The Boxing Day release of Michael Mann’s first feature in eight years, Ferrari, finally follows up Blackhat, a Chris Hemsworth-starring cyber-thriller dismissed on its 2015 release in a manner he hadn’t experienced since The Keep (1983). This two-disc, 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray Arrow release reveals many memorable virtues, alongside surprising inertia and superficiality.
Down memory lane, taking us back some six decades to the Buffalo Springfield, the latest Neil Young album's almost 50 minutes of continuous music, each song segueing into the next.
“Songs from my life, recently recorded, create a music montage with no beginnings or endings,” Young has stated. “The feeling is captured, not in pieces, but as a whole piece, designed to be listened to that way… This music presentation defies shuffling, digital organisation, separation. Only for listening. That says it all.”
The realisation that Shirley Hurt is the name assumed by Canada’s Sophia Ruby Katz for recording helps explain why her debut album is so oblique. As well as the cloaked identity, what seem initially to be direct songs cleaving to familiar musical forms have winding structures which don’t end up where they seem to be heading. Similarly, the lyrics are tough to parse.
Ghost Woman’s 2022 self-titled album and this January’s swift follow-up Anne, If were both fairly laidback and spaced out affairs, with echoes of Beak’s free form motorik grooves and the Byrds’ pastoral psychedelia. Now that multi-instrumentalist Evan Üschenko has recruited the forceful percussion of Ille van Dessel to gang, however, their third album in 18 months, Hindsight Is 50/50 presents a considerably heavier prospect.
A deathless trend in pop is taking great songs, slowing them down, doing orchestral versions, or rendering them raw acoustic. This, ostensibly, reveals their genius and/or brings them a new audience. Rarely, it can work, as on Johnny Cash’s final albums, but usually it simply renders sonic perfection as bland, naff slop. Such is the case with Trevor Horn’s latest.
Some 28 years in gestation, Peter Gabriel’s eighth studio album of wholly original songs – his first since 2002’s Up – will delight his fans and top the charts. Gabriel’s best instrument remains his voice, that husky marvel, which is at its most resonantly tender, vulnerable, and intimate here.
British anti-war films inspired by “the war that” failed “to end all wars” include Oh! What a Lovely War, The Return of the Soldier, A Month in the Country, Regeneration, Mrs Dalloway, The Trench, Testament of Youth, the different versions of Journey’s End, and Terence Davies’s haunting swansong Benediction. For simplicity of form and style in rendering the pity of war – and the war waged by officers on their men – none improves on King and Country (1964).
After leaving Midlake while recording their fourth album, Tim Smith said he was pursuing music under the name Harp. That was in 2012. Smith had been the Denton, Texas-based band’s singer and main songwriter. Without him, Midlake pushed on and issued 2013’s still-stunning Antiphon album.
Two weeks ago, Welsh harpist Catrin Finch and Irish fiddler, violinist and Hardanger fiddle player Aoife Ni Bhriain entranced their audience at the Union Chapel in North London, playing from their new album, Double You, as part of the London Jazz Festival, with guest singer Angeline Morrison joining them at the end of a glorious 90-minute set of dazzling instrumental duets.
Listening to the best of what they’ve created since their post-2005 reformation, it would take a staunch anti-Take That churl to hold fast to the punk-rockin’ claim the “man band” are, musically, just talentless piffle. “Shine”, “Patience”, “Hey Boy”, “The Flood” and others are evidence to the contrary.