28 hours ago Kim Deal: Nobody Loves You More review – a solo debut worth waiting for

(4AD)The Pixies and Breeders musician’s distinctive touch is ever present on a set that spans heartbreak, good times and strident guitarsA decade and more in the making, Kim Deal’s first solo album under her own name more than repays the wait. Nobody Loves You More distils the cult American musician’s strengths – previously flexed in the Pixies and her own bands, the Breeders and the Amps – into a tight 11 tracks that span heartbreak, good times and strident guitars.Fans may remember the poignant sucker-punch of Are You Mine? from long-ago 2013, a song that reflects the period when her mother’s Alzheimer’s led to Deal becoming her primary carer. A rueful, yearning cut, Wish I Was, dates from the same period, while LP closer A Good Time Pushed – whose take on fun errs towards ambivalence...

Politics

30 hours ago Lars Danielsson/Verneri Pohjola/John Parricelli: Trio review | John Fordham's jazz album of the month

(ACT/Edition Palmer)Bassist Danielsson, guitarist Parricelli and trumpeter Pohjola combine folksy melodies, Latin grooves and free-roaming improv on this lustrous albumWhen ACT boss Siggi Loch asked the three European musicians who created this glowing collage of folksy melodies, Latin-grooving and freely roaming improvisations for their three favourite jazz records, they all included one by Keith Jarrett. These singular artists aren’t Jarrett mimics, but see the piano giant as a transitional bridge between the American and European jazz cultures that had shaped their respective soundworlds for years.Swedish bassist/composer Lars Danielsson, former Loose Tubes UK guitarist John Parricelli and lyrical Finnish trumpeter Verneri Pohjola came together at ACT’s invitation to record in the wa...

Politics

30 hours ago Witches review – impressive study of postpartum psychosis recovery equated to witchcraft

Director Elizabeth Sankey’s free-ranging film uses interviews with actors and support groups alongside clips of cinematic covens to draw parallels with her own experiencesThis deeply personal, essayistic film by Elizabeth Sankey impressively manages to be very moving but never mawkish, raw but also surgically precise. It is quite free-ranging in its scope, but is essentially about how witches and their history overlaps with postpartum depression on the one hand and psychosis on the other, all told through the filter of Sankey’s own experience. Looking straight into the camera, she explains how she was engulfed by anxiety and depression after the birth of her son in 2020 during the Covid pandemic; after several trips to A&E and crisis moments, she ended up in a special psychiatric wa...

Politics

31 hours ago Poppy Ajudha: Poppy review – frank lyrics elevate soulful, funky love songs

(Virgin) The singer-songwriter cycles through many moods, finding hope and complication in her search for love and meaningWhen south London singer-songwriter Poppy Ajudha ended a two-year hiatus with the release of single My Future, a stunning and resolute self-love anthem about the greatness of ambition, she was evidently shifting her jazzy pop-soul formulation in a new direction. Debut LP The Power in Us had mused on bold political themes from abortion rights to borders, but second album Poppy charts Ajudha’s emotional development, with vulnerability and precise lyricism. Take Somebody to Love – with divinely escalating vocals and choir-like layering, Ajudha openly longs for love and firmly upbraids someone for “never showing up”.The album thrives on its mix of tempos and moods, from ...

Politics

32 hours ago Barrowbeck by Andrew Michael Hurley review – folk horror spans the centuries

The chill of the supernatural pervades these unsettling tales, following a settlement’s history from the deep past to the near futureThe quintessential “bad place” is one of the staples of horror fiction. For Stephen King, the bad place – think the peculiar little town of Castle Rock or the Overlook Hotel in The Shining – most usually acts as a repository for a long-forgotten evil or injustice to resurface (often literally, like the dead cat from the desecrated Native American burial ground in Pet Sematary). For writers such as Robert Aickman, the nature of the bad place is more elusive, so deeply immured in time that its effects are felt more often than seen: a prickling at the back of the neck, a chilly intimation of doom that, when spoken aloud, is ignored or ridiculed...

Events

32 hours ago Bread & Roses review – Afghan women reveal crushing reality of Taliban rule

Made under dangerous conditions, this documentary charts how the lives of three women were turned upside down by Afghanistan’s overthrow in 2021Afghan film-maker Sahra Mani, creator of the rape-survivor documentary A Thousand Girls Like Me from 2018, brought her camera to Kabul to chronicle Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban in 2021 following America’s withdrawal. A strange mixture of amnesia and cross-party reticence means that this issue has not in fact featured much in postmortem discussions of the Biden/Harris administration. Women’s rights were immediately crushed by theocratic misogynists, and Afghanistan’s women cannot have been reassured by the response from the western anti-war left, notably the now notorious, breezily unconcerned tweet from Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis: “Ha...

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