CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell first put out a joint album only a couple of years ago but their association goes way back, before either’s mainstream US fame. Crowell was working closely with Harris as long ago as the mid-Seventies, still within immediate memory of the latter’s folk origins and groundbreaking partnership with Gram Parsons. He later found major success Stateside but has never been renowned in Europe like Harris. Perhaps it’s their steadfast friendship that makes The Traveling Kind such easy-going and pleasing listening.Harris can always write and deliver a decent song but Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Almost two decades into a distinguished career, nobody would have judged Thea Gilmore for indulging herself with a greatest hits collection – indeed, it’s something that record labels have been bugging her about for years. Album number 15 Ghosts and Graffiti is perhaps intended as a compromise – part new songs and part old favourites, featuring an all-star cast of collaborators and reinterpreted with the same affection and irreverence the singer-songwriter recently brought to Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and the lost lyrics of Sandy Denny.Two of the songs from Don’t Stop Singing Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Todd Rundgren is not known for sitting on his laurels and churning out the same old stuff year after year. Since Runt, his debut solo album from 1970, he has tried out a vast array of genres from heavy metal to prog rock, EDM and power pop, as well as having a prominent role in Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell. Runddans, his second album of 2015, sees him venture further into pastures new by teaming up with Scandinavian electronica boffins Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Emil Nikolaisen for a one-track ambient beast – albeit one with a hefty injection of prog sounds.Runddans came about after Rundgren Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Fall has always delivered great album titles, and Sub-Lingual Tablet is right up there with the best – Witch Trials, Hex, Caustic, Are You Are Missing Winner… The song titles, too, have a medicated, sub-lingual ring that no other artist could pull off – “Junger Cloth”, anyone? – guaranteed to wipe away all psychiatric waste...Several songs take on the soft-focus Stasi surveillance of mobile social media – the rage and fury of “Facebook Troll” – Smith’s multi-layered vocal stylings, whiplash shrieks and raw blizzard of gleeful hatred are breathtakingly purgative, the song's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Spooky Tooth: The Island Years (An Anthology) 1967–1974After Spooky Tooth called it a day in 1974, various long-time members struck out in directions as unpredictable as their former band’s identity was hard to get a handle on. Drummer Mike Kellie joined the Lou Reed-influenced, punk-era band The Only Ones. Their main songwriter, co-vocalist and keyboard player Gary Wright scored a massive US hit in early 1976 with the fantastically atmospheric proto-yacht rock single “Dream Weaver”. Guitarist Mick Jones formed the immediately successful (in America) formulaic rock band Foreigner. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is the sort of intoxicated, mythic romance rarely seen in Britain or Hollywood. It is a tribute from the latter’s defiantly literate maverick, Albert Lewin, to the former’s Powell and Pressburger. Using the hallucinatorally vivid colours of their cinematographer Jack Cardiff and a couple of their stock players (Marius Goring, John Laurie), Lewin’s 1951 film is set in Spain “about 20 years ago”, under an “erotic and disturbing” moon, outside its Anglo-American leads’ normal place. When a mysterious Dutchman (James Mason, pictured below) moors off shore, events move outside time, too.The Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Back in the Seventies, in between keeping an eye out for the unwanted attentions of radio DJs and waiting for punk, the internet or colours to happen, there was real beauty if you knew where to look. By which I mean telly, of course. From the haunting fairground tones of the introduction to schools programme Picture Box, to the rolling sci-fi thrill of The Tomorrow People theme, it seemed that, far from not wanting to scare the horses, these oddball music makers would have sampled their galloping retreat and used it as a rhythm track for an animated short about a deaf boy and his magic snail. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Chungking are Brighton's great could-have-should-have band. Appearing around a decade ago the trio, enigmatically fronted by singer Jessie Banks, offered up an opulent alternative take on the whole indie-dance thing. Songs such as “Stay Up Forever” had irresistible, hedonic punch but the band were equally capable of channelling a delicacy that recalled The Carpenters at their most melancholy. They seemed to be on the cusp of hugeness. They were, after all, potentially accessible to a wide pop audience at the same time as appealing to clubland connoisseurs.The cusp, however, was where they Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The phrase “improbable life” crops up more than once in Greg Olliver’s highly engaging documentary Turned Towards the Sun about the poet Micky Burn (its title is that of the writer’s autobiography). It’s a contradiction in terms, perhaps, but as a way of expressing the sheer richness of a life-story, one that overlapped with some of the notable events of the 20th century, encounters with Fascism and Communism, participation in one of the most daring World War II commando raids, imprisonment in Colditz, a complicated sexuality, and 50 years as a writer, it works rather well.It reminded me Read more ...
Matthew Wright
For someone apparently so suave, Joe Stilgoe feels uncomfortable in the modern world. His third album is an express journey - in an exquisitely furnished, authentic carriage - back to a pre-bebop era of bronzed, big-band swing, and witty pianist-singers. If the album title doesn’t sum things up clearly enough, there are songs like “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”. Nothing Stilgoe does is crude enough to hammer a point home, but songs like this one and “Nothing’s Changed”, on which Stilgoe poignantly sings “Did we know jazz would all get rearranged?” make the point unambiguously.Music so Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Building Bridges - Eurovision Song Contest Vienna 2015Mind-bogglingly, Australia is a first-time entrant in Eurovision 2015. The nature of Europe may be a concern for some backwards-looking British voters in next week’s election, but the inclusion of Australia in a competition organised by the European Broadcasting Union extends the remit of being European beyond even the wildest imaginings of foolish fringe politicians. The competition may be seen on Australia’s TV screens, but is that any reason for them to perform? Apparently, it is.The booklet with the double CD of Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Mumford and Sons, world conquering as they are, still fall victim to various accusations. Some, for instance, loathe their blandness. Others detect a whiff of smug middle class about them. Perhaps a more interesting observation, though, is how the band takes an intimate, personal musical form – folk – and turns it into something anthemic. Well, not any more. There’s nothing folk about Wilder Mind. Not a single banjo.The anthems are fewer in number too. Like Noah and the Whale before them, the Mumfords have wholeheartedly waved goodbye to nu-folk and moved their sound Stateside. So, how Read more ...