"Disgusting", "depressing", "sheer horror from start to finish", a "filthy, rotten, immoral play". Such were the comments from viewers published across a spectrum of British newspapers following the BBC transmission, on 12 December 1954, of Nigel Kneale’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Expansive, free-form, handmade and improvised, the extravagantly-titled The Liquified Throne of Simplicity is the fourth album from this freewheeling Slovenian trio of multi-instrumentalists.
West Side Story’s cinema release crashed into Omicron and never recovered. Maybe Ariana DeBose’s Oscar will help the world wake up to this Spielberg masterpiece, which definitively betters 1961’s Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins version.
The global popularity of Latin music in the past few years is almost incomprehensibly huge. 2017’s “Despacito” by Puerto Rican Luis Fonsi was the point where it became clear that Latin America – like South Korea – was now operating entirely on its own pop terms and making the rest of the world dance to its beat. And a look at global streaming charts will show consistently vast figures for artists like Brazil’s Anitta whose “Envolver” is currently the worldwide no.1 single with streams in the hundreds of millions.
Jack White is still unsatisfied, and rock’n’roll still unfinished business for its most extremist exponent. His last pre-pandemic album, Boarding House Reach (2018), seemed a major blow to his career, its experiment in warped dynamics and Beat spoken-word relatively rejected, despite its chart-topping start, a setback barely arrested by the Raconteurs’ reunion.
“You know you’ll always be my best friend” and “There’s no-one else who gets me quite like you” run a couple of the lyrics to “Happy New Year”, the opening song from Norwich duo Let’s Eat Grandma’s third album. And the whole is laced with love songs from band members Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth to each other, not romantic love, but songs passionately, poetically affirming their long friendship.
Wet Leg’s self-titled debut album is one that has generated significant expectations over the past few months. Last year’s singles “Chaise Longue” and “Wet Dream” especially created all kinds of hype and led to plenty of media coverage.
“Everything bad that has happened to me has happened because I’m black,” laments teacher Joseph Pascale (David Oyelowo) in Shoot the Messenger, directed by Ngozi Onwurah in 2006 from a script by the late Sharon Foster. Handsomely produced and visually stylish, it was originally broadcast by the BBC.
Although Moon Rally has unambiguous musical roots, pinning down where it’s from is trickier. The album’s title nods to Air’s Moon Safari, as does a fair degree of the rhythmic chug and shimmering atmospherics. Sweden’s Radio Department come to mind. So do Belgium’s Antena and Estonia’s Maria Minerva.
Despite a five-year career and no breakout hits, Australian outfit Confidence Man has grabbed the attention of some heavyweights.