CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
The Glowing Man may be the declared final album from Swans’ present line-up, but it is certainly no whimpering exit. On the contrary, it is a thing of intense and magnificent beauty that doesn’t once let up for over two hours – despite several tracks that clock in at well over 20 minutes long.Opaque lyrics and stirring primal music that taps directly into the soul are again the order of the day for Swans. Moving from the Pink Floyd-esque dreamy but dark psychedelia of “Cloud of Forgetting” and “Cloud of Unknowing”, Michael Gira’s crew take in the menacing Gothic country blues of “People Like Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The fourth album from 25-year-old Texan singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz is a beautiful mope. It’s country-flavoured but is neither overflowing with syrupy emotion, nor honed to flinty Cash/Rubin desolation. Jarosz, who recently graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music, hails from a 21st-century milieu, far from cotton-picking and moonlit porch banjos echoing across the sagebrush.Discovered, while still at school, by Alison Krauss/Harry Connick Jr-producer Gary Paczosa, and signed since to his label, Jarosz's Undercurrent, also produced by Paczosa in his Nashville studio, is a Read more ...
mark.kidel
The language of documentary is shot through with conventions. Rare is the occasion when a film-maker breaks the rules and throws the genre wide open. It takes a versatile artist like Laurie Anderson to free the medium from genre and invent a whole new way of doing things.Heart of a Dog is a resolutely personal, emotionally charged and often witty exploration of the passing of Anderson’s rat terrier Lolabelle, but the film is also a meditation on dreams, death and love. Without ever seeming gimmicky, pretentious or over-intellectual, Anderson manages to seamlessly draw together reflections on Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Revenant is released as a home entertainment garlanded in fewer Oscar laurels than it might have been. Its impact as a pure cinematic experience is far greater than this year’s best picture Spotlight. Hence awards for director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. The paucity of dialogue means that few best actor winners can have had as little to say as Leonardo DiCaprio. He plays Hugh Glass, a tracker and guide abandoned by the party in his charge when he is mauled by bear and presumed next to dead. Spurred by the ghost of his Native American wife, slaughtered in a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Led Zeppelin are an icon of musical class. Train, even their admirers must admit, are not. With this faithful, perhaps too faithful cover, the credit can only flow one way. Responses to this album have been a touchstone of journalistic identity, with our competitor sites posting sarcastic reviews, only to be accused below the line of snobbery, ignorance, and, most damning of all, hipsterdom.So let’s get this out of the way. Rather like Monet re-painted by numbers in Dulux high gloss, Train have re-created the outlines of Led Zeppelin, but without the depth and nuance. In songs like “Whole Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
An increasing concern for society at large, dementia has become a recurrent theme in films and TV too. Concussion comes at the subject from an unusual angle, as it tells the story of Nigeria-born neuropathologist Dr Bennet Omalu, who identified a form of dementia which was killing an alarming number of American football players.Working as a forensic pathologist in Pittsburgh, Omalu conducted an autopsy on former Pittsburgh Steelers superstar Mike Webster (played here by David Morse), who'd died destitute and mentally shot away at the age of 50. This prompted Omalu's identification of what he Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Eli Paperboy Reed remembers a time when soul music didn’t just mean aping some of Michael Jackson’s old moves and wearing a daft hat: a time when Otis Redding and others on the Stax roster were making some seriously soulful music. Eli is also well-acquainted with gospel music, having played in the band at Mitty Collier’s South Side Chicago church when he was a college student and through his involvement with the Mama Foundation’s Gospel for Teens programme in Harlem in recent years. My Way Home sees Reed plunder heavily from both traditions and produce an album that is, in the main, a wild Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Adam Ant was one of the few who saw Sex Pistols’ first live show. On 6 November 1975, his band Bazooka Joe was playing Charing Cross Road’s St Martin’s School of Art. They found an uninvited support band had gatecrashed the evening. The impact of the interlopers on the then Stuart Goddard wasn’t instant, but he would go on to form The B-Sides and, then, Adam and the Ants, whose manager became Jordan, who worked at Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road shop SEX. Adam was hotwired into what became codified as punk rock. But his music was never defined by templates.Mainstream impact took a while to come Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There are many ways to push musical boundaries. Some artists, from Albert Ayler to Can to Sunn O))) and far beyond, do it sonically. Xylaroo are not a band in this vein. Consisting of east London-based sisters Holly and Coco Chant, their music dramatically sparks listeners’ sensibilities through other means.On one level their strummed pop could be dismissed as something a friend might come up with, off the cuff, around the campfire. But only if that friend happened to be Johnny Cash, Joni Mitchell or similar. Xylaroo push the boundaries, alright, but using a combination of glistening, Read more ...
joe.muggs
This record passes the Rainy Day Greasy Spoon Test with flying colours. It's a vital one for any music that tends to the middle of the road: picture yourself in a cafe, mid-morning, mid-week, perhaps with a hangover, perhaps trying to avoid thinking about a personal problem, certainly not feeling excellent, staring at a mug of tea and the remains of an egg sandwich, with everything outside the windows damp and grey. How do you feel as the music comes onto the radio?This is not about suspending critical faculties, and it's certainly not about snobbery: it's about understanding the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Watching Victoria on home video is a good idea if you first hide the remote. It’s impossible to pause Sebastian Schipper’s ambitious heist thriller even for a few seconds without ruining its pleasurably disorienting effect: cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen shot it – digitally, of course – in real time in a single 138-minute take on 22 Berlin locations. It's unsurprising to learn that Schipper acted in Tom Tykwer’s kinetic Run Lola Run (1998) and has written with him.The story is not a little implausible. Victoria (Laia Costa), a friendless Spanish expat, meets feckless charmer Sonne ( Read more ...
howard.male
When producer Guilherme Kastrup asked this 78-year-old Brazilian icon what she wanted this album to be about she replied, “Sex and blackness.” Listening to the end result makes one wonder if she was referring to blackness as the colour of her skin or the colour of her mood. Perhaps a bit of both, because Soares’s 34th studio album is a corrosive cocktail of rock, jazz, funk and samba that at times becomes almost unlistenably intense. I say "almost" because if you steel yourself sufficiently, it’s an unpredictable and bracing sequence of songs that makes more formal and emotional sense with Read more ...