If you key in "Josienne Clarke" on Google, you’ll hit on the "About" section of her website, and the following declaration sets up her stall: "No label, no musical partner, no producer. Clarke is in complete control of her songwriting, arranging, producing, release schedule and musical direction."
Last year’s Brad Pitt vehicle Bullet Train was an affable action comedy except in those parts – including the dreadful coda – when it was an insufferably smirky one. Freighted with more thrills, intelligence, gravitas, and social commentary, 1975’s The Bullet Train, released in a 2K restoration on a Eureka Classics Blu-ray, is the better movie.
GoGo Penguin’s new album, Everything is Going to be OK, is so named, not because the band are in possession of an hopeful crystal ball which predicts an imminent end to the UK’s present social and economic problems or of Vladimir Putin’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine, but is a somewhat more humdrum statement about the easy listening neo-jazz trio and their future.
This is technically Leslie Feist’s first release since 2018’s Pleasure. But that doesn't mean the Canadian songwriter has been resting on her laurels.
I admit I’ve never really seen the point of Ellie Goulding as a pop star. What is it that identifies her? What aspect defines her music? What sets her apart from the pack? Since I believe femme-led pop music is the defining pop of this century so far, surely I should be onside? My contrarian side honestly willed her fifth album to persuade. But it does not.
Popular musicians “going classical” can work well. Look at Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, at Richard Reed Parry and Colin Stetson from Arcade Fire, or at the late Jóhann Jóhannsson who had a successful career as indie and electronic musician in Iceland before becoming a globally beloved orchestral composer. Of course the boundaries are flimsy anyway these days, with the likes of Max Richter, Nils Frahm and Anna Meredith existing comfortably with one foot in the concert hall and one in the gig venue.
Anyone who’s heard even a smidgin of Reg Meuross’s music will know what a wonderful writer he is, homing in on often painful aspects of our shared history and retelling it in powerful and poignant songs that make any half-sentient listener want to explore further – both the history and his music.
"We’re not just a dance band, we’ve got things to say.” Pauline Black, lead singer with The Selecter, succinctly pins down what made the era of 2-Tone Records so important to the British music scene at the end of the 1970s.
On Domestic Sphere, Josephine Foster’s guitar and voice are joined by clacking crickets, a flock of sheep and wailing cats recorded in La Janda in southern Spain. There are also Colorado and Tennessee's birds and frogs. Foster’s great-grandmother is here too, her singing recorded around 1970: the voice from the past enters proceedings suddenly but not jarringly on the album’s ninth track “Reminiscence”.
May 1968. As France’s Fifth Republic shook, radical director Jean-Denis Bonan divided his time in the Paris streets between filming protests and the fictional hunt for a cross-dressing serial killer. A Woman Kills lay unfinished and forgotten till 2010, a rough-edged film maudit from a tumultuous time.