CDs/DVDs
CD: Beady Eye - Different Gear, Still SpeedingFriday, 25 February 2011
This isn't an awful album. It even starts really well. The opener, “Four Letter Word”, comes pounding in with the sort of jackbooted psychedelic rock attitude that Oasis always promised and so rarely delivered. Add a swooshy noise and it could... Read more... |
CD: The Blow Monkeys – Staring at the SeaThursday, 24 February 2011
It is a crowded market for primate reunions at the moment. In the same week that Davy Jones, Peter Tork and Micky Dolenz announced that they are hardnosing the highway again minus Mike Nesmith, the original line-up of eighties pop nuts The Blow... Read more... |
CD: Starfucker - ReptiliansThursday, 24 February 2011There are a lot of fucks out there in popland at the moment. Holy Fuck! and Fuck Buttons are happily laying their brand of electonic-tinted drone-rock on the world and then there's Portland Oregon's Starfucker. Read more... |
DVD: Another YearWednesday, 23 February 2011
Another of Mike Leigh’s finely nuanced ensemble pieces features some of his repertory players - including Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville and Ruth Sheen - who have developed their roles and dialogue in collaboration with the director. Those who... Read more... |
CD: Nicolas Jaar - Space Is Only NoiseWednesday, 23 February 2011
Of all the multiple micro-genres that make up the obsessively over-defined world of electronica and dance music, perhaps the dullest has always been deep house. The very words conjur up images of soul boy oldsters who misrecall rave as a jazzual... Read more... |
DVD: Sweet Smell of SuccessTuesday, 22 February 2011
It’s difficult now to imagine Hollywood conceiving a one-two punch as ferocious as Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd and Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, which were released a month apart in the summer of 1957. Their target was the... Read more... |
CD: The Cave Singers - No WitchSunday, 20 February 2011
It didn't take long for the back-to-the-barn modus operandi of bands like Bon Iver, Akron/Family, The Acorn and Fleet Foxes to descend, like a slow fall from A-minor to F, into something close to cliché: we're nowadays up to our horn-rimmed specs in... Read more... |
DVD: Arsenal & ZvenigoraSaturday, 19 February 2011
What a time of ferment of artistic revolution the 1920s were in the Soviet Union. Pioneering arts techniques overlapped for an all-too-brief period with the progressive ideology of communism. Alexander Dovzhenko’s Arsenal and Zvenigora were at the... Read more... |
CD: Lykke Li – Wounded RhymesFriday, 18 February 2011
“Don’t pull your pants before I go down… Like the shotgun, I need an outcome, I'm your prostitute, you gonna get some”. The lyrics of “Get Some”, the first single from globetrotting Swedish popster Lykke Li’s second album, are unforgettable. The... Read more... |
DVD: The Social NetworkThursday, 17 February 2011
In films featuring computer whizzes, there is always a key scene in which, to illustrate the whizziness, a star actor bashes on a keyboard at implausible warp speed. The Social Network is the first major film to respond to the drama inherent in... Read more... |
CD: Iness Mezel - Beyond the TranceWednesday, 16 February 2011
No, not “trance” in the sense of galloping four-to-the-floor electronic music made by people on Ecstasy for people on Ecstasy. This trance is the original ritualised half-conscious state produced by fast, intensely repetitive, rhythmic tribal music... Read more... |
CD: JÆ - Balls and Kittens, Draught and Strangling RainWednesday, 16 February 2011
There is a certain kind of Northern European songcraft that's difficult for we genre-crazed music journo sorts to categorise. The active components are a musical stew of late-night cabaret blues, oddball jazz-classical instrumentation, a smidgeon... Read more... |
