Archie Roach - Let Love Rule

In its combination of country, soul, percussive folk and piano-led balladeering, Let Love Rule reminds me of no one so much as Nick Cave (it's also only one word away from a Nick Cave album). But it's its own thing too, twined around Roach's characterful voice - he's one of those singers you believe when listening to - and songs of love of different kinds, at least some of them being love of country and land. There are some beautiful songs here.

The Weather Station - Ignorance

A sinuous and slyly oblique singer-songwriter record that doesn't skimp on the melodies. Like more than a few others going around at the moment (eg Weyes Blood) she seems to look back to the 60s/70s in producing a set of woodsy and folk-touched yet also distinctly digital-sounding songs that move in waves. I'm liking this.

Yesterday

The best thing about this film is the way it allows the songs to shine - a reminder of the Beatles' true greatness.

The second best thing is the concept - what if the Beatles were erased from history instantaneously and no one had any memory of them other than one extremely struggling singer songwriter?

Maybe Yesterday should have done more with those two elements but even as it is, and even with some problematic bits (especially the romance), it's a feel good film ultimately just as it aspires to be.

SAULT - Untitled (Black Is)

A melting flow of styles and textures - Black music and very good music.

Big Thief - Two Hands

Forceful stuff. "Not" is an outlier, with the rest of the album veering more electric-folk but it all hits hard.

Wonder Woman 1984

I gather this wasn't universally liked in the way its predecessor deservedly was, but I enjoyed it. I like the way it has a different shape from most comic book movies, taking its time in setting up and lingering in her loneliness and self-imposed isolation at the beginning and working in some nice character moments with both Barbara Minerva and Steve Trevor, and finding a genuinely lovely sequence in the fireworks over DC as they take off in the invisible jet. The movie seems to care just as much about who its characters and and what it's about as it does about its action scenes. Gal Gadot is the same empathetic figure she was last time, and Kristen Wiig and Pedro Pascal both hit the mark for me, including via the latter's embodiment of the 'greed in the 80s' theme that runs through the plot - providing a neat interlock with the period setting and the contrasting sacrifice that WW makes and the way she literally saves the world at the end by reaching the whole world and persuading everyone to act for the greater good. 

Nadia Reid - Out of My Province

Smooth and lonely (but not too lonely) contemporary folk; voice and songs both strong. Best are "High & Lonely" and the more propulsive "Oh Canada".

Promising Young Woman soundtrack

This is one where the music is integral to the film, and so the soundtrack unsurprisingly stands up.

Most memorable are Charli XCX's still terrific "Boys" (in lightly remixed form), Donna Missal's brooding "Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby" and "Angel of the Morning" (the Juice Newton version - one of those songs that's somehow endlessly present in popular culture).

Also, surprisingly, the Paris Hilton song - "Stars Are Blind" - is really quite good, in a throwaway kind of way. Listening to it of course brought to mind that scene where they dance to it in the pharmacy, which plays at the time as a classic date-cute moment with an extra layer from his implied sensitivity based on his knowledge of such an out and out pop song's lyrics and willingness to sing along to them, and later with much darker undertones flowing from Hilton's status in our culture, ie becoming famous due to a leaked sex tape.

Juno

Ripe for rewatching and stands up well. It was clearer to me this time how deftly it sidesteps the pro life / pro choice argument by centring Juno's own decision; also the contrast between Juno's growing maturity and the Jason Bateman character's stuckness-in-adolescence and general jerkishness, and the validation of both single parenting and blended families and the implicit mirroring of the non-mainstreamness of Juno herself and the relationship between her and Michael Cera's Bleeker. Also a reminder of how good an actor Page was from the beginning, both interesting and believable.

(last time, in 2008)