CDs/DVDs
joe.muggs
When does the avant-garde become folk? Both of the participants in this album have certainly been on the very cutting edge of sound-making, on multiple occasions. Conrad Schnitzler was a student of radical artist Joseph Beuys and leading light in the utopian thinking and radical soundmaking of 1970s West Germany as a member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster. Frank Bretschneider was, bravely, an underground musician in East Germany in the 1980s, in partnership with Olaf Bender – and, again with Bender and later with Carsten Nicolai, in unified Germany in the 1990s and on was responsible for some Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s been a hell of a four years for Glass Animals since their last album How to Be a Human Being, from a well-deserved Mercury nomination to drummer Joe Seaward requiring neurosurgery after a near-fatal bicycle accident. But while Human Being was leap forward in writing and production, new release Dreamland is a more subtle development. This is music designed to float on a sunlit pool to, though given lockdown restrictions, you may need to get creative with an air bed and your home lighting.It’s an album that takes its title to heart, building hazy soundscapes punctuated with drum machines Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Queen, performances and production design drive this campest, funniest and sexiest of the post-Star Wars space boom. Flash Gordon is a film about a classic American comic-strip hero made by a cynical English director, Mike Hodges, and dreamy Italian producer, Dino De Laurentiis. As this 4K fortieth-anniversary edition makes clear, American leads Sam Jones and Melody Anderson were innocents abroad among arch British character actors and extravagantly erotic Italians, almost as much as their characters Flash and Dale Arden are on Mongo’s moons.The plot is straight from Alex Raymond’s 1934 comic Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Like Fantastic Negrito’s previous, Grammy-winning albums, Last Days of Oakland and Please Don’t be Dead, Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? holds up a critical mirror to life in the USA in the same way that What’s Goin’ On, Sign of the Times and There’s a Riot Goin’ On did in previous periods of social upheaval. This disc is also no pale imitation of those monumental classics, and Fantastic Negrito stands unashamedly shoulder to shoulder in the company of Marvin Gaye, Prince and Sly Stone. There’s also more than a splash of George Clinton’s mighty Parliament-Funkadelic mob about Have You Lost Your Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A couple of years ago a vinyl white label appeared of a track called “Crumbling Down”. It was a breath of fresh air. Warmly crafted Afro-centric percussion, pared back but persuasive, it dragged the ears in, emanating a heads-down beachside vibe. Once the listener/dancer was fully ensconced, a gentle plinking tune led into the melancholic lyric loop, “As it all starts crumbling down”, before echoing bleeps sent things into space. Like much of the best dance music, it was beautifully simple but effective. By an artist called Zapatilla, it now appears at the end of his debut album, the rest of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Alanis Morissette was relieved when fame’s comet swiftly fell to more manageable levels, having crashed into her full-force 25 years ago, when she was just 21. Selling 33 million copies of Jagged Little Pill means, though, that she remains on many people’s minds. With a Diablo Cody-scripted hit musical based on its songs, and vivid female confession no longer an anomaly in the age of Fiona Apple, this eighth album arrives at a receptive moment.“This is the sound of me hitting bottom...and the anatomy of my crash,” Morissette sings in the opener, “Smiling”, seeming to announce another chapter Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Be careful what you wish for. Turns out the dream that most bands yearn for isn't all it's cracked up to be. Fontaines DC's debut album, Dogrel went large (and won a Mercury Prize nomination and BBC 6 Music's Album of the Year). They toured like crazy and nearly imploded. But, just a year later, they're back. And this time it's personal. The title song perhaps explains the progression "that was the year of the sneer now the real thing's here".So you won't find the "post-punk bangers" of yore. Or tales of Dublin back streets. It's a completely different affair – bleak, bold and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
RKO’s Dance, Girl, Dance was remarkable as a vehicle for two emerging stars, Maureen O’Hara and Lucille Ball, that stealthily radicalised its backstage setting and tried to slap moviegoers out of their comfort zone – probably the reason it failed commercially on release in August 1940.The fifteenth and penultimate feature directed by Dorothy Arzner, Hollywood’s only female director of the 1930s and 1940s, turned a routine comic melodrama about rival hoofers into a vexed appraisal of the compromises faced by women performers striving for success, whether financially or creatively, in the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Made of Rain is the Psychedelic Furs’ seventh album since their 1980, self-titled debut and, while the band has shed a few original members since then, brothers Richard and Tim Butler are still front and centre of this post-punk colossus. After a break that lasted most of the 90s, the Furs have been touring again since the turn of the century, but it is only now that they have inevitably tired of playing the part of living juke boxes, knocking out the hits from their glam-tinged purple patch. Hence a return to the studio and a new album which displays the band’s distinctive swagger, even if Read more ...
mark.kidel
Max Richter is the million-selling star of post-Minimalism, the composer of moody symphonies of a stillness that suggests otherworldly bliss and inner peace. The boundary between Richter and New Age isn’t always clear, not least in the work he makes outside his justly celebrated film soundtracks, where drama demands a greater variety of tones, textures, paces and rhythms.Voices features crowd-sourced readings from the UN declaration Declaration of Human Rights, in many different languages (from children as well as adults), spoken with the authentic passion that such a grounding text demands. Read more ...
mark.kidel
The tortuous drama of James M Cain’s 1940’s thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice has inspired many films: the slow-burning mix of erotic desire, temptation, murder and guilt was ideally suited to American film noir, so it’s in some ways surprising to find is as the source of inspiration for Michelangelo Antonioni’s first full-length film (Cronaca di un Amore – Story of a Love Affair) a kind of counterblast to the neo-realism that dominated Italian cinema in 1950, the year of the film’s release.The story is only loosely based on the Cain classic, more the tawdry spirit than the thrilling Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When she announced her “surprise” 8th album on social media this week, Taylor Swift described its subject matter as a combination of “fantasy, history and memory” told with “love, wonder and whimsy”. For the listener, this hits home around track three. “The Last Great American Dynasty” tells the story of Rebekah, a “middle-class divorcée” who marries a heir to the Standard Oil fortune and spends her widowhood - and inheritance - on boys, ballet and annoying the neighbours of her Rhode Island mansion. And then? “It was bought by me,” sings Swift, turning the song’s misogynist refrain of “who Read more ...