CDs/DVDs
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Shortly after Arab Strap split up in 2006, Malcolm Middleton was quoted saying “I don’t think we should ever get back together”. That’s the sort of fighting talk that’s just begging to be cast up by tired old hack music writers tasked with reviewing the inevitable comeback – but the trick, in this case, was that the comeback was never inevitable. The Falkirk duo built a reputation on electro-acoustic songs about drink, drugs and shagging. Who wouldn’t want to hear how that all turned out?The album opens with a challenge to the nostalgia-hungry listener, Aidan Moffat disclaiming past Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jindřich Polák ’s 1963 film Ikarie XB-1 (also available from distributor Second Run) still seems fresh, a cerebral, visually arresting sci-fi which clearly influenced 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s surprising to read that Polák was actually a comedy specialist, and that the broader, farcical stylings of 1977’s Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (Zítra vstanu a opařím se čajem) are more typical of the director’s output. Yes, it’s still sci-fi, but more Carry On than Kubrick. The setup is a good one, with elderly Nazis plotting to travel back in time from the 1990s with a stolen Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“How it went with the women,” Martin Amis’s phrase for what most straight men are likely to contemplate in the evenings of their lives, would have made an ideal alternative subtitle for the 50-minute documentary T S Eliot: The Search for Happiness.Until 1949, when Eliot met Valerie Fletcher, the secretary to whom he would be happily married from 1957 until his death in 1965, love went badly for the Nobel poet. He regarded his miserable 18-year marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, who was probably bipolar, as “a hideous farce", while his fraught long-distance relationship with the American speech Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Flock ends with “Solarised”, a glorious five-plus minutes excursion into retro-futurist pop with the artistic smarts of Saint Etienne and Stereolab. Snappy, toe-tapping drums and bubbly, funky bass guitar move it along. “Stages of Phases” is another winner. Built around a stomping glam-rock chassis, it's sense of otherness is shared by “Solarised”.Jane Weaver’s sixth album proper (there are also collaborations, soundtracks and live/remix sets) and the follow-up to 2017’s Modern Kosmology isn’t a full-on lunge towards conventionality, but it’s her first brush with dance-pop – albeit on the art Read more ...
mark.kidel
John Benjamin Power (formerly half of Fuck Buttons) opens his new opus with glittering synth arpeggios – reminiscent of the Seventies electronica of Tangerine Dream, Manuel Gottsching or Steve Hillage: cosmic dance floor bliss that just keeps coming. The peals of heart-warming sound are gradually taken over by an invasion of menacing and slightly robotic voices, buried deep in the mix, and inarticulate.Power is a master of cliff-edge dramatics, and after a celebratory avalanche of sound, the narrative gives way to something radically different, a gentle and beguiling mélange of sounds, dreamy Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A decade ago, Alice Cooper reconnected with his roots. He created a sequel to his 1975 album Welcome to my Nightmare with Bob Ezrin, the producer whose vision crystallized Alice Cooper, the band, and shot them to stardom in the early-Seventies. The survivors of that original outfit also played on the album, their first recordings with the singer in 38 years. After a couple of decades firing out increasingly stale metal, Cooper suddenly sounded refreshed and full of mischief. That same team partly reconvened for 2017’s Paranormal. Now they’re at it again. Alice Cooper has had more comebacks Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Frànçois Marry’s sixth album as Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains evokes warm days spent lounging in fields of clover reflecting on friendship, places visited and journeys which could be undertaken. Banane Bleue’s 10 tracks are unhurried and delivered as if Marry had just woken up. Relatively, the chugging “Holly Go Lightly” is uptempo – but it’s still reserved.Musically, Banane Bleue is more Eighties sounding than previous Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains albums and comes across as a family friend of Belgium’s Antena, the early Elli Medeiros and él Records mainstay Louis Philippe. Marry’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a striking interview among the extras for this Criterion edition of Russian director Larisa Shepitko’s fourth and final feature. The director was talking in 1978 to Bavarian Television at the Berlin Film Festival, where The Ascent had won the top award, the Golden Bear, the previous year. She had only just turned 40 yet speaks about her World War II film with the absolute authority – not least about moral and spiritual subjects – of a figure far more established on the world cinema scene (her achievements to date were remarkable anyway for the hurdles she had overcome as a woman Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“That cat’s a blues singer,” Frank Sinatra famously said of Willie Nelson. “He can sing my stuff but I don’t know if I can sing his.” The two men sang together, on stage and on record, and Nelson, 87, is now older than Sinatra when he took his final bow – the Guv'nor last sang in public aged 79, and died at 82. The perfect phrasing which had marked him out had by then long gone, swagger and vulgarity replacing once intelligent and subtle performances. "I learned a lot about phrasing listening to Frank," Nelson has said.Nelson has been dipping into the great American songbook since the mid- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig gets an acknowledgement in The Grand Budapest Hotel’s closing credits and if you’ve read Zweig’s Beware of Pity you’ll recognise why, Wes Anderson’s Mitteleuropa setting and penchant for flashbacks within flashbacks framing a complex narrative that becomes more affecting with repeated viewings. There’s an awful lot going on, the film’s 100 minutes taking in below-stairs hotel shenanigans, love story, murder mystery, prison break and a wildly extended chase, and though first released back in 2014, this Criterion reissue confirms its status as a modern classic. Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Composed in the first lockdown, and recorded remotely, the seventh album from Newcastle’s Maxïmo Park was produced by Ben Allen (Animal Collective, Deerhunter). But it is not so much a record of the times as a snapshot of a time in the band's lives.And it opens strongly with a typically jerky piece of indie pop considering ageing in an exhausting world “As you can clearly see/I’ve lost some luminosity/I hadn’t bargained for such intensity,” Paul Smith sings in "Partly of My Making", still with the magical accent. I think we can all get behind that right now. Given our times, you Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Immersively arranged and intricately lyrical, Ghetts’ third full album further boosts grime’s takeover of British music’s front rank. Aged 36, he’s a contemporary of Kano, and similarly still evolving.Last year’s eerily mesmeric single, “Mozambique”, shows how he now layers his music deep, helped by subtly supportive orchestration and potent deployment of a packed guest list. Chopping strings add classical gravity as synth police sirens stir, while on the hook, South African “future ghetto punk” Moonchild Sanelly trills rrrs hard as an Art Blakey press-roll (wanting “gr-r-reen dough”), over Read more ...