CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
Three years ago a debut album, The Future Through a Lens, by Hastings duo Vile Electrodes, announced the arrival of an A-league synth-pop talent. The pair have since appeared on stages around Europe supporting everyone from Eighties pop heroes Heaven 17 to Krautrock mainstay Manuel Göttsching, but they’ve remained a cult phenomenon, the analogue electro-pop musicians’ analogue electro-pop musicians. They deserve better for, as their second album shows, Anais Neon and Martin Swan’s ability to craft atmospheric productions with pristine depth and skill has only grown in the interim.In the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Way back in 1996 Robert Earl Keen issued an unexpected career bestseller in No 2 Live Dinner, and this new double live set marks a joyous, star-stacked return to John T Floore’s place, 20 years later, drawing on three decades of songcraft, alongside live cuts from his most recent studio set, 2015’s Happy Prisoner: The Bluegrass Sessions.Floores Country Store in Helotes, Texas, is a honky-tonk, barbecue café and bar dating from the 1940s, set on the Old Bandera Road up in the hill country north of San Antonio. As such, a line of cold beers, a quart of chili and a Saturday night crowd would be Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Everything about Xam Duo’s debut album, out earlier this month on Sonic Cathedral, has a wonderful sense of self-indulgence: from the freeform, experimental feel, the stretched-out tones and resulting melodies that exist almost by implication, to the mournful squall of the saxophone, buoyed by a stubborn sea of sound.The project, a collaboration between Hookworms’ Matthew Benn and Christopher Duffin of Deadwall, was born when the former was looking to expand what had, up until then, been a solo project. Much of this album is formed of the pair’s very first, completely improvised, session Read more ...
graham.rickson
What to do if you’re a despotic leader with an underperforming film industry? Hiring better directors and actors wasn’t an option for Kim Jong-il in the late 1970s, so he took drastic action: luring South Korea’s biggest female star Choi Eun-hee to Hong Kong on false pretences and having her abducted. Her ex-husband, the South’s leading filmmaker Shin Sang-ok, did the honourable thing and went in search of her, only to suffer the same fate. What happened next is the subject of Rob Cannan and Ross Adam’s engrossing documentary.Shin was a financially inept directorial maverick, whose production Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Kuro is the brainchild and debut album of classically-trained violinist Agathe Max and bass-playing noisenik Gareth Turner, he of wigged-out psychedelicists Anthroprophh. If this seems an unlikely partnership, a shared love of “the drone” is where their sonic worlds collide, and from this collision has come a spaced-out opus of quite uncommon beauty.Drawing on a sonic pallet that takes in the repetitive minimalism of Steve Reich, the drone of Sunn O))) and Ulver’s Terrestrials collaboration and dashes of Alice Coltrane’s trippy meditations, Kuro avoids easy pigeonholing. Its melancholy but Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1996, the NME ranked Super Furry Animals’ debut album Fuzzy Logic as the year’s fourth best. It sat between Orbital’s In Sides (number three) and DJ Shadow’s Entroducing. Beck’s Odelay took the top spot and Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go was at two. Fuzzy Logic was on Creation Records and the Oasis-bolstered label’s only other album in the run down-was The Boo Radleys’ C’Mon Kids (15). A run through the list suggested Britpop was over (Suede’s Coming Up was in there, but they were hardly Britpop) and grunge was on the shelf (Screaming Trees made the cut though they, like Suede Read more ...
David Nice
Like Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Abel Gance's Napoléon is the monument of a genius badly in need of self-editing. In both instances, everything testifies to the singular vision of the artist - in Gance's case, his innovations in the field of film technology, from hand-held-camera mayhem to three-screen novelty in the final sequence which ends up in tricolour (earlier, tints and tones in greens, purples and reds, inter alia, articulate the underlying moods of certain scenes). But it's disconcerting that the five and a half hours of film assembled in Kevin Brownlow's digitally restored Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“One thing there's not is the big Metallica ballad – it's all pretty uppity,” said Lars Ulrich of Hardwired… to Self-Destruct, Metallica’s first album for the best part of a decade. If we ignore, for a moment, the Trump-esque grasp of language and assume he meant uptempo rather than arrogant, the drummer appears to be a master of understatement as soon as opener “Hardwired” tears out of the gate, all rabid intent and sweary barking.It’s a tempo that you’d imagine would be difficult to keep up for a group that’s made up of, in the main, men in their 50s, and you’d be right. So, after the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In a career that began just six years ago, Rumer has tipped her musical hat to such songwriting greats as Jimmy Webb and Hall and Oates while also finding her own voice as a writer. Now, with her fourth album, she pays homage to one of the great pop catalogues, that of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, in a collaboration with Rob Shirakbari, her musical and life partner, who worked as Bacharach's musical director. There are many who would disparage it as “elevator music”. Critic Nik Cohn described it as “tasteful, attractive, a bit gutless” and thought that between them Bacharach and Dionne Read more ...
joe.muggs
It would be easy to create a neat dichotomy between Solange Knowles and her sister Beyoncé. Solange is alternative while Beyoncé is pop, Solange deals in intimacy while Beyoncé is about grand gestures, Solange – on this album more than ever – is about elegant musicianship while Beyoncé is about the weaponised possibilities of the modern studio. And all of these things are true, more or less. Solange does operate free of the constraints of being pop culture royalty, she has tended to be associated with quirky and cool musicians rather than megastars, and very certainly on this record she Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Little Mix, like Girls Aloud before them, have developed fast from TV talent newbies into impressively sparkly industry professionals. They won The X Factor in 2011 and released a flabby cover of Damien Rice’s moany fist-pumper, “Cannonball”, but they’ve since honed their act to laser precision. No longer ingénues (if they ever were), they’re a polished showbiz machine with songs to match. They first reached such a status with last year’s Get Weird album and its ubiquitous chart-topper, “Black Magic”. Their fourth long-player sees them snappily consolidate.Glory Days already has a No.1 hit Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Penélope Cruz has rarely been better, though her director Julio Medem has seldom been worse. As Magda, she’s an earthy everywoman, whether dealing with an errant husband, protecting her son Dani, or treating breast cancer with wry stoicism. It perhaps helps that her doctor, Julian (Asier Etxeandia), is dishy, sensitive and, like football scout Arturo (Luis Tosar) – a chance acquaintance undergoing his own tragedies who becomes her lover – enraptured by her. Magda becomes a centrifugal force around which these men spin, even as the lurking cancer’s blows become more grievous, and fright and Read more ...