Album: Django Django - Glowing in the Dark
A much needed ray of fluorescing festival fun from the indietronic troupers
It’s odd that there’s still no name for the wave of genre-agnostic British bands of the '00s.
DVD/Blu-ray: Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story
Scorsese and Dylan's smoke and mirrors can't obscure an exhilarating tour
In the autumn of 1975, Martin Scorsese was finishing Taxi Driver, Bob Dylan began his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, and Orson Welles’ F for Fake premiered in New York.
Album: Paul Leary - Born Stupid
Butthole Surfer keeps the freak flag flying high
“I could have been a doctor or a lawyer, playing golf with my rich friends at the club” bemoans Paul Leary on the title track of his first solo album in 30 years.
Album: Foo Fighters - Medicine at Midnight
Anthems for an imaginary festival
The massed rock audiences which caused Dave Grohl’s old band such angst have fuelled the Foos. This tenth album was finished early in their 25th year, with a celebratory lap of 2020 festivals booked.
Album: The Staves - Good Woman
The Staveley-Taylors kick over the traces
The Staves – Emily, Jessica, and Camilla Staveley-Taylor – have routinely been described as “an indie folk act”, and while the term folk has undergone a lot of stretching over the years the band’s first two albums – Dead & Born & Grown and If I Was – could broadly be said to fit, their latest, Good Woman, requires redefinition.
Album: John Carpenter - Lost Themes III: Alive After Death
The film director and soundtrack composer releases his first solo album in five years
John Carpenter may be more celebrated as the director of such great cinematic landmarks as Escape From New York, Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween, but he is also well-deserving of his plaudits as one of the founding fathers of modern electronic music.
DVD/Blu-ray: The Masque of the Red Death
Horror is a many-splendoured thing in Roger Corman's 1964 film of Poe's tale
One hundred and seventy four years ago today, on Tuesday, 2 February 1847, the body of Virginia (“Sissy”) Poe, Edgar Allan Poe's 24-year-old wife, was interred in a vault in a graveyard near the couple's rented cottage in Fordham, in the Bronx; she had died of consumption (tuberculosis) the previous Saturday.
Album: Elephant9 - Arrival Of The New Elders
Norway’s jazz-prog luminaries take their feet off the accelerator pedal
Album: Femi Kuti and Made Kuti - Legacy+
Scions of Afro-Beat dynasty deliver the old and new
Fela Kuti and Afro-Beat have achieved a kind of joyous immortality: his son Femi and his grandson Made keep the flame of Nigerian agitprop and party-music ablaze, with a pair of albums (Stop the Hate by Femi, and For(e)ward by Made) that both, in their distinct ways, pay homage to the man who started it all.