CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
Birmingham outfit Pram achieved profile amongst alt-music connoisseurs shortly after the millennium. They’d been going for over a decade but their weird-masked presentation and spooked, abject music suddenly struck a chord. Being truly an art band, they were unmoved and gradually faded whence they came, their capacity for offbeat instruments noted for posterity, a bunch of capsules of occasionally creepy chamber pop oddness left behind. A decade on, and they’ve resurrected with a new line-up. They are still unlikely to bother the Top 10.That last sentence isn’t quite fair. It implies their Read more ...
Ellie Porter
System of a Down guitarist and vocalist Daron Malakian isn’t going to let a little thing like his band going on an extended hiatus get in the way of releasing new music. With SOAD having gone all quiet on the recording front since 2005’s double whammy of Mezmerize and Hypnotize (they have been touring, though) – a move down to frontman Serj Tankian, Malakian says – Malakian decided to get cracking on a new project, Scars on Broadway, with SOAD drummer John Dolmayan. Now, in this follow-up to Scars on Broadway’s self-titled 2009 debut album, Malakian has gone it alone Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At 29 minutes, the second album from Paris’s Juniore is short. But as it makes its point, it’s hard to hear how it needs to be longer. Magnifique opens with “Ça Balance”, a harmony-drenched vapour trail suggesting a kinship with the great French Eighties band Antena. It’s that good. As is the rest of this album.Nodding to Sixties archetypes such as John Barry, Ennio Morricone and late-decade Françoise Hardy as well as the synth-pop of early Elli et Jacno, the glistening surf-inclined bricolage pop heard across Magnifique’s eight tracks could have appeared in the shops 30 years ago without Read more ...
graham.rickson
The first words we hear in The Piano are the thoughts of Holly Hunter’s Ada, and they set up the film’s premise perfectly: “I have not spoken since I was six years old. No one knows why… not even me. My father says it is a dark talent …Today he married me to a man I have not yet met.” Ada and her young daughter (a deservedly award-winning turn from a young Anna Paquin) pitch up on a bleak New Zealand beach. With them is Ada’s beloved Broadwood piano, transported from Scotland and left abandoned on the sand when her colonist husband claims he has no room for it in his house. Ada’s keyboard is Read more ...
Matthew Wright
This is Drake’s account of his astrological sign, the only one to be represented in multiple forms: an eagle and phoenix as well as the poisonous creepy-crawlie. (At an unwieldy 25 songs, on a kind-of double album, divided into two kind-of halves, it certainly isn’t a reference to the petite, nimble insect that comes quickly to a point.) It’s part hip hop album, part R&B album, with a (slightly) different vibe for each, a separation which some critics have regretted as a regression from the previously boundary-busting performer. The album, if that’s what it is, highlights what we Read more ...
Ellie Porter
This woozy, seductive slice of gothic Americana is the Canadian quartet’s first album in six years, a swampy follow-up to the icy, winter-inspired sounds of their last offering, The Wilderness. “All That Reckoning Part 1” gets things going, an oppressive tale of a relationship with dark undercurrents. “This bed was poison / And I lay afraid of ever touching you,” breathes Margo Timmins, whose rich, smoky vocals go from seductive and sinister to sweet and romantic over the course of the record. Unfortunately, a few of these songs – including the next track, “When We Arrive” –seem to Read more ...
graham.rickson
You come to Christopher Ian Smith’s New Town Utopia expecting a damning indictment of post-war British planning. But while there are melancholy moments, this is mostly an upbeat documentary. Smith manages, without the use of CGI, to make the much-maligned Essex new town of Basildon look uncommonly attractive. The spiritual home of Essex man, this solidly Conservative town isn’t what you’d expect.Basildon was born in the late 1940s, planned to accommodate the thousands of East Enders living in terraced slums. As one veteran resident puts it, “I just wanted a bathroom and a toilet.” It was (and Read more ...
joe.muggs
An extraordinary musical movement has been bubbling over from the far left field into the public consciousness in the last couple of years. A very loose international alliance of musicians like Elysia Crampton, GAIKA, Ziúr, Arca, Rabit, Yves Tumor, and the NON Worldwide collective of Angel-Ho, Chino Amobi and Nkisi have been making sounds that unceremoniously strip experimental electronica of its straight white male trappings, and rebuilding it from first principles as something nonconformist in every sense, shot through with a strong sense of urgency and possibility.J’Kerian Morgan aka Lotic Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Woodfall was the independent film production company responsible more than any other for launching and realising the British New Wave of the early 1960s. The outfit was formed in 1958 by theatre and film director Tony Richardson, playwright John Osborne, and American producer Harry Saltzman to make the film version of Osborne’s Royal Court succès de scandale Look Back in Anger. Directed by Richardson in 1959, the movie – with Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, and Mary Ure – successfully opened up the play but trimmed its Suez Crisis polemic.Woodfall followed up in the next five years with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Who in their right minds has the time of day for Rick Astley? As a cynical 1980s experiment by ruthlessly commercial production house Stock, Aitken & Waterman his Eighties output was vapid grinning plastic bilge. He was annoying too, really annoying, a neutered avatar representing suburban English everyboy blandness incarnate. One of the trickiest things as a music writer is facing up to long-held and enjoyed prejudices but, on hearing the title single from Astley’s latest album, I had to admit – through gritted teeth – that it’s a thoroughly enjoyable slice of Chic-like pop. But what of Read more ...
Owen Richards
Lamp Lit Prose is the ninth Dirty Projectors album since 2003, an incredibly prolific output for any artist. All the more impressive when you consider it’s the project of producer/songwriter David Longstreth, who also finds time to collaborate with artists such as Rihanna, Kanye, Paul McCartney and Solange. Such a notable CV befits an act as innovative as Dirty Projectors, and their latest release further demonstrates the talent on show.“Change is the only constant law” sings Longstreth, an appropriate lyric as Lamp Lit Prose is a journey of shifting influences. Tracks range from folk and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At its most impactful, Époques is an aural analogue to the occasions in Tarkovsky’s Stalker when the explorers of “The Zone” find their perceptions of what might be reality warped, and when there’s a growing realisation that this may be a place with a consciousness. Rather than being blurred, boundaries have become meaningless. With the album’s “The Only Water”, creaking, sawing strings and whooshing sounds give way to a structured composition where forward steps are impeded by a heavy yet impalpable object. The even-more brooding “Ultramarine” meshes rasping cello with ominous booming and Read more ...