Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 17 September 2021. Pianist/composer and 2021 Guggenheim Fellow Helen Sung celebrates the work of influential women composers on her latest album Quartet+, crafting new arrangements of tunes by Geri Allen, Carla Bley, Mary Lou Williams, Marian McPartland, and Toshiko…
If you’ve ever seen and enjoyed Baz Luhrmann’s kinetic Romeo + Juliet (1996), you’ll probably enjoy Die in a Gunfight. Like Luhrmann, director Collin Schiffli updates Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for a contemporary audience. Although the result is a mixed bag, Schiffli gets it mostly right. The film reminded me a lot of the recent…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 10 September 2021. If you could call out to your country, what would you say? When Eric Bibb embarked on the title song that would galvanize his latest album, Dear America, the songwriter found himself unpacking a seven-decade relationship…
Updating classic fairytales is nothing new (see: Shrek). And, of course, the musical has been around for as long as movies have had sound. So combining an updated take on Cinderella with a pop-laden musical would seem to be a guaranteed winner. But somehow director Kay Cannon (Blockers) and her team have created a by-the-numbers…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 3 September 2021. Montreal band SUUNS’ fifth full-length album The Witness – their first for Joyful Noise Recordings – marks a shrewdly offbeat left turn from their previous work. The tried-and-true narrative for a band of this nature is…
Despite perceptions to the contrary, art and crime are never far apart. Dark deeds plagued Renaissance painters like Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi. The artist Walter Sickert has been accused (posthumously) of being Jack the Ripper. And the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre is one of many “crimes of the 20th Century”….
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 27 August 2021. “Everything has to be said.” This is the conviction guiding Indigo De Souza’s sophomore album, Any Shape You Take. This dynamic record successfully creates a container for the full spectrum—pushing through and against every emotion: “I…
The “wrong man” trope has a long cinematic history. It provided the basis for at least three Alfred Hitchcock classics – The 39 Steps, North by Northwest and The Man Who Knew Too Much. But it probably found its most intriguing form in the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, like The Conversation. Now director Ferdinando…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 20 August 2021. Recording for the first time live and as a full band, Shining Bird demonstrates their mastery of cathartic improvisation and stripped back songwriting on their new album Deadlands. This is exactly where producers Tim Whitten and…
You don’t have to look hard to see the shadows looming over Lisa Joy’s Reminiscence. The film is essentially a re-working of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, with futuristic elements overlaying the noirish story. What Joy does with the tale is clever, but it never surpasses the original. Joy is better known as a screenwriter, notably for…
