CDs/DVDs
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Complaining about pop music sounding manufactured is something that, in these postmodern monoculture days, “serious” music fans are all supposed to be past by now. Certainly, since its US release last month, those who are paid to know better have been practically frothing at the mouth over the long-awaited third album by a third-placed 2007 Canadian Pop Idol contestant whose irresistible “Call Me Maybe” was the soundtrack to your summer a few years back. But while E•MO•TION crackles and fizzes in places with moments of pure pop joy, there are big chunks of this record that sound as though Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Growing up is a pain in the arse. Actually that’s not true, my arse has remained relatively unaffected by advancing years. In the last few months, however, I’ve managed to put my back out getting up off the sofa and inexplicably hurt my knee while trying to stand after retying a shoelace. I’ve also developed an acute fear of cholesterol, without really understanding what it is.On the basis of the two tracks I’d already heard on Rattle That Lock, I’d assumed that David Gilmour had managed to avoid such bodily rebellion and was dancing his way through the days. Both the title track and single “ Read more ...
Graham Fuller
When filming Vivre sa vie in 1962, Jean-Luc Godard made his wife and star Anna Karina wear a wig resembling Louise Brooks’s black-lacquered art-deco bob. Karina’s Nana was less immaculately coiffed than Brooks’s Lulu in G.W. Pabst's Pandora’s Box (1929), however, and her hair didn’t taper into pincers, like those that lay against Lulu’s cheeks. Nana is more vulnerable than her iconic antecedent – her glum stares at the camera replacing the devastating smiles Lulu bestows promiscuously.Godard’s fourth feature (and third with Karina) ostensibly traces Nana’s downward spiral as an aspiring 22- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The oft-used phrase “Hackney drum & bass band Rudimental” is misleading. It sets the listener off on the wrong foot. Anyone up for a “Hackney drum and bass band” would likely want something with serious bite - big, bad and boomin’. I know I would. This is not what Rudimental are, as anyone who’s heard their chart-topping hits and debut album will attest. Their second album journeys even further away from such a description.In Autumn 2011 a shrewd trio of young Hackney DJ-musicians approached the successful producer Amir Amor, a man who already owned a Hoxton production house and had Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I was prepared to be fondly underwhelmed by Keith Richards' first album in 23 years: 15 loose-limbed tracks laid down with drummer Steve Jordan from 2011 on, with studio guests and old Xpensive Wino friends casually sitting in on keys, brass, strings, vocals. There's Bobby Keys with his last recorded blows of brass on “Blues in the Morning” and “Amnesia”; Norah Jones breathing sweetly over “Illusion”; Larry Campbell on fiddle and pedal steel on "Just a Gift" and "Robbed Blind".But mainly it's Keith, handling all the guitars and a fair amount of piano, carrying lovelorn ballads and songs of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The off-the-wall premise of The New Girlfriend could have been one adapted by Pedro Almodóvar. After married woman Claire’s close childhood friend dies, she gives an undertaking to look after the widowed father David and the couple’s daughter, to whom she is godmother. While keeping her promise, she accidentally discovers he is a secret transvestite – David says his wife knew of this. Claire helps him into the outside world in his female persona (which she names Virginia), learns the reasons for the cross-dressing, falls for him in his female guise and, in the process, discovers she isn’t Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Jazz pianist Bill Evans was a titanic figure in jazz performance until addiction and death took him in 1980, his blend of strength and sensitivity unparalleled, while his collaborations with Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, among others, left epochal records. Yet Evans is covered much less frequently than his contemporaries, so this release by London jazz pianist Bruno Heinen and Danish guitarist Kristian Borring is a timely reminder of what we’ve been missing.Heinen is best known for the intriguing album Tierkreis, which re-worked a 1974 piece of the same name written for 12 music boxes by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: The London American Label Year by Year – 1966The arguments for 1966 as the year popular music irrevocably changed are sound. Rock began emerging from pop as its serious offspring. Earnest expression, as opposed to fluffiness or accessibility, would become the objective for many. With the 1967 release of Sgt Pepper’s, the album was set in stone as a different medium to the single. The foundations were laid when The Beatles began recording “Strawberry Fields Forever” in November 1966.A chaotic, kaleidoscopic 1966 single like The Yarbirds’s “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Coming to Foals without the baggage – without knowing, for example, that they’re a British guitar band of mid-Noughties vintage – is a disconcerting experience, not least where fourth album What Went Down is concerned. Opening with a huge, heavy title track that – at least by its mid-section – appears to owe a heavy, screaming debt to the band’s recent association with Metallica, by its end the album checks off anthemic indie rock, beats-driven electronic experimentation and the sort of widescreen, cinematic sound beloved of contemporaries from the other side of the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It’s nearly 40 years since bassist Steve Harris formed Iron Maiden and much has changed since then. Singer Bruce Dickinson has learned to fence, fly and kick cancer in the cock, and the band have continued to release albums – albums which, though rarely hitting the high points of their Eighties heyday, have often been pretty decent and admirably ambitious in scope.Speaking of ambition, Book of Souls, their latest, is comprised of 11 tracks and clocks in at an impressive 92 minutes. Now that’s a long album, but consider that, within those 11 tracks, there are three that go over 10 minutes and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Randolph Scott had ridden long in the saddle before Budd Boetticher directed him as a driven loner with a painful past in the six harsh “Ranown Cycle” Westerns (1956-60). His apprenticeship began with ten 1930s Zane Grey oaters, mostly made by Henry Hathaway, and concluded with the B-Westerns he starred in for Edwin L. Marin and André de Toth after World War II. Marin’s rousing Abilene Town (1946), newly released on Blu-ray, augured Scott’s becoming a genre icon.Though it lacks the melancholy poetry of John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (also 1946), Marin’s Western similarly evokes postwar Read more ...
Guy Oddy
As someone who has always been completely indifferent to the retro New Wave stylings of The Libertines, I can’t say that I greeted the news of their reformation with anything more than a shrug of the shoulders. Sure, they had released a few toe-tappers around the turn of the century, but to view Pete Doherty and Carl Barât’s mob as culturally significant for their music seemed absurd. So I was somewhat surprised to experience all my prior prejudices go up in smoke on hearing Anthems For Doomed Youth, the band’s third album and first in over a decade.Whereas 2002’s Up The Bracket and their Read more ...