CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
Although primarily known for "Guns Don’t Kill People, Rappers Do", Goldie Lookin' Chain have actually been around longer than you'd imagine. The Welsh comedy collective was formed at the turn of the millennium, and Fear of a Welsh Planet is, staggeringly, their 20th LP. Back in the day, the boys would wear shell suits and rap about council estates. But that was years ago. Surely, by now, they've moved on?Not a bit of it. On the new album, the lads still sound like a Welsh version of Insane Clown Posse with added blue humour. The rudest track is "Sex People" which discusses "shooting each Read more ...
mark.kidel
The much-respected visual artist Isaac Julien made his name as one of the first great black British filmmakers, not least with Looking for Langston (1989) and Young Soul Rebels (1991). While Steve McQueen moved from gallery art and installations to big-budget fiction movies, Julien has gone the other way, leaving narrative behind and finding his vocation as an artist rather than a story-teller.His BFI film on Frantz Fanon, made in 1995, co-written and directed with Mark Nash, focuses on the story of the psychiatrist from Martinique who made his name as a vivid and penetrating theoretician of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The sensation evoked by Sykli is that it documents a voyage, one beginning with anticipation for what will come and then journeying through diffuse territory which could be an endless, mist-filled valley, anywhere beyond this solar system or within inner space. The mostly instrumental – the only vocals are wordless – album uses repeated guitar and keyboard figures as the basis for five lengthy pieces which openly draw from Philip Glass, Neu and Tangerine Dream. Yet an innate character stands apart from what is recognisable. At its core, Sykli is about intensity.Siinai are Finnish. Half the Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
As son of the famous Blockheads frontman, Baxter Dury has always had big (new) boots to fill. Over the last 15 years though, he’s become distinguishable in his own right for his Chiswick accent and roughened-up pastoral music. Both are just as present in Prince of Tears as they have been on his previous albums, but with friends Madeleine Hart, Jason Williamson (Sleaford Mods) and Rose Elinor Dougall (The Pipettes) providing guest vocals, it’s an album that engages with a wrenching variety of humanity's different sides, often more shade than light, rather than being just about the music.Single Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Danish director Martin Zandvliet brilliantly explores a little-known episode in 1945 when more than 2,000 German POWs were forced to clear almost two million land mines that had been buried on the beaches of the west coast of Denmark in anticipation of an Allied invasion. Many of these POWS were schoolboys who had been conscripted in the final year of the war when the Nazis were desperate for soldiers. Roland Møller plays a Danish sergeant who has spent the war fighting with the British (he still wears Parachute regiment uniform). He now has the task of overseeing 14 German teenagers who Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s now thirty years since Courtney Pine stepped out from underneath the shadow of the Jazz Warriors with his debut solo album, Journey To The Urge Within, and his unforgettable contributions to the Angel Heart film soundtrack, to stake his claim as British Jazzman Number One. It is a position which he has resolutely refused to relinquish since then and one that is definitely confirmed by his nineteenth solo release, Black Notes From The Deep.While Pine’s last disc, 2015’s The Ballad Book, featured a set of duets with pianist Zoe Rachman, Black Notes From The Deep sees a complete change of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Pere Portabella’s remarkable Vampir Cuadecuc is almost impossible to classify. It may have been filmed on the set of Jesús Franco's 1970 Hammer horror film El Conde Dracula – with the obviously enthusiastic participation of a cast led by Christopher Lee – but it certainly isn’t a "making-of" film. In fact, it seems wrong to call it a documentary at all: so vivid is the Catalan director’s imagination that the result is best treated as its own original version of the Dracula story.But it’s the Bram Stoker novel as we have never seen it before, focused through the intoxicating prism of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
For those who are unsure of Bootsy Collins’ place in the funk pantheon, he is the bassman who put the One into James Brown’s “Sex Machine”, “Soul Power” and “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing”, as well as everything that came out of the first ten years of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic. Suffice it to say that Bootsy Collins is a funk colossus and, along with Clinton, one of the architects of P-funk: that sweet spot where Jimi Hendrix gets down with James Brown and they party for all they’re worth.A man with this kind of standing inevitably attracts a bit of an entourage and there are no Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s a long time since The The were bothering the charts with songs that, while often witty and thought provoking, resolutely viewed the glass as not only being half-empty but also way too small. Matt Johnson’s last The The album-proper was released in 2000 and although there has been some soundtrack work since then, last year’s Record Store Day single, “We Can’t Stop What’s Coming”, was a pleasant reminder of Johnson’s pessimistic-pop-with-a-hook, and set up expectations of new tunes and maybe an album of the stature of 1986’s mighty Infected.Ever the contrarian, Johnson hasn’t followed this Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Super Besse are from the Republic of Belarus, Europe’s sole dictatorship – a country where freedom of expression and opportunities for individual self-determination are limited. As there’s little musical infrastructure in their home country, the label they are on is Latvia’s leading independent imprint. Despite the obstacles, the Minsk-based trio – named after a French ski resort – have played across mainland Europe. La Nuit* is their second album.Given where they are from, Super Besse would be notable whatever the nature of their music. However, what they deal in and how they put it over Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It takes a while to get going, and doesn’t altogether evade sentimentality but overall this black comedy is hugely endearing. Rolf Lassgård (complete with bald cap) plays Ove. He's a depressed and resentful 60-year-old widower who can’t see any point in life without his beloved wife, especially since he's been made redundant from his job as an engineer. His suicide attempts are thwarted by poor quality materials and a rag-bag collection of neighbours.Flashbacks to Ove's childhood and courtship are beautifully done, but it’s the portrait of Swedish small-town life that intrigues. This isn’t Read more ...
howard.male
"I’m a person who, knock on wood, hasn’t suffered a lot of writer’s block," speaks/sings Kozelek in the song “Topo Gigio”. And he’s not kidding. This new album is just one of six collaborations and solo efforts over the last couple of years, each brimming over with confessional, visionary, banal, funny and wise words. This deluge of work is arguably both a good and a less good thing. The less good aspect is that it places a lot of demands on his audience to stay focussed for sometimes 15 minutes at a time (the length of some of these songs) over this many hours of work, while their hero Read more ...