaut Back to the Future, sat comfortably (yet incongruously) alongside the likes of Madonna and Duran Duran. They were, however, always shorthand for middle-of-the-road, their appeal satirized by Brett Easton Ellis who made them a favourite of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. It should, then, come as no surprise that their latest album is Read more ...
Owen Richards
And so, Tame Impala’s evolution from riff-laden psych-mongers to dancefloor-fillers is complete. It’s undeniable from the opening drum machine on “One More Year” supplanting Kevin Parker’s trademark kit-work. The band’s music has always been built from the groove up, but now the head banging has been replaced with waves of rhythm that flow through the body. The Slow Rush is an apt name. This is an album that replicates the wash of a narcotic come-up. Unstoppable, inimitable, and highly addictive.A sense of joyous adventure carries through the songs, less concerned with the destination than Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In the times long before Oasis and certainly before indie music made much of an impression on the public consciousness and wallet, Alan McGee’s Creation Records carved something of a niche for itself, by championing fey psychedelic guitar-pop revivalists. Rishi Dhir’s Canadian space cadets, Elephant Stone clearly have quite a fondness for those times, by immersing themselves in that sound with their latest album, Hollow. However, not content in tipping their collective hat to McGee’s acid eaters from the 1980s, Elephant Stone have flown even further into the psychedelic firmament, by making Read more ...
Mark Kidel
There is something deliciously normal about Tennis, the Denver husband and wife team of Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley. Steeped in the best pop of a bygone age, the couple’s lyrics seem so simple and yet unpack hidden depths on repeated listening. Moore and Riley met as analytical philosophy majors - with a shared love of great and often little-known music - and they bring to their crystalline songs of love a sophistication that never gets too clever.This is their fifth album, and they never let up. As time goes by, Tennis seem to refine their art, leaving most traces of indie rock behind. Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Without wanting to get into what constitutes punk, we can, at least, agree that brevity is to be lauded? Right? Good, because at 26 minutes, Green Day’s 13th studio album, Father of All Motherfuckers, is a volley delivered at velocity. That’s not to say that all 10 tracks speed along at the same Ramones-esque breakneck pace however. There’s room for changes in speed and style as the pop-punk’n’roll band deliver an album high on energy and low on political outrage. Despite no shortage of source material, any fans hoping for American Idiot #2 will find something very different in store. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
10 years ago, a wave of exciting femme-pop was cresting, women taking the reins with singular visions; the results were shiny, personally honest, inventive and ebullient, from Gaga to Adele and beyond. A leading light was La Roux, a duo fronted by the androgynous Elly Jackson. She looked different, a bit Bowie, and the music was a fantastically catchy reimagining of Eighties synth-pop. They had monster hits with “In for the Kill’ and “Bulletproof” but Jackson’s career since has swerved about somewhat. Her return is much-anticipated. Unfortunately her third album, while bubbling with bounce, Read more ...