CDs/DVDs
Reissue CDs Weekly: Art Ensemble of Chicago, Nathan Abshire, Nick Drake, DonovanSunday, 21 April 2013
Art Ensemble of Chicago: A Jackson in Your House/Message to Our Folks/Reese and the Smooth OnesA New Orleans brass band plays a death march. What sounds like a saucepan is tapped steadily. The music suddenly dives into swing. A bicycle horn... Read more... |
CD: Frank Turner - Tape Deck HeartSunday, 21 April 2013
Frank Turner has been setting his life to music ever since he re-emerged as a heart-on-the-sleeve singer-songwriter type some time in 2005, and so it’s hard to avoid the temptation to play therapist when considering his most personal collection of... Read more... |
CD: Har Mar Superstar - Bye Bye 17Saturday, 20 April 2013
On the cover of Bye Bye 17, Har Mar Superstar – the creation of musician Sean Tillman – is still wearing his infamous underpants. Inside, however, his music has moved on. By trading Har Mar's former Prince stylings for influences ranging from... Read more... |
DVD: Dead HeadFriday, 19 April 2013
British film noir followed two courses in the 1980s. Whereas the American neo-noir revival of the 1970s prompted such contemporary crime thrillers as The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa, and Stormy Monday, three superior BBC drama serials, though... Read more... |
CD: Michael Bublé - To Be LovedThursday, 18 April 2013
It’s too obvious just to take the Canadian charm-monkey down in a bile-fest, so where to begin? He looks a bit peaky on the album cover and peakier still on the first page of the CD insert booklet (not that anyone under 40 listens to CDs). He’s lost... Read more... |
CD: Ian McCulloch – Holy GhostsWednesday, 17 April 2013
When I suggested reviewing Ian McCulloch's new album, our glorious editor was under the impression that it was just a live collection of ancient tracks. It is actually a double album – mainly old Bunnymen beauties on the self-explanatory Orchestral... Read more... |
DVD: You're Human Like the Rest of Them - The films of B S JohnsonTuesday, 16 April 2013
The author B S Johnson would have been 80 this year. An accessible "experimental" writer, cheekily described by the author Jonathan Coe as “Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde of the 1960s”, he’s best remembered for The Unfortunates, a book in... Read more... |
CD: Morris Cowan - Six DegreesMonday, 15 April 2013
Some 20 years ago, a series of albums called Artificial Intelligence on WARP Records aimed to promote techno as home-listening music. They made up a frequently sublime collection, but unfortunately the word “intelligence” in their title was picked... Read more... |
CD: Françoise Hardy – L’amour fouSunday, 14 April 2013
"Stately" is the best adjective for Françoise Hardy’s similarly measured follow-up to 2010’s La pluie sans parapluie. Fifty-three years on from her first release, there is no need for Hardy to break new ground or hare off on a tangent, but her... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Sandie Shaw, Country Joe & the Fish, David Bowie, MorrisseySunday, 14 April 2013
Sandie Shaw: Sandie/Me/Love Me Please Love MeThe former Sandra Goodrich probably would have emerged in the Sixties as an embodiment of the era. She could have been a model, actress or a TV presenter. But it was music that found her, and it... Read more... |
CD: Major Lazer - Free The UniverseSaturday, 13 April 2013
When Major Lazer first appeared half a decade ago they were two on-the-rise DJ-producers, Diplo and Switch, touting a novel mash-up of electro and Jamaican rhythms. Like Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz before them, they hid behind a jokey conceptual conceit... Read more... |
DVD: CapturedFriday, 12 April 2013
While it’s impossible to know the effect of Captured on the few who originally saw it, you can be damn sure it packed a punch. It still does. This unforgettable film was made in 1959 for the Army Kinema Corporation to train personnel in resisting... Read more... |
