CDs/DVDs
Katie Colombus
If you’re still searching for a summer soundtrack, look no further. Blossoms will make you want to immediately take a road trip around Devon, cruising at sunset, musing over easygoing lyrics and having a bit of a hum while appreciating a good strum.The synth-heavy "Charlemagne" drags you immediately into a beautiful journey, with a cruising rhythm and gratifying melody. It’s cheerful indie, with none of the tormented whinging we experienced the first time round in the 90s (and with some of the more recent "nu-retro" stuff). "At Most a Kiss" keeps the pace, driving and persistent before " Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“I may not be pure, but I’m as simple as they come,” says Dolly in the press release, by way of explanation for this latest collection. In fact, she’s neither, which is just as well – a certain pretence is a crucial part of her act. What makes these songs work (and they don’t always) is the deliciously self-conscious tension between the two seemingly contrasting sides of her character: the dedicated wife and granddaughter of a preacher, versus the irresistibly sensual lover and artist. She’s authentically, simultaneously both things, and her art emerges from the fragrantly forbidden fruit, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There will surely be no end to the debate as to how any work of art can approach treating the Holocaust, and its depiction in cinema, with the great immediacy of that form, has always been especially problematic. Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’s 1965 film The Shop on the High Street (Obchod na korze) certainly stands in the very first rank of such attempts, its depiction of how a civilian population becomes complicit in treatment of outsiders remaining as insightful and necessary today as ever.Kadár and Klos’s film achieves that rarest thing, the convincing introduction of elements of comedy into a Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The duo of Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi – aka 21- and 23-year-old Tupelo Mississippi brothers Khalif and Aaquil Brown – are the epitome of everything that is baffling to ageing hip hop fans. Whisked from obscurity as teenagers by superstar producer Mike Will Made It, they became the breakthrough rap success of 2014, with what appeared to be little more than leaping around shirtless barking a bunch of half-nonsensical slogans and in-jokes about how much weed, money and sex they are surrounded by. There's nothing overtly conscious or “woke” about them, no reverence for hip hop's history, just Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Peter Hall’s 1974 film depicts English village life when its roots still ran deep, with generations sunk often unwillingly into the same soil. Based on Ronald Blythe’s 1969 bestseller Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, Blythe and Hall – both “Suffolk men who have been reconditioned into intellectuals”, as Hall wrote in his diary – collaborated closely on location. Their amateur cast were drawn from the villages Blythe had canvassed for his non-fiction book. Their East Anglian burrs are almost impenetrable, a land-locked language spoken under big Suffolk skies.Garrow Shand plays sullen Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Despites odd dives into atonal sound-colour, Ryley Walker’s third album shares much with the catalogue of Island Records circa 1971 and the more edgy Elektra singer-songwriter albums from around 1969. Not that it sounds dated. The daisy-fresh Golden Sings That Have Been Sung is timeless, yet so clearly draws from a deep knowledge of maverick solo artists like Tim Buckley and John Martyn that it inevitably evokes its foundations. As it was with the similar-minded Jonathan Wilson and his Gentle Spirit album, Walker’s reconfiguration of the past confounds any suspicions that overtly embracing an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A two-bar flurry of guitar lays the table for a skip-along beat, handclaps, and an arrangement and melody akin to Martha and the Vandellas’ March 1964 single “In my Lonely Room”. This though was not a Motown production and did not tell the story of a girl so distraught at her boyfriend’s dalliances that all she could do was take to her lonely room and cry. On “The 81”, Candy & the Kisses sang of a dance craze for anyone “tired of doing the monkey, tired of doing the swing.”Despite being a knock-off of the Detroit sound, the irresistible “The 81” did not sound like a Motown record. It Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Sia, Mo, Adele, Lukas Graham and Coldplay. Those are artist names that speak of a general desire to make their owners accessible to the mainstream. Hieroglyphic Being is not that kind of name and the music he makes is equally abstruse. He’s called this album The Disco’s of Imhotep, which implies it will be danceable and have some conceptual association with mystical healing. It’s certainly danceable, but its edges are not gentle, and it’s also wilfully tricksy in places. Overall, however, for DJs, techno-heads and lovers of tough, crunchy electronica, there’s much to enjoy.Hieroglyphic Being Read more ...
Graham Fuller
One of European cinema’s most dynamic storytellers, Jacques Audiard chose to follow his iconoclastic romance Rust and Bone and remorseless prison drama A Prophet with a film addressing Europe’s refugee crisis. The no less searing Dheepan won the Palme d’or at Cannes last year.The decision to depict the experiences of three Hindu Tamils newly arrived in France was prompted by the likelihood that the movie’s predominantly French audience would be relatively unfamiliar with the fallout of the Sri Lankan Civil War, which ended in 2009. In terms of posterity, it was a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
After 20 or so years the Moles are back. Great news, one imagines, for fans. Others may be a little nonplussed about their identity. A quick recap then. During the early Nineties the band catalogued the lo-fi adventures of quirky Aussie psych-rocker Richard Davies. Davies and friends later relocated to New York and London where they achieved a degree of cult success. But in 1996, the singer decided on a change in musical direction and the Moles were no more. Davies's "Moles" ideas were put on ice. Now they've been warmed up in the form of Tonight's Music. Unsurprisingly, the LP is Read more ...
Barney Harsent
In an age where things change at a lightning pace, where we are programmed for progress, touchstones are crucial. There’s a need for something we can rely on to remain solid, unchanging and free of the burden of momentum. The noise produced by Dinosaur Jr, which comprises J Mascis, Lou Barlow, drummer Murph and others, is just such a thing – gloriously monolithic and fondly familiar.On this, the band’s 11th studio album, there is, if anything, an echo of past glories. Indeed, when the clatter and drums of “Goin' Down” starts up, their 1987 sophomore statement of intent, You’re Living All Over Read more ...
Joe Muggs
In the early 2000s, a club called Trash in London, run by DJ Erol Alkan, introduced a wave of indie teenagers to the joys of electronic music, giving them a way into club culture that was all theirs and not beholden to the superstar DJs of the acid house generation. A generation of bands would form directly or indirectly influenced by it – and by the end of the decade, there was a mini wave of bands like Friendly Fires, Late Of The Pier and Wild Beasts, who integrated electronic sound into a rock band format, and brought a bit of disco glitter and androgyny to their image to boot.It felt like Read more ...