CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
These days, it's not just those of a certain age who remember Simple Minds early days. Fans and critics alike have been reappraising the group's New Wave phase. The band too. Jim Kerr recently said to one theartsdesk writer "maybe we shouldn't have cashed in". Which sounds like an appealing sentiment until you realise it would have entailed denying the world "Alive and Kicking" and "Waterfront".More pertinently, where you stand on the relative stages of the bands career will dictate what you make of Big Music. Like 2005's Black and White 050505, the album plugs straight into the New Gold Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Choosing the cutesy-pie “Fwends” – as The Flaming Lips have before – for the title rather than "friends" instantly suggests this track-by-track revisit to The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band isn’t going to be entirely reverential. It isn’t. And there’s nothing wrong with that. No music is sacred and reinterpretations can indeed be interesting and fun. Occasionally, they can even be revelatory. In this case, The Residents’ “Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life” is the exemplar: a cover version of a song from Sgt Pepper's which took The Beatles to places so far-out Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There's a "foreword" which accompanies the new Taylor Swift album – because it's not enough for the one-time Nashville starlet gone full New York pop star merely to create physical objects for the digital age: she also has to give them forewords – which says that these songs that were "once about my life" are "now about yours". It's for this reason that those articles that list the romantic encounters claimed to have inspired every song Swift has written since 2010's "Dear John" onwards do her an incredible disservice: the gossip column inches are irrelevant. That Swift can use vivid Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There are moments in observational documentary that sometimes seem to rise to the drama of fictional cinema, and Ilian Metev’s Sofia’s Last Ambulance (Poslednata lineika na Sofia) has plenty such. They come when the viewer becomes in some way so engrossed in what is on screen that the standard distinctions of form seem to be lost.Given both its subject and origin in Bulgaria, the obvious feature counterpart to Metev’s film must be the Romanian ambulance drama The Death of Mr Lazarescu by Cristi Puii from 2005 (though viewers may find themselves recalling Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, too Read more ...
Tim Cumming
At the end of last year, The Fall released an EP, The Remainderer, one of their more refreshing studio tonics of recent years, a madly diverse range of songs and sonic attacks with Mark E. Smith’s vocals thick with phlegm and gleeful, gristly exuberance. Among the EP’s tracks was "Amorator", a spindly, crooked 3 and a half minutes of intense weirdness, which reappears in even wilder, woolier form here alongside a second studio track, "Auto (1914) Chip Replace", a fantastically bonkers, multilayered fixture of this year’s live sets, with the line-up expanded to accommodate a second drummer Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Minny Pops: Drastic Measures, Drastic Movement The Pop Group: Cabinet of Curiosities, We are TimeTwo groups with tangential relationships to the pop in their names. One from Bristol, the other from Amsterdam. Each attracted attention in the punk's slipstream yet most certainly weren’t punk. In time, both would be pigeonholed as post-punk, despite The Pop Group having formed in 1977 and Minny Pops getting off the ground in 1978 – successive years when punk was still vital, common currency and commercially viable.The term post-punk, like most after-the-fact categorisations, doesn’t neatly Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Every rock fan knows Cat Stevens' story: how, during the early Seventies, the son of a Greek café owner conquered the world’s charts with classics like “Wild World” and “Father and Son” but eventually tired of the music business, found Allah, and packed his guitar away. Since 2006, though, the artist currently known as Yusuf Islam has been slowly returning to his old day job. So far, most agree, the results have been pleasant rather than stellar. Tell ‘Em I’m Gone, however, is in a different league. Teaming up with production guru Rick Rubin (of Johnny Cash’s American Recordings) Cat Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Angelina Jolie carries this re-visited Disney classic. She is the flying buttress that supports the old story told anew, as commanding as the nuclear green energy she emits into the stratosphere and as striking as any original drawing may have been.While the famous curse scene is as honest an homage as it could be to the original animation, Maleficent draws upon the backstory of the supposedly evil villain from Sleeping Beauty. A woman mistreated and exacting her revenge, Jolie's powerfully haunting portrayal complete with clipped British accent sees her excel as both villain and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
To the uninitiated, Black Veil Brides are five young men who look and sound pretty much like ‘80s hair metal horrors Motley Crűe – but with a hefty dollop of emo attitude on top. They may be the kings of hard rock cliché but it hasn’t stopped them from selling ridiculous amounts of albums right from their 2010 debut, We Stitch These Wounds.Black Veil Brides IV is, unsurprisingly, the band’s fourth album and sees them taking on the woes of the world with a bagful of jolly ditties going under titles such as “Drag Me To The Grave” and “World Of Sacrifice”. “You want a fight. I’ll bring the war” Read more ...
Matthew Wright
You wonder what gets them out of bed. After more than a decade together, and with this, their fourth album, just released, The Twilight Sad must be feeling very miserable. The odd thing is, they seem to revel in their misery. “Scottish band who enjoy drinking & making miserable music,” says The Twilight Sad’s Twitter profile. “Enjoy” and “miserable” are key. They have taken shoe-gazing mournfulness to a new level of craftsmanship. This time, it’s more enjoyable than ever, but you can’t help feeling it’s a bit less spontaneous. There’s just a hint that this is not ordinary misery, but Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Blaxploitation, like Krautrock, is an early Seventies term that sounds faintly uneasy now. Begun by Hollywood studio hits such as Shaft, the craze for films with mostly black casts and often black creators made expressly for black audiences was basically positive, though. Blacula (1972) gave the vampire flick its makeover, as an 18th-century African prince hoping Count Dracula will help him end the slave trade is instead cursed to be undead, and left entombed till two gay interior designers, distracted by what a feature his coffin will be, unwittingly unleash him on Seventies LA.Neither Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As tough-going as expected, the eagerly anticipated collaboration between Scott Walker and deconstructed metallers Sunn O))) is 48 minutes of deliberately ugly darkness. On the opening track “Brando”, in his now-familiar strangulated tenor, Walker wails “a beating would do me a world of good.” He’s already punned “whip-poor-will” which was, with crushing inevitability, followed by the sound of an actual bullwhip. All the while, Sunn O))) grind away, producing elongated slabs of unyielding noise.Like Walker's last album, 2012’s Bish Bosch, Soused (as in saturated or drunk) is, sonically, Read more ...