CDs/DVDs
graeme.thomson
There are two fundamentally opposing schools of thought on Florence Welch and her mysterious machine. For the believers, her music belongs to the tradition of questing, modernist pop with a pagan trim of the kind Kate Bush made before she started writing 14-minute songs about having sex with snowmen. To the naysayers, on the other hand, she’s both shallow and contrived, a paint-stripping belter desperate to lend her sub-Siouxsie Sioux shtick gravitas by grafting on a skin of borrowed poses and studied weirdness.Neither view quite nails it. In reality, Welch makes occasionally stirring but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This might not have been a bad album if Lou Reed wasn't on it, but its 95 minutes would still have been 50 per cent too long. Not being privy to the inner workings of the Metallica universe, I have no idea why the speaker-bursting veterans thought that working with Reed might be to their advantage, unless they'd fallen for Lou's own propaganda about Metal Machine Music being a masterpiece. In the end, the band gathered in the studio to whip up a batch of piledriver riffs and broody instrumental backdrops, over which Reed has been permitted to intone lyrics (said to be inspired by Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Some pretentiousness was inevitable. Any film that sets out to tell the story of the universe (we get the whole caboodle - big bang to eternal blackout - with cameos for dinosaurs, microbes, DNA and even Sean Penn) is I'd say bound, perhaps even required, to sink into the mud of philosophical grandiloquence. But to focus on this, or the film's frequent slips into the coffee-table visual language of Anselm Adams (electro-static trees, smoky waterfalls) or the moralising family lectures through which this story of the universe is mediated, would be unfair. For, however familiar Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Joker, aka 22 year old Bristolian Liam McLean, is one of the most individual talents of the dubstep/grime generation. His long run of dancefloor-directed single releases, some originally recorded when he was in his early teens, showed natural gifts for finding the funk in the sparsest rhythms and for frazzlingly catchy melodic synth riffs which meant his productions leapt out of DJ sets wherever and whenever they were played. Now, following a quiet 18 months, his debut album shows that he's not content to rest on his laurels.The Vision is a high-gloss affair. McLean has always been a Read more ...
peter.quinn
Spoiler alert: this CD contains grooves that will bring out your inner air guitarist. From the album's lead-off song, “Tenderly”, whose sumptuous voicings lesser artists can only fantasise about, to its towering sign-off, “Fingerlero”, George Benson's 24-carat gift for free-flowing improv remains a thing of wonder. “Fingerlero” also features one of the most recognisable and heart-stirring sounds in jazz: Benson scatting in perfect unison with his deftly picked guitar lines. He makes you wait, but it's so worth it.Heard in both combo and solo settings, the 12-track set includes nods to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s no doubt that In the Realm of the Senses shocked and still shocks, but after watching this first-ever uncut UK release, it’s hard to figure out what shocks most: the sex, the equation of sex, obsession and death, that all this takes place in a sealed environment ruled by ritual, or whether it’s the revelation that Japanese society could produce a film so opposite to its perceived or received persona. It could also be the fact that it's based on a true story.Neither 1976's In the Realm of the Senses or Ôshima’s follow up, 1978’s Empire of Passion (although based on a Namura novel, Read more ...
howard.male
How thrilling to hear you again, gentleman. Can it really have been 30 years? Yet within half a song, the emotional and cerebral connections are re-established in my brain as post-punk’s least punky band present their shiny new songs for our amusement and amazement. However, my job is to resist the inexorable pull of nostalgia: some objectivity is required if this review is to be of any worth to anyone under 45. In other words; do Devoto and co still cut the mustard in the 21st century?There’s nothing here as John Barry bombastic as “Shot by Both Sides” or as icily disconnected as “Permafrost Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Is there any point criticising Coldplay? You might as well take issue with your own digestive system, or the word “the”, or the colour brown. They're there, they're part of the fabric of things, they're not going away. Indeed, so etched are they into our culture, with not just ambitious indie bands but every rapper from Jay Z on down adding a mopey none-less-funky chant-along chorus into their tracks in the hope of getting some of those Chris Martin dollars, that getting riled by their sound is, frankly, a short cut to insanity.And anyway, they're not awful as such. For every mimsy-whimsy Read more ...
david.cheal
These days Tom Waits lives in the boondocks of California with his wife and co-writer Kathleen Brennan and their three children. A settled life sometimes makes for dull art. Not in his case. At 61 he has just made one of the albums of his life. Seven years have passed since its predecessor, Real Gone, and he seems to have got over his bathroom-beatbox phase (it was thrilling but at times almost unlistenable) and emerged at a place where he still connects with the urge to be a loner, to be a lover, to flee, to join in, to whimper, to rage and to roar, but in a musical idiom that doesn’t sound Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They don’t make films like Red Psalm any more. They rarely made them then either. In Red Psalm (1971), Miklós Jancsó imagined a corner of a Hungarian field in 1898 in which the forces of revolution were pitted against the uniformed, armed and often mounted might of the establishment. But unlike a regular piece of schlock-heroic agitprop, Jancsó envisions an encounter that is somewhere between a ballet and a debate, a folk opera and a game of toy soldiers.Rather than simply shout at or shoot one another, his peasant protagonists and young soldiers engage in stylised argument. One side spouts Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Gary Numan and Cliff Richard are clearly kindred spirits. One was born Gary Webb, the other Harry Webb. Both have strangely youthful appearances, though one owes it to tennis while the other looks as if he owes it to the blood of virgins. Both are deeply unfashionable yet have fiercely loyal fan bases. And a quick fact check reveals that Numan's "Cars" replaced Cliff's "We Don't Talk Any More" at Number One 32 years ago last month.And that's where the similarities end. Dead Son Rising is a Frankenstein's monster of an album, made up of old demos with new bits grafted on. The biggest Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Norwegian, Ane Brun’s biggest impact has been in Sweden, where she lives. Since her last studio album, she’s toured and recorded with Peter Gabriel. Her new album again finds her diving off the expected path, throwing herself forcefully onto new musical ground.Her voice is still recognisable. Crystalline, tremulous and keening, it’s meant to bear emotion. But the aptly titled It All Starts With One might as well be a debut album. Always a stellar songwriter, Brun chose to get her material across in a familiar, largely folk-styled way. It could be the Gabriel experience that's pushed Read more ...