CDs/DVDs
Graham Fuller
Twenty-five-year-old Anthony Asquith didn’t call the shots on the silent movie that launched his distinguished directorial career, but the screenplay he co-wrote with JOC Orton included elaborate scenarist notes that told his designated co-director, AV Bramble, exactly what he intended. It was a gamble that paid off – 1927’s Shooting Stars proved a dazzling combination of tragicomedy and early docudrama, its subject being life in a film studio (Cricklewood in North London).The essays that accompany the British Film Institute’s dual-format release of the restored film emphasise that it Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Neil Arthur is on a mission. He was once one half of Blancmange, the British synth-pop band most famous for middle-sized hits of the early 1980s, songs such as “Don’t Tell Me” and “Living on the Ceiling”. He has been the group’s sole member since 2011 and, recently, he’s been busy. Two albums came out last year, the playful Semi Detached and the instrumental, experimental Nil by Mouth, both decent outings that threw off the shackles of being a tribute act to his younger self. A few months later, Commuter 23 appears, a successful continuation of the same mission.This isn’t to say that the new Read more ...
joe.muggs
DJs and techno producers doing “real music” doesn't always inspire the greatest of confidence: they often seem in thrall to other musicians, blind to what makes their own music special, or afraid to take the risks they would with their electronic production.However, Julius Steinhoff of Hamburg's Smallville records and Abdeslam Hammouda, with whom he's been producing house tunes since 2008, defiantly buck that trend. On this album for the ever-reliable Tokyo label Mule Musiq, they've left the dancefloor a long way behind them, and created 13 gentle meditations on life, love and the mind: each Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Music is no exception to the rule that history is littered with winners and losers. In commercial terms, however they are looked at, San Francisco’s Charlatans were losers. They issued just one single in 1966 and a belated album in 1969. While the world hummed along with Scott McKenzie’s "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" in 1967, these pioneers of the city’s scene were without a label and left adrift in the rush to sign Bay Area bands. Big Brother & the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape and Quicksilver Messenger Service saw their stock Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The answers, for the listener curious as to whether Emmy the Great’s Second Love fared any better than her first (it’s the title of her 2009 debut as much as any reference to the songwriter’s psyche), do not emerge until its final track. “Once I was a flight risk,” Emma-Lee Moss sings softly, almost swooning, “but soon I think I will be safe … Let me get lost in you”. Which sounds as close as one gets to a happy ending, until the lyric changes with the second verse to “I wish I was a flight risk”.It’s been five years since Moss’s last album proper: five years in which the Londoner moved to LA Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The expectation that late means great is one embedded deeply in our culture: that the consummation of creative endeavour finds its peak towards life’s conclusion, with experience assimilated into a rich finale. These two films from the very start of the career of the eminent Czech director Věra Chytilová (1929-2014), and the beginning of the remarkable movement that became the Czech New Wave, are a salutary reminder of the opposite, showing just what happens when youth bursts out with supreme energy.The Czech New Wave was a young movement, emerging directly out of the Prague Film School. Read more ...
mark.kidel
Jeff Buckley, who died much too young, only made one studio album, Grace. Part-channelling his sweet-voiced father Tim, and part-exploring a strand of rock that was both dangerously wild and exquisitely sophisticated, it was a revelation and a masterpiece. To this day, it sounds as fresh and deeply moving as ever.There has been, over the years, a series of posthumous releases, some of them constructions based on half-finished work, little of which matched the sheer brilliance of Grace, as well as some impressive live material – Buckley was a powerhouse on stage, with a band that fed on his Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Read the track listing of Belgica and you might assume that this soundtrack is a compilation featuring 15 different artists from a wide variety of musical genres. In fact, it has been written and produced in its entirety by Belgian experimentalists Soulwax, using virtual bands created purely for this project. Soulwax is actually made up of Belgian brothers Stephen and David Dewaele (AKA dance titans 2manydjs) and Stefaan Van Leuven, and their latest offering accompanies a film set in a nightclub in Ghent which, on this evidence, sounds like quite a wild venue with plenty to recommend it.The Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Ten years after his debut album, the former N.A.S.T.Y Crew MC from East Ham has produced a distinctly British album. It’s probably his best yet. Kano has skirted the fringes of mega success and previous albums have been criticised for chasing hits and the American Dream rather than staying true to his own style. Now, he’s returned to what he knows, creating a series of polaroid snapshots of himself and what made him.Made In The Manor talks about the streets he grew up on ("A Roadman's Hymn"), his mates ("Strangers"), his family ("Little Sis"), the trappings of fame and the reality of living Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bill Forsyth’s slice of Glasgow noir never received the praise showered upon its predecessors Local Hero and Gregory’s Girl. The bonus interviews included on this disc hint at the reasons why: Forsyth admits that his script could have been tightened up, and Claire Grogan suggests that the film’s payoff doesn’t feel like a proper ending.Comfort and Joy is still a treat, though, its dry humour a return to the style of Forsyth’s zero-budget debut. Bill Paterson’s Alan "Dickie" Bird is a Partridgesque local radio DJ whose life starts to unravel when his kleptomaniac girlfriend leaves him. Buying Read more ...
Barney Harsent
So the Coral have hit their eighth studio album, Distance Inbetween. This is, I’m ashamed to say, news to me. It’s like realizing that a show you used to really like transferred to Sky Atlantic and you’ve failed to keep up and extend your subscription. The question then is how will it be, jumping in now, so far down the line? Particularly when their last offering – 2014’s release of "lost" album, The Curse of Love – comprised an extended flashback sequence that received a mixed response. This is, I’m assuming, the first time that the Coral will have found themselves compared to the ‘85-‘86 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When the Sixties-inspired The Prisoners released their second album Thewisermiserdemelza in 1983, the decade they looked to for their musical and sartorial style was closer to the album itself than it is to today. Now, the half-century remove from what the Medway band drew from then ought to be as distant as, say, the minutiae of 1916 are from those of 1966. Yet this is not the case. The 1960s have never been consigned to the dusty drawer of distant memory, a point rammed home by the Victoria & Albert Museum's annoucement last week that they are to hold a major exhibition dedicated to the Read more ...