The most striking thing about the 1976 documentary (restored and re-released by the BFI) is just how polite Billy Connolly comes across as. Not that he's impolite now, but the raucous stage presence and vibrant chatshow interviewee was yet to fully form.
Always looking dapper and always sounding cool, Barry Adamson is a man who nevertheless seems to be perpetually of another time. Giving off the vibes of a one-man Rat Pack with a dash of the legendary Lee Hazelwood, his music certainly doesn’t have much in common with mainstream tastes.
So Billie Eilish’s new album has had its worldwide midnight release, dropping at midnight wherever you are kiddos, and taken as a whole it’s like some dark, heavy, low-hanging semi-forbidden, semi-erect fruit that you want to bite into, chew and swallow.
It’s a long way to the middle. Jack Savoretti has worked hard to get there. He’s grafted. His first album, 2007’s Between the Minds, hinted that his musical DNA bestrode early-Seventies Los Angeles, those Topanga Canyon strummers and such, but melded to something much more BBC Radio 2. It took a while for his core audience, the Dermot O’Leary mum-core massive, to find him. A nice fella and a looker, by about five years ago, they had. His last two albums were chart-toppers. But now he’s challenging the fanbase with an Italian language album. “Challenging” may be the wrong word.
Claire Denis’ 1988 debut is a sensual madeleine to her Cameroonian childhood, with its taste of termites on butter, sound of birdsong and insect chitter, and the camera’s slow turn and rise into vast vistas. It’s also a colonial reckoning, setting out themes of violent incomprehension and fractured souls. Like the gaze of France (Cécile Ducasse), her child surrogate in this 1957 tale, Denis’ initial African vision is enigmatic and unblinking.
Glance at The Holdovers’ synopsis and you might suspect that Alexander Payne’s latest effort is a slice of lightweight seasonal schmaltz. Yes, it is set at Christmas, and contains tear-jerking moments, but Payne and screenwriter David Hemingson throw so much more.
It’s been a long while since Beth Gibbons released an album. Portishead’s Third was out in 2008. She has lived through so many changes since, and, even though her signature is still very much in glorious evidence, Lives Outgrown represents a step forward and deeper than the moody indie pop of Out of Season her last solo outing, made with with Rustin Man (Paul Webb) of Talk Talk.
Having moved out of her mother’s apartment aged 15 to become “an emancipated minor” and set up her own record label, Righteous Babe, just four years later, every step of Ani DiFranco’s life has been determinedly – some might say ferociously – independent. Alt-folk, alt-rock – the labels don’t matter. What counts is her commitment and steadfastness during the course of a career that’s seen her on the righteous side of so many battles, in the US and beyond. She raised $47,500 to enable New Orleans musicians to replace their lost instruments after Hurricane Katrina.
Anniversary is Canadian singer-songwriter Abigail Lapell’s sixth album (if we include last year’s lengthy EP of lullabies). Her success has not reached much beyond her native land, as is often the way with Canadian acts, but she’s a proven talent, one who deserves a higher international profile. Anniversary consists of 11 poetic folk-country meditations on love.
The buildup to this album offered quite a bit of hope. The promo blurb with it talks about “cutting loose, trying new things… hark[ing] back to their gritty origins… freed from any expectations.” Most glaringly, it says it’s “the album the band says they’ve always wanted to make” – perhaps, along with the plaintive album title, a tacit admission that their heart hasn’t really been in the modern day AOR they’ve been pumping out every since the strained “woah-woahs” (“millennial whoops”) of “Use Somebody” and “Sex on Fire” blasted them into the mainstream in 2008.