Memento Mori is an anomaly. Album 15 of a 40-year career is supposed to be business as usual. It’s supposed to be slightly worse than the one that came before, which was slightly worse than the one that came before. It’s supposed to have a lead single that sort of sounds like a big hit from the back catalogue, plus a bunch of other songs that sound tired at best. It’s not supposed to be a time for firsts. And it’s really not supposed to be this good.
High Window’s debut album, Benighted & Delighted, has been a long time coming.
You could say Keith Dixon has been working towards it his whole life.
Bloc Party: Alpha Games
Bloc Party’s Alpha Games is an album of our times. No, it’s not yet another rumination on the sociological, existential, and mental health impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s not that reductive. Instead, the 12 unflinching tracks carry an underlying sense of discomfort, unease, dread; that low-level feeling surely everybody’s had over the past five years that something’s not quite right. The only relief is provided by moments of despair, outbursts of rage, and sparkles of beauty.
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Unlimited Love
In some ways, Unlimited Love is more than just another Red Hot Chili Peppers release. It’s their first in a decade recorded with producer Rick Rubin. More importantly, it’s their first since 2006 to feature John Frusciante. His replacement, Josh Klinghoffer, is clearly a talented musician. On 2011’s I’m With You, he ably channelled the mercurial guitarist, while 2016’s more experimental The Getaway made him an integral part of producer Danger Mouse’s sonic palette.
Placebo: Never Let Me Go
Everything’s a matter of perspective. Even as Placebo’s 2016 greatest hits album and accompanying two-year world tour reminded fans of their extensive back catalogue, it reminded the band they’d never been about commercial success or nostalgia.
Tears For Fears: The Tipping Point
The road to The Tipping Point was long and (yes) winding.
There were the initial “speed dating” songwriting sessions with flavour of the month hitmakers. There was the fully completed album of wall-to-wall “bangers” all intended to top the pop charts. There was Curt Smith’s disappointment in the results, prompting him to consider leaving Tears For Fears again.
Spoon: Lucifer On The Sofa
The opening 20 seconds of Spoon’s tenth album tell you all you need to know. In-studio banter and the sound of instruments being tuned are universal shorthand for “this music was recorded by people playing in a room together”. And that’s exactly the spirit that the instantly compelling Lucifer On The Sofa embraces.
Steve Louw is a storyteller. From the slow train of 1990’s ‘Waiting On The Dawn’ that “takes us back to the dreams and hopes we had when we were young”, to the restless wanderer of 2008’s ‘The Wind Blows’, the singer-songwriter has created imagery as vivid as the music that accompanies it.
‘Headlight Dreams’, Louw’s first international solo release, is no different.
Good thing IMF agent Ethan Hunt isn’t afraid of heights. He’s already leapt from a speeding train onto a helicopter inside the Channel Tunnel. He’s gone free-climbing up a 600-metre cliff-face. He’s leapt between Shaghai’s skyscrapers. So scaling the outside of the world’s highest building, Dubai’s 163-storey Bhurj Khalifa, without ropes, is all in a day’s work.
The epic action centrepiece of ‘Ghost Protocol’ easily surpasses its predecessors in terms of sheer scale and white knuckle thrills. But – with comedian Simon Pegg in tow to explain how Hunt’s adhesive climbing gloves work (“blue means glue, red means dead”) – the sequence also highlights the differences between the ‘Mission: Impossible’ films.
John Cleese has been the disgruntled owner of a dead parrot, a lawyer, overconfident (and ultimately limbless) knight, clueless and belligerent hotelier, TV news reader, civil servant at the Ministry Of Silly Walks, zookeeper, cheese aficionado, Roman Centurion, and fruit-obsessed self-defence instructor.
So it’s easy to forget that, as the actual creator of these characters, the self-described “writer, actor, and tall person” is first and foremost a storyteller.
Nils van der Linden