CDs/DVDs
mark.kidel
Carla Bruni delivers smooth and sophisticated pop. She undoubtedly has plenty of talent, and this latest collection of songs – all of them covers, and sung in impressive English – reeks of good taste, careful artistic choices and a wide knowledge of popular music, from which she has drawn material, as she has said, that "blew her away".She is a wide-ranging pop connoisseur, and the tracks run from the Stones’ “I Miss You” to Abba’s “Winner Takes All”, and from Lou Reed’s “A Perfect Day” to Willie Nelson’s “Crazy”. The production by hit-maker David Foster is flawless, well suited to the Read more ...
peter.quinn
With her third recording for Mack Avenue, Grammy Award-winning vocalist and songwriter Cécile McLorin Salvant has delivered a vocal jazz album for the ages. A 2CD set recorded live at NYC’s renowned Village Vanguard, the fascinating track list juxtaposes jazz standards, vaudeville songs, blues and more. A number of studio recorded originals sprinkled throughout, featuring the exquisite playing of the Catalyst Quartet, offer an intriguing commentary on the live material.Having immersed herself in early jazz and blues, it’s no surprise to see McLorin Salvant dusting down the glorious “You’ve Read more ...
joe.muggs
When Miley Cyrus released the deliriously patchy Bangerz in 2013 she was as over-exposed as any pop star has ever been, as I subtly pointed out at the time. Far less so now. Her only album in the interim has been a slightly tedious, flung-out drug folly of a Flaming Lips collaboration in 2015. Other than that, she's steadily edged away from the limelight, meaning this record arrives with less fuss and kerfuffle than more or less anything she's done since her very beginnings as the child star of Disney's Hannah Montana.And it's all the better for it. My first reaction on seeing the title was “ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sweet isn’t the right word; in Mike Leigh’s 1990 film, life is unfair, frustrating and confusing by turns. Though, despite the darkness, Life Is Sweet exudes positivity and remains one of Leigh’s funniest, most quotable features.Many of the best lines are mumbled by Timothy Spall’s grotesque would-be restauranteur Aubrey, especially when he’s talking us through the menu for his Edith Piath-themed restaurant. Anyone for prune quiche? Saveloy on a bed of lychees? Or liver in lager? Spall here is a brilliant physical comedian, whether he’s capsizing a caravan or tumbling off an expensive Read more ...
joe.muggs
It was this album's good fortune to arrive on a miserable rainy afternoon. At other times my first impressions might be a bit harsher about its comfortable, retro dad-grooves and easily flowing sax solos, but instead I let it wrap me like a blanket, and by three tracks in it was absolutely impossible to dislike it.But then again, back in the Eighties, The Blow Monkeys were always adept at turning the smooth, super-mainstream and potentially pastiche-y into something rather more interesting – somewhere in the British white soul continuum between the gruff urgency of The Style Council and the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
London indie-rockers Wolf Alice’s debut album, My Love Is Cool, made it to no 2 in the charts a couple of years back. It was a bona fide success story and a rare thing, a gold record for a female-fronted outfit who major in grungey, ambitious post-Pixies rock. It was derivative, but also showed a feisty, admirable willingness not to be pigeonholed, especially on songs such as the ecstatic “Freazy”. Its successor initially seems destined to be even more wide-ranging, to reach headier heights, but then settles, during most of its second half, for being simply a decent album.Let us not damn Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The main man of folk big band Bellowhead steps out solo with a companion piece to his 2009 outing Songs from the Floodplain. Where that album was essentially rural, the new one is altogether more urban, Boden describing it as a story of "two star-crossed lovers trying to find each other amongst a backdrop of decaying buildings, burning oil drums, home-made fireworks, tribal rioting and Bacchanalian revelry”.Once again we are in a dystopian near-future, a world transformed by global warming though less bleak than the apocalyptic vision conjured up in prose by Cormac McCarthy, over whose Read more ...
Barney Harsent
David Crosby might be entering life’s twilight but, like a tired drummer, he seems to be speeding up towards the end. Perhaps he’s simply hit a rich vein of form – the success, both artistic and critical, of 2014’s Croz, and the 2016 follow-up, Lighthouse, certainly suggest that he has. But one can’t help wondering whether the quickening of the pace is also down to a sense of time running out.If anything, this new creative burst feels more like a rebirth than the end of anything and the dichotomy this presents is not something lost on Crosby. The lilting rise and fall of “Here It’s Almost Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The last song on The Killers' new record is called "Have All the Songs Been Written?". The words refer to Brandon Flowers' writers' block during the album's recording. Apparently, he tried everything to get out of the slump, including asking Bono for advice. The U2 singer had no answers but their meeting started a process that gradually led to Flowers realising what he really needed to do: to write about his own life.This self-reflective approach has resulted in a record which starts out full of ambitions but ultimately ends up sounding low-key compared to their earlier work. The Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Oh dear. I thought that this was going to be one of those exciting fantasy films that livened up TV on weekend afternoons in my childhood, and that there would be kitschy special effects and ludicrous dialogue. But no, it's not 20,00 Leagues under the Sea, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad or even Dr Doolittle. It's a turgid plough through a Jules Verne yarn which doesn't even introduce a freaky creature until almost 50 minutes into the storyline, and then it's just some poor old lizards matted into a drab seaside set. Journey to the Centre of the Earth frankly doesn't deserve the full Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
The Horrors have always had a penchant for churning out pop-tinged gems, and on V, with help from Adele/Coldplay/Florence and the Machine producer Paul Epworth, they’ve applied their same winning formula to darker music. The album cover, a mishmash of faces, sums up V perfectly – it nods to a huge range of influences, creating something that feels larger and more engaging than all of them on their own.“Hologram” oozes in with monolithic drums and hazy synths, storming its way to the four-minute mark before offbeat eight-bit sparkles create a solo that’s as bemusing as it is enjoyable. We Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A decade after his masterpiece, The Tree of Wooden Clogs, won the 1978 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Italian director Ermanno Olmi took Venice’s 1988 Golden Lion for The Legend of the Holy Drinker (La leggenda del santo bevitore). Festival victories aside, at first sight the two films could hardly seem more different.In the second film Olmi moved into distinctly new territory for him: Legend was an adaptation (of the 1939 novella by the Austrian writer Joseph Roth), featured professional actors (Rutger Hauer in the lead role), was made in English, and counts as a fable, very different in style from Read more ...