CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
The other day I woke up with Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” fracking my mind. Round and round it juddered, wouldn’t leave me alone - horrid production, killer chorus - and much too much of that bloke whose career used to be endlessly repeating, “One time, one time” on Fugees tunes. Turns out it’s not just me. “Hips Don’t Lie” is globally the best-selling song of this century. When I discovered that fact, it fried my head.Then again, it’s possible for Europeans to forget what a massive deal Shakira is, one of the top-earning female entertainers of all time. The petite Colombian burst out of the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
It’s strange that probably most of the best-known Brazilian artists here are over 60 and from one state, Bahia - those being Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Maria Bethania and Tom Zé. Brazil is the size of Europe, though, and of course there are younger generations from other states. One of the leading new voices is Karol Conka, whose Brazilian electronica is as fresh as anything you are likely to hear this year. Her breakthrough hit “Boa Noite” kicks off and ends the album (see video, overleaf) in which she raps that she is “totalmente livre e leve ao mesmo tempo que ferve” (“totally free and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Donald Cammell made two films that were close to his intentions: Performance and this. There were only four films altogether, in almost 30 years of trying. Wild Side, studio-savaged as Demon Seed had been, was restored to something like his wishes after he shot himself in 1996, defeated.White of the Eye is, then, the only untarnished testament to Cammell’s talent away from his Performance co-director Nic Roeg. It’s a 1986 film about a possible serial killer, Paul White (David Keith), and his wife Joan (Cathy Moriarty, pictured below). Each anonymous murder is highly stylised: a meat cleaver Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Thinking back, it was with 2010’s Heaven is Whenever that I stopped recommending my favourite band to the people who didn’t already get it. It wasn’t that it was a bad album – in capturing the world-weariness of the party band once the world moves on it was almost exactly the one that they needed to make – but by that stage you probably knew yourself whether you were the type of hopeless barroom romantic likely to learn lessons from the one who’d seen it all in the corner. On first listen Teeth Dreams comes across as more of the same, but there are so many moments of magic here I’m half Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Talk about not going gentle into that good night. In the year or so since Wilko Johnson announced he had terminal cancer, he has stunned doctors and fans alike by giving a string of blistering concerts and candid interviews. But Going Back Home - a retrospective LP featuring Roger Daltrey on vocals – is, surely, his final parting shot. It's also an ambition fulfilled. For the two men have long admired each other and Daltrey remarked in a recent interview how they were inspired by the same American R’n’B.Johnson then chipped in, “Don’t matter how hard you try, you can’t sound like you’re from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Lou Adler – A Musical HistoryLou Adler is more than a stitch in rock’s rich tapestry. Akin to a whole spool of yarn, he helped Carole King realise the monumental Tapestry, was integral to making 1967’s epochal Monterey Festival happen, brought The Mamas & The Papas to the world and co-wrote Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World”. Adler is a towering figure in music. Lou Adler – A Musical History is an overview, collecting records he masterminded. A reminder that the achievements did not spring from nowhere, the disc frames this man within the world he operated in.Many names Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Out on the fringes of rock there ain’t half some noisy bastards. It’s not just Wire magazine-friendly, supposedly cerebral sorts who push the boundaries, not just avant-garde industrialists, Finns making “tone music” and Japanese gentlemen with vast arrays of effects pedals, every one bearing a manifesto quoting Deleuze, Nietsche et al. Nope, sometimes there’s just a visceral joy in pushing music far over the edge, and it can be done on the cheap after a few pints, just for kicks.Gabber does it, or used to, and certain varieties of puerile yet enjoyable drill’n’bass too, but there are more Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The big screen is no country for old women. The exception who proves the rule over and over again is of course Judi Dench. Of no actress is it more frequently said that you’d happily listen to her reading out the phone book. Her most recent masterclass in the tiny brushstrokes of screen acting is in Philomena, adapted from Martin Sixsmith’s book about helping an Irish woman to find the son she bore out of wedlock in 1952. Dench is very largely the reason it’s worth making an appointment to view.She plays Philomena Lee, a devout old woman with love and sadness in her heart leavened by a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Liars are well known for trying different musical styles. In times past, we’ve had the punk funk of 2010’s "Proud Evolution", the industrial noise of 2007’s “Dear God”, 2006’s freak folk “The Other Side of Mt Heart Attack” and the psychedelic garage rock of 2008’s “Freak Out”, to name a few. On their last album, 2012’s WIXIW, Liars tentatively dipped their collective toe into the world of electronica. Mess sees the band expand on this by giving their keyboards a good kicking, dropping their guitars and coming out with some seriously dark electronic sounds, reminiscent of Black Strobe’s Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Seb Rochford’s five-piece Polar Bear is now ten years old, and the band's post-jazz amalgam of lugubrious saxophone phrases and scratchy riffs, scarified electronic soundscapes, and mesmeric, crackling drum and bass rhythms has matured. The giddy thrills of nearly winning the Mercury Prize (with Held on the Tips of Fingers in 2005) are long past, and they seem content with the trappings of the alternative scene, releasing limited edition vinyl and selling inscrutable T-shirts. That stability of identity has, perhaps, contributed to a subtler, slower-burning sound that lets the details breathe Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Once in his stride as a director, Samuel Fuller never shied away from the controversial. The mental-hospital set Shock Corridor, from 1963, prefigured One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and touched on the arms race, incest, racism and the Korean War. A year later, his Naked Kiss sympathetically portrayed a prostitute. The final film he made in America, 1982’s White Dog, also pulled no punches and met the nature of racism head on. In some quarters of the press it was trailed as itself being racist. It was not released in America. Fuller then upped and offed to France where he had long been hailed Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lost in the Dream takes a while to make its presence felt. Four tracks in, with “An Ocean in Between the Waves”, it all falls into place. A frosted-glass take on the Bruce Springsteen of “I’m on Fire” washes out from the speakers and submerges the ears in a warm bath. Familiar-sounding yet just alien enough to attract attention, the song builds upon itself to climax with a crescendo which could easily win a stadium audience over.Although an early home for the pre-solo Kurt Vile, until Lost in the Dream The War on Drugs has largely been the one-man band of Philadelphia’s Adam Granduciel. He Read more ...