CDs/DVDs
Barney Harsent
John Grant is nothing if not a confessional songwriter. On his last album, Pale Green Ghosts, there were moments of dark despair, caustic barbs and some surprisingly slinky grooves soundtracking a man who was offering himself up with a breathtaking honesty. On Grey Tickles, Black Pressure – a title that places us somewhere between mid-life crisis and full-on nightmare – he is similarly laid bare, but the literate humour has now become full-on funny and could well mark him out as the best lyricist of his generation.Although Grant says he wanted to get “moodier and angrier” on this record, he Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Hurts first appeared half a decade ago, a duo from Manchester who aspired to Depeche Mode but sounded vaguely like OneRepublic and similar. Which is to say they dealt in stadium sized, studio-orchestrated melodrama that veered towards the ostentatious and hand-wringing. In mainland Europe, they’re big news and at home their previous two albums have been Top Ten.With this third outing, Hurts have drifted into the realms of the preposterous. Most of Surrender consists of hysterical hi-NRG stomping delivered with po-faced bombast, like a cross between pop-prog megastars Muse and the 2005 Euro- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though packaged as a tale of an ageing rock star, Danny Collins is really an autumnal comedy-drama about regret, redemption and trying to seize life's second chances. As the title character, a cheesy AOR veteran pitched somewhere between Neil Diamond and Neil Sedaka, Al Pacino demonstrates why he and rock'n'roll have never been intimately linked – he can't sing, he can't dance, and he hasn't a clue what to do with a baying live audience.Nonetheless this is Pacino at his warmest and most soulful, and, abetted by such wily old veterans as Christopher Plummer (as his manager Frank Grubman) and Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Sir Tom Jones’ recording career has enjoyed an Indian summer for the first two releases of this trilogy, 2010’s Praise & Blame and 2012’s Spirit In The Room. This concluding album, another collaboration with producer Ethan Johns, returns to a similar heritage hinterland of folk, country and Sixties rock, though with more explicitly personal overtones: it accompanies an autobiography, Over The Top And Back (a “self-penned” autobiography, it’s promised), published next week. Sir Tom is still in fine voice, that baritone as firm and dark as seasoned mahogany, but in a rather Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It’s sometimes suggested that few things in music are as ridiculous as Christian metal. The point, however, is moot. The band Stryper, for instance, play with such inspired fury any sermonising seems entirely organic. Then there are the likes of Alice Cooper; so low-key about his faith you might not even know he had one. Most surprising of all is Cooper lookalike Blackie Lawless. For those who haven’t followed his career closely, the W.A.S.P. lead singer – famous for “Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)” – is also born again. He has been for some years.The title Golgotha here, of course, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s easier to admire than enjoy 2013's Hard to Be a God. The 177-minute final film directed by Leningrad-born Alexei German depicts medieval squalor and butchery so intensely that the viewer is forced to shrink from its portrait of life without culture, humanism, and soap. Like another protracted masterpiece, Béla Tarr’s 2011 The Turin Horse, German’s miasmic swansong imparts its riches mostly after being endured and reflected upon.Adapted from the novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, whose Roadside Picnic begat Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Hard to Be a God was filmed between 2000 and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
From its title-track opening cut to the final moments of its closer “Sova”, Allas Sak is recognisably a Dungen album. The musical dynamic between the Swedish quartet’s members and their collective sound is so distinctive that they effectively constitute a one-band genre. Allas Sak does not have as many dives into a jazz-informed inner space as its predecessor 2010’s Skit I Allt, and is also not as pastoral.The new album is, instead, more minimally arranged and balances melody with interrelated instrumental passages with a greater fluidity than previously. As ever, the lyrics are in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bert Jansch: It Don't Bother Me, Jack Orion / Bert Jansch & John Renbourn: Bert and JohnWhen theartsdesk last caught up with Bert Jansch, it was April 1965 and he had just issued his eponymous debut album – a set which now, as it was then, is a benchmark take on what acoustic folk and blues would be if a singular, all-embracing vision was applied. As much singer-songwriter album as template for the future of boundary-breaking British folk, Bert Jansch was as influential as it was remarkable.Jansch did not stand still after April 1965. His follow-up album It Don't Bother Me was released in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The album of the sitcom. You don’t get a lot of those, and technically – beyond the title song – you don’t get one here either. “Cradle to the Grave” is the theme tune for Danny Baker’s autobiographical comedy currently on BBC Two, based on his memoir of growing up in south London in the same vicinity as Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook. In fact, the song came first. Squeeze’s 14th studio album, their first since 1998, has been several years in the brewing: they resumed touring in 2007 and pondered writing new material four years ago. The result is that rock’n’roll collectors’ item, an album Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This is Yppah’s fouth album. It’s being reviewed here today because Janet Jackson won’t let us listen to her album yet. theartsdesk heard yesterday that it’s still under wraps, fearful of piracy. This is a regular occurrence, especially with big US stars. It is also fortuitous because Yppah makes the sort of delicious off-radar music that deserves wider exposure. In the Autumn, when so many big names are releasing music, he and multitudes boasting a similarly low profile are shunted aside so you can read about the usual deluge of glossy everyday normalcy.Yppah, on the other hand, a guy called Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s easy to forget about the Slovak side of the Czechoslovak “New Wave”: works coming out of Bratislava often seem to receive less attention, even on their home territory, than those from Prague, where the now legendary FAMU film school that gave birth to the film movement was based.And that’s despite Štefan Uher’s Slovak film of 1962, The Sun in a Net, being generally acclaimed as the one that set the New Wave rolling. It makes for a situation, as Eastern Europe film scholar Peter Hames notes in a filmed extra on this Second Run DVD release, in which Slovak film of the period hasn’t so much Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title of Don Henley's fifth solo album refers to the rural area of East Texas where he grew up, listening to country music stations like Shreveport's fabled Louisiana Hayride and absorbing the building blocks of the country-rock sound he forged with the Eagles. The Eagles went through many changes, but country remains close to Henley's heart, and Cass County sounds like the country albums that used to come out of the old Nashville in the 1950s and Sixties. Try his version of the Louvin Brothers' 1955 hit "When I Stop Dreaming", remade here as a scintillating duet with Dolly Parton.Despite Read more ...