CDs/DVDs
mark.kidel
Staff Benda Bilili and Kasai Allstars redefined the sound of Congolese dance music: the supremacy of the Rumba popularised by Franco and others, with its cascading guitar solos and instantly recognisable beats, was replaced by a host of other rhythms, closer to the intense vitality of the area’s rich traditions.Jupiter & Okwess are part of a similar roots-inflected but resolutely contemporary journey through the sounds that make Kinshasa one of the most vibrant musical capitals of Africa. In this second album, Jean-Pierre Bonkondji (who changed his name to Jupiter over 10 years ago) and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“I would love it,” Lola (Barbara Sukowa) sighs, warned of a world without morality. “My problem is that they don’t let me in to take part.” In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1981, 1950s-set reworking of Sternberg’s Dietrich-creating Weimar classic The Blue Angel, the original’s voracious femme fatale becomes a wistful, drunkenly mercurial, not unkind sexual businesswoman. She’s the emblem of 1950s West Germany, ready to be bought and sold to get ahead, and put a difficult past behind her.Fassbinder turned the lush Technicolor palette of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s “women’s” melodramas feverish for a Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Watching the YouTube clips that accompany the release of the Vamps’ third album, Night and Day (Night Edition), it becomes immediately apparent how keen they are to come across as a "real" band. They talk eloquently about the writing process and are frequently filmed playing guitars. Good on them, we’re supposed to think. Good. On. Them. Well, quite. Except…When in the name of Depeche Mode did writing your own songs become a point of difference for a pop band? The key, surely, is to write good ones. That’s the space in which we can define the arena of judgment, surely? My son wrote a song Read more ...
peter.quinn
Hearing the London Metropolitan Orchestra ripping a hole in the silence with the impassioned opening theme of the three-movement "Developing Story", I’m not entirely convinced that the New Zealand-born, US-based pianist, composer and arranger Alan Broadbent doesn’t have any Russian blood flowing through his veins, despite the two-time Grammy winner's assurances to the contrary when I interviewed him last year.For its sheer beauty of sound, from hushed simplicity to breathtaking climaxes – not to mention superb performances from both orchestra and Broadbent's jazz trio featuring Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the four years since Dizzee Rascal’s last album the landscape around grime has changed. In 2013 grime MCs were busy hooking up with as many pop stars as possible, fusing their machine-gun lyricism with Autotune-addled pap pop. A Dizzee single from that time even featured a collaboration with Robbie Williams. With the ascent of Skepta, Stormzy, Jme, Novelist et al, grime has partly returned to its original fusion of spiky word-flow and caustic electronics. Dizzee’s been listening. His sixth album showcases an MC determined to astonish, and succeeding.The best those turning to Raskit for Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For viewers not familiar with the background story of Cézanne et moi – which surely includes most of us without specialist knowledge of late 19th century French artistic and literary culture – the moi of this lavish yet curiously uninvolving double biopic is Emile Zola. Danièle Thompson’s film tells the story of the friendship between the eminent realist writer and the genius of Post-Impressionism – to whom acclaim came only late in life – that lasted, despite their differences, for almost half a century.They first encountered one another as schoolboys in Aix-en-Provence in the early 1850s, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
What’s not to like about To My Roots, the third album by singer-songwriter Emma Stevens? That’s the problem. Not just her problem, of course, but the problem with so many DIY indie artists who release albums, often crowdfunded (as this was), pick-up download traffic, sell albums off the back of tours, and maybe find a champion on mainstream radio. It's bland. Nothing to dislike but nothing to hook you in. Competent, but not memorable.Terry Wogan, who championed Eva Cassidy (unexceptional talent, life cut tragically short) and Beth Nielsen Chapman (exemplary singer-songwriter), described Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Boris are a trio of Japanese noise rockers who are masters of all things heavy, and Dear, a double album of superior quality, marks the band’s 25th anniversary as a going concern. Covering a range of bases from doomy slabs of heavy noise to riff-tastic stoner rock, distortion-soaked dream pop and beyond, there is nothing jaded about Dear, and nor is there anything clunky about the band’s subtle genre-skipping. In fact, this album exudes a vitality that many bands which have been around for half as long as this mighty leviathan frequently have difficulty mustering.“DOWN - Domination of Waiting Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
To anyone other than Eighties and Nineties indie obsessives, the guitarist from The House of Love and Levitation and the singer from Adorable getting together in 2014 did not cause a stir. However, both had stylistically leapt away from their pasts, and the resulting album, Broken Heart Surgery, showcased rich, heart-worn songs, filtered through a sensibility somewhere between Lee Hazelwood and John Barry 1960s film scores. It brought them a new audience. Their second album is equally palatable.Boasting great cover art by photographer Rosanne de Lange, featuring the now disappeared car Read more ...
Matthew Wright
New Orleans trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah has been at the forefront of the movement to reinvent jazz for some time. On this album he claims to be creating a new kind of “Stretch Music” (and has created an app of the same name, which won Jazz FM’s innovation award), supposedly a genre-blind evolution of jazz. The concept of diaspora, inspired by his experience of New Orleans multiculturalism, is an exploration of the African-American musical contributions to jazz. In this respect he’s joining several other young(ish) musicians of jazz origins including Britain’s Shabaka Hutchings, Read more ...
joe.muggs
For over 30 years, Melvins have been flagbearers for a kind of foundational American underground rock. Monstrously psychedelic, heavy as lead, mischievous and angry, they are part of a lineage that connects to squarepeg counterculture forefathers like Beefheart and The Fugs, share swathes of DNA with heavy metal and particularly Black Sabbath, and are particularly impervious to outside cultural shifts. Though they were fleetingly affiliated by the media with grunge, thanks to founder Buzz Osborne's musical and personal relationship to Kurt Cobain, they were something else. And along with Read more ...
graham.rickson
Using Hollywood stars to prop up British crime thrillers is an ignoble tradition. Guy Ritchie’s Snatch misused Brad Pitt, but John Wayne’s execrable Brannigan is probably the worst example. So one’s hopes aren’t high for Stormy Monday, a 1987 noir starring Sean Bean and Sting, aided and abetted by, er, Melanie Griffiths and Tommy Lee Jones. Fear not – this was Mike Figgis’s feature debut, and it’s a remarkable piece of work, Figgis also responsible for the screenplay and soundtrack. The plot is disarmingly straightforward; Sting’s jazz club is threatened by dodgy developers, and the young Read more ...