CDs/DVDs
Katie Colombus
For her fifth studio album, Paloma Faith decided to boldly ctrl-alt-delete the first version, and re-do it in lockdown.The new-new one is a little bath bomb of an album – it fizzes with funky pop, 80s sheen and emotional nuance than speaks of her long term relationship and being a mother to teenies (she’s currently pregnant with no. 2).If you need any further explanation about her headspace in re-versioning Infinite Things and generally how it’s been going in lockdown, fast forward to “Me Time” which practically yells about “I need some me time, figuring out who I want to be time, saying what Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lordy, how much marijuana did we smoke in the 1990s? When people arrived home from the endless dance, jack-frazzled, 6.00 AM or later, pupils the size of 7” singles, legs twitching to invisible percussion, the time arrived for doobies, chillums, bongs, an eternal blissed NOW in foggy, curtained living rooms. The accompanying music was my generation’s unlikely conceptual fusion of prog rock and easy listening. Music journalists gave it proper names, like "trip hop" and "chill out", but it was really just wibbling, spliffed ear massage. And Austrian duo [Peter] Kruder & [Richard] Read more ...
mark.kidel
Just as British pub and punk rock of the mid-to late 1970's ushered in an era of music that referenced the history of pop and thrived on irony, much of the French New Wave, nearly 20 years earlier, looked back as much as forward, an avant-garde anchored like none other before in a sense of cinema history.Breathless (A bout de souffle), Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, established the genre. The film broke the rules of conventional cinema narrative, in a manner that changed the seventh art forever: jump-cuts, non-sequiturs in the dialogue as well as in the unfolding story. The ripples from Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Little Mix, currently at another profile peak with their TV talent show The Search, are one of the most successful female groups ever, their tours amongst the highest earning of recent times. Like a CGI-shiny Instagram-age Spice Girls, now newly signed to RCA after years on Simon Cowell's Syco label, they offer teeth-rattling sugar-pop with a girl power motif, although Confetti, as its title suggests, is even more of a frothy frolic than usual.The producer-songwriters on Little Mix’s sixth album are the cream of contemporary chart-pop back-roomers. They include MNEK, who first earned his Read more ...
graham.rickson
Much has been made of The Ladykillers having being directed by a Scot (Alexander Mackendrick) from a screenplay written by an American (William Rose). This last great Ealing comedy shares its dark tone and leading actor with Robert Hamer’s sublime Kind Hearts and Coronets, but in many respects it stands alone. The Ladykillers is sharp and unsentimental, a brilliant London noir. There’s not a bum note: script, design, casting and pacing are close to perfection, the whole thing wrapped up in just 97 minutes.Rose and MacKendrick’s conceit was to have a genteel old lady defeating a criminal gang Read more ...
mark.kidel
Wherever we might live, the contagious energy and urgency of rock reflect the mood of our times: it’s hardly surprising that musicians from all over our super-connected world should re-invent their traditions in a way that absorbs rock’s decibels and immediacy. Balothizer are one of the latest bands that use their roots as a launching pad for something that combines psych, punk and metal music. In this case the tradition is Cretan: the mantinades, syrtoi and ritzika of an island proud of very distinctive musical style are usually played on lute and the lyra – an upright bowed string Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
We’re eight months into a global pandemic, and Kylie Minogue is serenading us from her kitchen. “We’re a million miles apart in a thousand ways,” she sings, feather-light vocals floating over a driving disco beat. “Can we all be as one again?”At least on first listen, Kylie’s 15th studio release - 12 tracks of giddy, gleaming, disco-pop escapism, appropriately titled DISCO - doesn’t fit the now-established mould of the lockdown album. The clue is in the sleeve notes where, for the first time, you’ll see an engineering credit on every track in the name of Minogue: the singer taught herself Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The last time that these ears were grabbed by a new Shirley Bassey tune was when she went toe to toe with Propellerheads for the mighty “History Repeating” single in 1997. But it’s actually only been six years since her last album, which isn’t bad for a solo artist who’s well into her eighties and has some 70 long-players to her name. I Owe It All to You, however, has been labelled her “grand finale album” and is therefore likely to be her last. Given her still powerful lungs though, Dame Shirley is not going out with a whimper but with a mighty roar. Admittedly she’s firmly back in her Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The cheaply made experimental exploitation indie Dementia (1955) is one of those footnotes in movie history that makes cultists salivate. And with good reason – it’s a wry blend of film noir and horror that makes you wonder if it was a touchstone for Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1957) and David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001).The 61-minute movie – which features sound effects but no dialogue – unfolds in real time. In her room in a seedy Hollywood hotel, a psychotic woman (Adrienne Barrett) – called "The Gamin" in the credits – clenches her sheets as she lies in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
As this review goes live on the internet – an invisible medium even more pervasive than coronavirus – we’ve just enjoyed All Hallow’s Eve with not only a Blue Moon but October’s Hunter’s Moon, too, gazing down upon us from the constellation of Taurus, while today is All Souls’ Day, when the spirits of the dead are abroad and life is celebrated and decorated with skulls and skeletons. As winter approaches, this astro-cosmic emanation of the spirit world of magic and ritual – like the internet or Covid-19, another invisible medium – is celebrated and enacted in Cunning Folk’s arresting new Read more ...
graham.rickson
Raed Andoni’s semi-documentary Ghost Hunting (Istiyad Ashbah) is nominally "about" the Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners but is an effective, potent denunciation of human rights abuses across the modern world. Andoni’s booklet introduction includes the sobering statistic that more than four in 10 Palestinian men are, at least once in their lives, arrested or investigated in Israeli prisons, some as young as 12. Andoni himself was held and tortured as a teenager at al-Moscobiya detention centre, and this 2017 semi-documentary is partially an attempt to exorcise his demons. As he puts Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 45 years since the West End success of John, Paul, George, Ringo… and Bert put a young Scottish folkie named Barbara Dickson on the map, launching a career that brought richly-deserved success on stage and screen, as well as in music. She’s since recorded 25 studio albums and enjoyed major singles success. The latter paid the rent but the primped hair and dry ice of 1980s Top of The Pops never was her style and in recent years Dickson’s returned happily to her roots with a series of folk-accented albums that demonstrate the effortless beauty of her voice.The latest is Time is Going Read more ...