CDs/DVDs
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Back in the early 2000s, it was rumoured that Ryan Adams had covered Is This It by The Strokes in its entirety. According to my extensive cataloguing of the career of Americana’s enfant terrible, only “Last Nite” ever surfaced (I have a live version, which opens with a couple of versions of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”), but the point is that Ryan Adams is no stranger to these sonic experiments. Which is why, as a huge fan of both artists I have found it both amusing and perplexing to watch the internet collectively lose its shit over Adams’ version of Taylor Swift’s 1989.The parallels between Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Killing Joke are a band that inspire near devotion in their fans. Their 1980 eponymous debut is regularly cited as one of the best of all time, and they’ve managed two very decent outings since the original line-up of Jaz Coleman, Paul Ferguson, Kevin "Geordie" Walker and Martin "Youth" Glover reformed in 2008.With Pylon, their 15th studio album, not a great deal has changed. The band show absolutely no sign of letting up on the raging fire and apocalyptic anger that have become trademarks, but it seems to suit the times a little better now. Perhaps the world has caught up with them – maybe Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Attempting to halt an enemy army with a small unit of troops on bicycles seems impossible and improbable, but this is exactly what happened at Lundtoftbjerg in the south of Jutland in the early hours of 9 April 1940 as Germany invaded the strategically important Denmark.Although the assault was launched on more than one front, this aspect of the land campaign is the subject of the Danish film April 9th, which tells the true story of how ill-equipped, low-population Denmark had no chance. Even so, the Danish troops did what they could after first sighting the invaders at 4.50am. There were Read more ...
joe.muggs
The world of Rodney Smith aka Roots Manuva often feels like a hermetic one. Despite his increasing elder statesman status the Stockwell-raised rapper, producer and visionary exists away from trends and scenes, a self-professed armchair philosopher, whose lyrics more often than not have the feel of internal dialogue, and whose music tends to the claustrophobic. And so it is here: the real, outside world is often referenced, starting with the sociological mutterings of the opener, “Hard Bastards”, but it always comes to you through Smith's thought processes, bounced back and forth in word games Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Asif Kapadia’s Amy packs a punch. It is a wrenching, clear-eyed portait of a supremely talented, charismatic young woman being whittled away by voracious, relentless 21st century celebrity, exacerbated by her own demons. At the UK box office it’s become the second most successful documentary feature film of all time (after Farenheit 9/11). Part of its power is, of course, the raw, soulful singing of its central protagonist. Now a soundtrack arrives, a collage of Winehouse favourites, demos and live takes interspersed with the instrumental music of Brazilian film composer Antônio Pinto.Where Read more ...
mark.kidel
Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to his much-acclaimed The Act of Killing is a much more accomplished film. Once again, he is concerned with examining the large-scale, American-inspired massacre of Indonesian "Communists" in 1965.His first attempt – extraordinary and shocking – was in some ways undermined by the surreal reconstructions of killing and torture that the director filmed with the more-than-willing perpetrators. This time around, he has focused on one particular case of torture and murder, as a microcosm of the larger scale mass-slaughter. The film follows the optician Adi, as Read more ...
Barney Harsent
As well as releasing electronic music on Ron Morelli’s feted L.I.E.S. label, and the sporadically brilliant Ghost Box, as well a particularly impressive outing on Static Caravan (as Primitive Neural Pathways), Steve Moore is the bass- and synth-playing half of Zombi. On Shape Shift, a heavier, darker and more rock-sounding record than fans of 2009’s Escape Velocity might be expecting, he is doing his utmost to show the acceptable face of horror-suited post-rock. Meanwhile, his accomplice, AE Paterra, provides the path from which they must not stray by beating several shades of something out Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Little Bob Story: Off the Rails + Live in ‘78Aki Kaurismäki’s 2011 film Le Havre features a cameo from a hard-rocking band fronted by a grey-haired gentleman who crops up elsewhere in the action. He is Roberto Piazza, and trades under the name Little Bob. Although born in Italy, his family moved to France in 1958 when he was 13. Integral to and at one with France’s perennial love affair with classic rock ‘n’ roll, he formed the band Little Bob Story in Le Havre in 1974.Kaurismäki recognised that the wilful Little Bob is the genuine article: a man forever marinated in the spirit of high- Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“I always think she knows a little more than the rest of us,” said film director Paul Thomas Anderson, on casting Newsom as the knowing narrator Sortilège in last year’s Inherent Vice. Fans of her music know the feeling. It’s five years since the epic Have One On Me, all of which time Newsom claims to have been working, on and off, on Divers, an inspiringly complex and ambitious collection discussing love, history, time travel, desolation, the indigenous people of New York (I’ve only got 300 words, so I’ll leave it there…).Vocally, Björk and Wuthering Heights-era Kate Bush (with glimpses of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Time, released in 2013, was Rod Stewart's first album of fresh compositions in nearly two decades. The business of working on his deservedly bestselling autobiography triggered a windfall of new songs in the key of Rod: reflections on love and family with the odd mea culpa thrown in. Another Country picks up where he left off.Thus from another dad-rock goodies bag comes “Love Is” (see video overleaf), a four-square chugger with bluegrass tinges in which Rod expatiates, presumably to one of his vast brood, “on a subject on which I’m well versed”. A younger bairn is apostrophised in the lullaby Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The first feature written and directed by John Maclean, the former Beta Band keyboardist, is a Western comprised of late-genre tropes and references – but one that’s fresh and sincere. It’s knowing and affecting, unlike Django Unchained.A tremulous aristocratic youth, Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee), is searching for the fellow Scot (Caren Pistorius) he loves in the hell of 1870 Colorado Territory. The terrified survivors of a burned Indian camp flee murderous bluecoats. Their officer is about to shoot Jay when bounty hunter Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) intervenes. After Silas hires Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title Tape Hiss instantly telegraphs a dissatisfaction with today’s digital world and, fittingly, the all-analogue second album from Rotterdam’s Rats on Rafts could soundtrack a half-remembered Eighties evening taking in a bill of Britain and New Zealand’s most singular post-punk survivors. Their musical inspirations ring through loud and clear. But – and it's a massive but – these Lownlanders do it better and more ferociously than any of their forebears.Most prominent in the mix are the two-step swing of early “Pink Frost” Chills and the unwavering rolling crescendos of “Going up” and “ Read more ...