CDs/DVDs
Barney Harsent
Before the resurgence in vinyl, and the resultant pursuit of audiophile perfection on pointlessly expensive sound systems, was the musician’s fetish for vintage equipment and analogue synths. Live, this makes sense: sounds go direct into the audience's ear, air its only conduit. After the painstaking pathway that most recorded music has to take – downloaded onto a phone and compressed to flux through headphones made entirely out of snidely weighted plastic reputations – you wonder why they’d bother. Generator, the second album from Berlin-based producer Rodion, shows exactly why, boasting a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Around the turn of the century, when Brit Pop was infatuated with a Beatles-esque plodding beat, the Dandy Warhols were putting out some fine slabs of Glam-infused Garage Rock that often bothered the charts with a substantial dash of decadent swagger. A couple of decades on, and four years since the stripped-back This Machine, they’re back with a heady mix of driving electronics, power pop hooks, trippy psychedelia and garage rock attitude which suggests that the middle of the road is a long way off.Album number ten, Distortland may be full of many of the things that have made the Dandy Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The most radical of the directors who forged a “cinema of resistance” at the BBC in the 1960s, Peter Watkins completed two groundbreaking docudramas there – Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965) – before the suppression of the second prompted his eventual exile to countries more receptive to his internationalist films and his anti-capitalistic approach to financing and making them.Half a century hasn’t dimmed the seismic power of this pacifist diptych, now handsomely restored and packed with supplements by the British Film Institute for its release in a dual format edition. The antithesis Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s been a lifetime in pop music since the Last Shadow Puppets’ debut album, The Age of the Understatement, went straight to number one in the UK charts. With Alex Turner taking a break from his day job with Arctic Monkeys, however, he’s finally got back together with ex-Rascals’ mainman, Miles Kane, to resurrect their side project for album number two. Cinematic orchestral beat pop may still be the order of the day on Everything You’ve Come To Expect, but there have been changes, and the melodramatic Scott Walker and David Bowie-like flourishes have been turned down somewhat to allow plenty Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Is greatness there from day one, does it evolve or suddenly strike? Do artists – in any discipline – develop in steps or arrive fully-formed? How does the quotidian become exceptional? With the new triple-CD set Highlife-Jazz and Afro-Soul (1963-1969), the man who would be dubbed the Black President has what amounts to 39 musical baby pictures made easily available for the first time. As to how this release answers any of these questions, it is a question of degree.First issued in Japan in 2005, Highlife-Jazz and Afro-Soul (1963-1969) was a pioneering collection of the bulk of Fela Kuti’s pre Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There's an area in American music that is oddly under-reported given its scale. Somewhere between the garish mania of mainstream dance music, “EDM”, and the cool cachet of more underground sounds is a kind of “festival electronica”: very musical, often subtle and sophisticated, acts detached from nightclubs and often far more visible on the live circuit, where lasers and LED displays create epic backdrops for their sound. Acts like Tycho, Pretty Lights, Ratatat and British export Bonobo have, mostly through hard touring, built highly lucrative careers, and increasingly form a layer within the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Never ever have I felt so… nostalgic for the late 90s. While memories of platform jelly shoes, silver eyeshadow and purple all-in-ones mostly have me cringing, there’s no denying that the ultimate coolest thing about that generation was "Pure Shores". And now, despite the tabloid mayhem of the band’s first split in the early Noughties, All Saints are back, with a vengeance.I mean that literally – there’s a lot of fighting talk in Red Flag. There’s a nod to the high-profile, relationship-fuelled tabloid fodder that became the band’s downfall, but (dare I say it) there’s a smidgen of girl power Read more ...
Graham Rickson
The earliest film collected here, 1963’s Elgar, stands up incredibly well. Some of its quirks were imposed from above: fledgling director Ken Russell was initially employed by the BBC’s Talks Department and was discouraged from using actors in his documentaries. So Elgar is packed full of reconstructions of scenes from the composer’s life, though the actors never speak and there are no close ups.All of which adds to the realism, aided by Huw Wheldon’s sonorous narration of Russell’s script. The images are glorious: the recurring scenes of Elgar traversing the Malvern Hills accompanied by his Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“7 Years” is one of the biggest hits of 2016, spending five weeks at the top of the UK charts, with plays on streaming sites running into the hundreds of millions. It’s by 27 year old Danish singer-songwriter and former successful child actor Lukas Graham Forchammer and his eponymous band. They have been pop stars in their homeland for half a decade and this album – now boosted with a couple of previous Danish hits – was a chart-topper there last year. The appeal, it seems, is Forchammer’s guileless lyrical honesty, backed with a Clearasil-spotless, squeaky clean stadium pop pitched somewhere Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The deadpan duo of Tennant and Lowe have never been easy to suss out at the best of times: maybe their way of layering wackiness on deep seriousness, eyebrow-flickering subtlety on roaring camp, giddy frivolity on erudition, has been their way of staying fresh. The Gilbert & George of British pop, they live to perplex even into middle age and beyond. But even given all that, quite what they're doing starting an album with “Happiness”, a hokey country and western hoedown mixed into the thumping EDM of modern American raves – sounding like Major Lazer going crazy on the chewin' tobacco – is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The trio of Sixties television documentaries assembled here are prototypical examples of Ken Russell’s oeuvre: hyper-real, and often frenzied, depictions of the lives of their subjects. Each not-quite or more-than documentary was made for the BBC in an era when boundaries were pushed and the corporation allowed directors to follow their artistic sensibilities. Although there is little immediate link with the Ken Loach of 1966’s Cathy Come Home, both he and Russell thrived in the fertile environment of a BBC which took chances.The Great Passions collects Always on Sunday (1965), a portrayal of Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Free improvisation has been part of the jazz scene since the 1960s, and you would have to look long and hard to find anyone who would be shocked by it these days. So it takes a special kind of imagination to make improvised music sound as fresh as this debut from the young band led by Welsh double bassist and composer Huw V Williams. It’s not, to be fair, completely improvised – Williams can even write tunes – but there’s a rare vivacity about the composition and orchestration. For once the blurb is accurate: “It is a captivating and vital record.” If you’re looking for a statement of all the Read more ...