CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
You couldn’t make this guy up. A pianist from age 11, he grew up in a strict Ghanaian Christian household in deepest north London, had his teenage world turned upside down when he saw New York indie-alternative torch act Antony & the Johnsons in a rare peek at TV, ran away to become homeless in Paris, busking for a living, then slowly made a name for himself. This biography is dealt with in the serialist piano stomp of “Adios”, before the song blooms into an Ennio Morricone-meets-Philip Glass escapade.Now 26 and striking looking, with a notably chiselled jaw and a giant pompadour haircut Read more ...
Barney Harsent
After waiting a quarter of a century for Blancmange’s last album, 2011’s Blanc Burn, this new offering, effectively a Neil Arthur solo project, almost feels like a rush release. There’s a much changed visual aesthetic – gone is the stylised, Fifties cover kitsch, replaced by something much more stark and impenetrable. Now, I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but what about CDs?This new collection is certainly darker, but, before we address that, let’s get the negative stuff out of the way. Don’t worry, it really won’t take long. So… “Useless” sounds like the Wedding Present trying Read more ...
David Nice
Filming in bombed locations around Italy and Germany, the immediate evocation of wartime and post-war moral zeros, ordinary Italian locals and American GIs playing themselves alongside professional actors: all these assets would be enough to make Rossellini’s gritty films made between 1945 and 1948 essential to the history of cinema. But cinema as vibrant life itself breathes in the pace and in most of the performances.You’ll probably be familiar with Anna Magnani’s passionate mother and lover and Aldo Fabrizi’s heartbreaking Father Pietro in Roma citta apertà (Rome, Open City). These were Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone whose attention was caught by Royal Blood’s recent explosion in popularity and who imagines the Brighton duo as rock innovators, with their bass and drum approach, may be surprised to hear that Lightning Bolt have been ploughing that particular furrow since the 1990s. In fact, Fantasy Empire is the Rhode Island band’s sixth album and its first since 2009’s monumental Earthly Delights. The two bands’ chosen instrumentation is their only similarity though. Instead of heavy blues riffs, Lightning Bolt churn out joyous, high-speed noise-rock that frequently suggests twisted, industrial Read more ...
Mark Kidel
There is languor about the swamps of the Southern USA that’s reflected in the drawl of local speech and the slow-paced sensuality of the music. Boz Scaggs, indefatigable lover of American roots music, and one of the most consistently excellent US musicians of the last 40 years, swings down South for his latest collection of flawlessly produced covers. Rich Woman which opens the album captures the downhome funk of L’il Millet and his Creoles’ original better than the ear-catching revival of the same song a few years ago by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Scaggs has always gone for the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Simple Minds: Sparkle in the RainPlaying increasingly larger venues throughout 1983 had changed Simple Minds. “In places like that, 50,000 people, there’s just no room for subtlety, and there’s no need for it and there’s no want for it.” The quote from frontman Jim Kerr is telling.When Sparkle in the Rain was released in 1984, it made good on the promise of “Waterfront”, the single which trailed it. This was a new, heftier Simple Minds: a band retooled for stadia. “Someone recently described the record as 'art school rock with fantastic bombast',” says Kerr elsewhere in the book Read more ...
Heidi Goldsmith
“How will I sing us out of this sorrow?" Björk wails over jagged cello arpeggios, six songs into her string quartet-led break-up album Vulnicura. Though heartbreak may be the theme most often stewed and chewed up by singer-songwriters, optimism - a belief in music's healing power - is the driving force of this nine-track record.Though we might wish Björk cried iridescent neon tears, the album's emotions are familiar enough to imagine her your snotty chapped-cheeked self. Albeit psychologically twisted by an accompaniment of legato strings that collide erratically with squelching beats. " Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Leviathan is an urgent film about corruption in Putin’s Russia and you should make sure you see it. The story has an elemental simplicity: the remorseless state, in collusion with the church, sets out to crush the blameless individual citizen with the brutal use of the police and the courts. It is remarkably beautiful to look at, and acted with valiant truthfulness (and a lake of vodka). Perhaps the Academy’s voters missed a geopolitical trick in not anointing Andrei Zvyagintsev as this year’s best foreign film.Don’t expect to have a good time: this Russia has no truck with happy endings. For Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s a particular sound that the best 1970s British punk rock has, scuzzy, scorched riffage emulating Chris Thomas’s multi-layered guitar production for the Sex Pistols. The Rezillos had it and they still have it. This is their first album since their 1978 debut, Can’t Stand The Rezillos, and it sounds as if it was made the following year rather than three-and-a-half decades later. The Rezillos, from Edinburgh, never embraced punk’s fury, nihilism or politics but, coming on like The Ramones crossed with The B52s, they fetishised sci-fi retro kitsch, looking a riot of quiffs, mod-ish ties, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
These days, reflections on Madonna’s 30 years at the top of the pop podium may only be framed in terms of the pagan Triple Goddess: maiden, mother and crone – or, at least, that’s what the global reaction to The Fall That Was Heard Around The World® would lead one to believe. But with enough raunch among the 19 – nineteen! – tracks that make up the deluxe edition of Rebel Heart to make all three blush and a track which, guest rap from Nicki Minaj aside, is essentially a blow-by-blow reinterpretation of pop bad girl du jour Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop”, it’s clear that the only Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A frivolous piece of hysteria. I liked it in a confused sort of way but when it was all over I must confess I couldn’t really see the point.” So ran the Daily Express review of The Manchurian Candidate on 5 November 1962. Other fascinating newspaper appraisals quoted in the booklet of this new Blu-ray/DVD edition of John Frankenheimer’s Cold War-era drama detect the shadow of Hitchcock looming over the film. Despite also mentioning Hitchcock, the Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker was less equivocal, saying it was “a fiendishly clever spy thriller that might have been devised specifically Read more ...
fisun.guner
What was that about the difficult second album? If you thought Ground of its own, Sam Lee’s Mercury-nominated album of 2012, broke new and fertile ground for traditional folk music, then you’ll find The Fade of Time even richer, even more musically ambitious. Here on this 12-track disc is an evocative and heady brew of global influences, featuring the koto, conch, uke, banjo, hunting horns, Jew’s harp, a variety of brass and strings, and wow, not an acoustic guitar to be heard. If you think you know folk, then you don’t know Sam Lee.Sampled sounds, from mineral to animal, archive material of Read more ...