CDs/DVDs
Nick Hasted
The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960) was Fritz Lang’s final film, resurrecting his Weimar villain in Cold War Berlin and forming a satisfying circle with his career’s German first half, which included Metropolis and M. This ended when Goebbels banned The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), leading to equally brilliant Hollywood exile, and the hard shadows of fierce classics from Fury to The Big Heat.Lang’s M star, Peter Lorre, ended his exile earlier with his sole film as director, The Lost One (1951), a searing parable of Nazi corruption, madness and murder which was too much for his homeland. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Joe Casey is the final refugee from the Detroit garage-rock scene which spawned The White Stripes. He has led this otherwise young band for five albums now, every one of which feels like an indignant last stand. Feeling under the baleful influence of unspecified, pre-Covid sickness, and unsure if the source lay in his body or an increasingly depressing world, he conceived this record as a raging epitaph, “last words...while I still had breath to say them”. Esoterically original post-punk soundscapes are meanwhile marshalled by guitarist Greg Ahee. “I Am You Now”, haunted by doppelgangers and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Czech director Alfréd Radok’s Distant Journey (Daleká cesta) has an unprecedented place in the history of cinema of the Holocaust. Initially released in March 1949, it has been called the first fictional treatment of the Jewish experience during the Nazi era, appearing less than four years after the liberation of the Terezin (Theresienstadt) transport camp, where the greater part of its action is set. As the world struggled to assimilate its recent history – if, indeed, assimilation of any kind can ever be possible – the fact of such a film appearing, from within a society that had been so Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In pop music, less is often more and it doesn't come much shorter-and-sweeter than Quickies, the new collection from New York songwriter Stephin Merritt. The tracks range in length from a brisk 13 seconds to a whisker over two and a half minutes, all chock-full of wry humour. Numbers like "Let's Get Drunk Again (and Get Divorced)" are a glorious blend of cynicism and charming vulnerability. That basic recipe is, of course, Merritt's stock-in-trade. It formed the basis for The Magnetic Fields' celebrated concept album, 69 Love Songs, and features throughout his work. This time, though, Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Over the years, the legend of The Apu Trilogy has been much-repeated. Now widely considered India’s greatest filmmaker, Satyajit Ray was little more than a small-time commercial artist when, failing to find a sponsor for his script, he assembled what few funds he could in order to begin filming. Come the first day, Ray had never previously directed a scene, he had a still-photographer (Subrata Mitra) for a cinematographer, and a composer (Ravi Shankar) who was essentially unknown. Together, they combined to produce a set of films that have been acclaimed ever since as masterpieces of arthouse Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Word has been out for a while that EDM megastar Diplo has decided to throw a curve ball with his musical career, don a cowboy hat and release a country and western album. If that is truly the case, then there must be another disc in the pipeline because the somewhat awkwardly titled Diplo Presents Thomas Wesley – Chapter 1: Snake Oil certainly isn’t anything which displays any meaningful kinship with the likes of Willie Nelson or Hank Williams.Sure, there are miniscule hints of cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats in places, but “Intro” has more in common (unintentionally, I suspect) with the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The 1975’s career is about navigating ambition, and finding ways to be an interesting, worthwhile big band after the music industry and rock music got small. This fourth album rambles and sprawls through 22 tracks, a double-album in no hurry to settle down.Greta Thunberg’s opening monologue is a typically on the nose lunge for meaning from frontman Matthew Healy. And yet elsewhere he insistently describes insularity, uncertainty and scared fronts, like an accidental report from the viral frontline. It’s as if lockdown was always lying in wait for generations struggling with online mediation, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Footsie might not have the profile of a Skepta or Wiley, or even his Newham Generals partner and recent IKEA advert soundtracker D Double E. But anyone halfway schooled in grime will know that both as MC and producer he's a key player from grime's original generation, and still a pillar of the scene. Amazingly, though, despite the fact he's released a couple of mixtapes and four compilations of his instrumentals, he's never made an official solo album until now. So given that, since his beginnings in N.A.S.T.Y. Crew, he's been in the game for some 20 years, there's quite some weight of Read more ...
Barney Harsent
In 2000, when Badly Drawn Boy released his debut album, The Hour of Belwiderbeast, it felt like an embarrassment of riches. Along with the string of singles he’d previously put out, ranging from the lo-fi to the luminous, Damon Gough’s creative tap was in full flow. His 2002 follow-up, the soundtrack for hit film About a Boy, was similarly sublime. Of course, if you’re going to place a bar that high, you won’t always reach it. Gough’s last album proper was 2010’s It’s What I’m Thinking…, an introspective affair that pays dividends, but demands close attention and repeated listening Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A calculatedly nostalgia-infused town-taming Western, 1939's Destry Rides Again out-sparkled Errol Flynn's contemporaneous light “oaters" and anticipated noir-tinged classics like My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Gunfighter (1950). Because it sublimely teamed Marlene Dietrich as worldly dancehall queen Frenchy and James Stewart as pacifist deputy Thomas Jefferson Destry, it is godparent to both Dietrich's crazy Western vehicle Rancho Notorious (1952) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), in which Stewart also played a peace-loving outsider.Destry proves far from the milquetoast Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Guy Clark, Steve Earle’s mentor and champion and the singer-songwriter to whom he paid homage on his 2019 album, once said that “songs aren’t finished until you play them for people”. By which he surely meant live, creating that vibe for which the best system, or headphones, is no substitute. Nothing beats the communal concert experience, and Earle in the flesh really gets the blood pumping – never more so for me personally than when I was able to present him on stage in Washington Square Park last year. Live is what all of us with music at the centre of our lives are truly missing right now. Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
There is a memorable scene in Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), in which a group of stoned hippies and cross-dressers force each other, one-by-one, to walk the length of a line of tape that runs along the floor. Those who await their turn are seen crouched below, their flailing arms beckoning the walker down from their imagined tightrope. When they fall, as they inevitably and willingly do, they are punished – with the forced removal of their clothes.This unveiling of the naked body is a symbol for exposure, a metaphor for a film that seeks to shed light on “ Read more ...