CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
There’s been a quiet storm of critical approval building around Weyes Blood. American singer Natalie Mering has been releasing music for over a decade but, during the last two or three years a tailwind of positive verbiage has blown her faster forward. Her last album, Titanic Rising, the first of a loose trilogy, of which this is the second part, made low level inroads to commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, a fine balance of delicate singer-songwriter fare and something more baroque, has the potential to go further.Imagine the strident, indie- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Even the jolliest number on Micah P Hinson’s new album, a banjo-pickin’, wistful campfire jig entitled “Waking on Eggshells”, has him singing, “Give me a knife, I’ll show you my vein”, alongside offers to “blow out your brain” with various firearms, and proclamations he “must be going insane”.If the listener is after jollity, best look elsewhere then, but those searching for world-weary Americana could do worse than settle down, lonely and broken, with these 10 tracks from the Texas-raised singer.Hinson has released numerous albums since he appeared 20 years ago. He has a penchant for Read more ...
graham.rickson
Slovak director Eduard Grečner wrote the first draft of a screenplay for Dragon’s Return (Drak sa vracia) in 1956 but didn’t have the confidence to direct it, this adaptation of a novella by the Slovak author Dobroslav Chrobák that he finally realised 12 years later.An elderly but spritely Grečner appears in one of this disc’s bonus features and there’s a fascinating 2015 interview with him transcribed in Second Run’s booklet, Grečner recalling his efforts to convey the author’s rich prose in cinematic form. Dragon’s Return is indeed visually spectacular, the rocky landscapes and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Carl Cox is one of the key DJs of his generation, the generation that propagated the club culture which blossomed from the European acid house/rave scene (and originally, of course, from black American house and techno).Going through various musical stages Cox ended up as “the three-deck wizard”, focusing on tougher techno-centric sounds. These are the core of his fifth album, and first in over a decade. Utilising analogue equipment dug out of his garage, he achieves mixed results, but the best of Electronic Generations, despite its uninspiring title, has solid exhilarating whip-bang foot- Read more ...
Tom Carr
Jamie Lenman is as cult an icon as cult icons can get. The former guitarist, song-writer, frontman of Reuben, a band unfortunately most notorious for breaking up, but still dearly beloved by a devoted, passionate fanbase.Lenman has since carved for himself his own niche as a solo artist, kickstarting his solo venture with 2013’s double-sided debut album Muscle Memory. A handful of albums and an EP have followed, cementing his crown as one of the UK’s lesser-known but underrated alternative rock stars.Returning with his fourth album, The Atheist, Lenman sets his stall out on a smoothed-out Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Christeene is not so much a musical entity, as a performative assault, an artist who pushes drag somewhere visceral, caustic, wilfully edgy and defiantly unpolished. The creation of New York-based, Louisiana-raised Paul Soileau, her videos and shows have thus far probably been more important than her albums, but her third raises the bar.Where previously her music has been rap-laden, post-electroclash, the excellently titled Midnite Fukk Train is more fully-formed, in New York’s underground punk rock tradition. And she nails it.Accompanied by her Fukkn Band, the album has eight tracks and is Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There can be few currently operating musicians who have a sound as distinctive as Craig Fortnam’s. Whether solo or with his erstwhile band The North Sea Radio Orchestra, his writing has a kind of zig-zagging melody that’s part Robert Wyatt, part early Kate Bush, part medieval, part super modern, but all Fortnam. And that’s as true on this collection of 12 songs, each – as the title hints – recorded (with a “b-side”) in the space of a month and released on the full moon over the course of a year. You wouldn’t know, though, that this wasn’t conceived and recorded as a Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When most of us fall victim to things beyond our control, the impulse is to howl into the abyss, scream to the stars, wave our fist at clouds. Most of us, of course, aren’t Neil Young.While the raging wildfires that destroyed the singer’s home in 2018 are unlikely to be the sole driving force behind this collection of environmentally-focused songs (he hitched his horse to that wagon decades ago), they certainly seem to have focused his ire and given him a theme to roll with for World Record, his 42nd studio album.Following the success of 2021's Barn, Young sticks to familiar ground with Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Two-percent movie-making and 98% hustling,” Orson Welles sighed not long before his death in 1985. “It’s no way to spend a life.” His 1962 film of Franz Kafka’s The Trial was his penultimate full-scale completed feature, only 1965’s Chimes at Midnight similarly allowing him a regular director’s resources during his last quarter-century (the fraudulent documentary F for Fake from 1973 was later conjured from scraps with filmic legerdemain).Kafka’s paranoid tale, written as World War One began, and predictive of the totalitarian mindset which would murder his own family in the Holocaust, sees Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Not even a worldwide health epidemic could stop the meteoric rise of the Irish singer, who has managed to crack America, achieve national treasure status in his homeland and rack up streaming figures that could actually pay his winter gas bill. Not bad going.He’s managed it by being a broad strokes performer with film-star good looks and big, big voice – colossal emotion with a rough-edged burr. His appeal is deep and wide, capturing the hearts and imaginations with simple songs that render universal emotions in popular, comfortable colour schemes and Sonder, his second album, does little to Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Larkin Poe story goes back to 2010, when they released four beautiful and distinctive seasons-related EPs, displaying the Lovell sisters Rebecca and Megan’s rich, absorbing vocal harmonies, slippery slide guitar work and a winning with with crunchy blues-rock riffs. They’ve released five albums since then, and Blood Harmony is, for the Georgia-born siblings, a musical homecoming to the sultry humidity of the American South of their musical and familial roots. The cover art looks like a Seventies vintage that’s been hauled around in a crate ever since, and that decade spreads its own aura Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Bruce is back! His 21st studio album (can it really be 50 years next year since Greetings from Asbury Park?) and his second covers album. It’s a musical world away from the first, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006), but like that collection it’s a deep dive into a genre totally different to his own – American soul classics from the 1960s and 1970s.Begun in 2020, shortly after the release of Letter to You, the world in lockdown, it’s an opportunity for the Boss to put his “badass voice” at the service of 15 of the “most beautiful songs in the American pop sound book” – songs which Read more ...