CDs/DVDs
mark.kidel
Iris DeMent’s settings of poems by the great 20th century poet Anna Akhmatova are as original as they are courageous: it's so easy to fall short of the genius displayed by the Russian mistress of the lyric verse. This is a work of love and devotion – prompted in part by DeMent’s adoption, along with her partner the equally original and talented Greg Brown, of a girl from the former Soviet Union.There is a kinship between the singer from the American South , raised in the Pentecostal church, and the tortured soul of Akhmatova, who lived through Lenin and Stalin’s terror, refused to go into Read more ...
Nick Hasted
I walked out of Videodrome into Soho’s neon in 1983, and felt the film’s hallucinatory visions had infected the street. It’s one of a handful of times a film has shifted my mind. David Cronenberg’s crowning achievement before, as critic Kim Newman notes in a documentary extra, he diluted his work by adapting others’, it retains a cohesive, grubby surreality.We are in the early days of VCRs, clandestine cable networks and easily transmitted, contraband imagery. Max Renn (James Woods) is on the hunt for filth to get ratings for his low-budget channel, and is passed a sadomasochist snuff tape. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Company could have been recorded any time in the past 25 years. Although Slime’s debut feels fresh, affinities with the familiar tag Company as a retro-nodding debut which will have a broad appeal. Chin-stroking collectors will love its references. Hipsters dwelling in the edgy zones of cities will love the comedown, late-night, reflective atmosphere. The Newcastle-born, Hackney resident electronicist Will Archer – who assumes the name Slime – has created an album with the potential to cross boundaries.The chief attribute of Company is the ease with which it brings together the disparate as a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
America: The Warner Bros. Years 1971–1977Prime amongst the many ironies associated with Seventies soft-rock trio America is that when they reached number one in America in March 1972 with “A Horse With No Name”, the single they knocked off the top spot was Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold". “A Horse With No Name” sounds so like Young, it might as well be him. Young’s thoughts on the ousting are not a matter of record.It went further. America’s fine, eponymous debut album is so much a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young knock-off that frequent double takes are unavoidable. CSNY's distinctive, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bullet For My Valentine retain their fury. Last time round, on 2013’s aptly named Temper Temper, frontman Matt Tuck was snarling about substance abuse affecting his band. This time, on their fifth studio album, he claims his enraged microphone onslaught results from pondering his dead-end origins in Bridgend, Wales, and the way he was dismissed at school for being a metaller. Be that as it may, the album also reeks of torment, indignation and pure fury at a love affair turned sour.Since splitting with bass-player Jay James earlier this year, Bullet For My Valentine’s sound is, if anything, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In John Ford’s rueful 1946 allegory about the human cost of America’s new role as global peacekeeper, Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) agrees to clean up Tombstone, Arizona, as a pretext for revenging his teenage brother's murder by Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) and his rustler sons.Ford dodges many facts about the real Earp clan’s politically driven feud with the Cochise County ranchers’ faction, which erupted inconclusively in the 1881 OK Corral gunfight. Frank Perry’s revisionist Doc (1971) comes closer to the skimpily documented truth but lacks My Darling Clementine’s mythic resonance and Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Producer Ruf Dug has released a slew of singles and remixes, both on his own label, Ruf Kutz, and other independent imprints, including Porn Wax and Banoffee Pies, that have made the UK such an exciting prospect for new music for the past few years. For this, his debut LP, he decamped to Guadeloupe, a location that has clearly influenced the very bones of the work. After a vinyl release earlier this year, it’s now getting the full treatment later this month, and deservedly so.This is an album that will undoubtedly be hailed as a Balearic classic. No surprise there, the genre is so wide, it’s Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There used to be a time when albums would regularly come in at around the 45-minute mark. It was pretty much the perfect length for fitting on to one side of a C90 (disclaimer: Home Taping Is Killing Music) and made the most of the vinyl format’s sonic limitations. Now, with the endless digital stream imposing no such restrictions, Four Tet’s latest offering – two tracks spread over 40 minutes – feels almost like a novella by comparison. That’s fine though, I like novellas: good ones scale back the grand plan, trim the fat and focus on what’s important.The first of the tracks, “Morning”, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Indian documentarist Anand Patwardhan is far less known outside his native country than he deserves to be, and his 2002 film about nuclear proliferation on the subcontinent War and Peace (Jang aur Aman) is a good introduction to a filmmaker who has been tackling issues of fundamentalism for more than four decades.There’s no direct link to Tolstoy here, although War and Peace’s opening scenes reprise the assassination of the Russian writer’s Indian disciple, Mahatma Gandhi. The episode serves as a reminder of how Gandhi’s vision of independence has been hijacked by the growing nationalism of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Sad singers never write truly happy albums, but Positive Songs for Negative People – and was there ever a title that so perfectly summed up the work of Frank Turner? – is probably as close as this one gets to putting a brave face on it. Turner’s sixth album opens where 2013’s Tape Deck Heart left off: a sinner amongst saved men on the banks of the muddy Thames, dusting himself off and falling back in love with the city he calls home anthropomorphised as the Angel of Islington. Along the way expect choruses designed to get punk pulses racing, awkward tennis metaphors and not a little Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Cocteau Twins: The Pink Opaque, Tiny Dynamine/Echoes in a Shallow BayThe current fad for all things vinyl is of course, in general, a good thing. It has also meant that a column with CD in its header has, inevitably, broadened its scope. There might be careless major-label abominations like the Marvin Gaye box set reviewed in a recent Reissue CDs Weekly, but there are also gems like the enhanced-sound Mission of Burma albums covered last week.But what to make of new vinyl-only editions of releases where original copies sell for less than the reissue? A first-press of the US vinyl album Read more ...
joe.muggs
Jill Scott albums should, in theory, be a bit of a chore. Everything about them, this one included, is like listening to a life coach: positive affirmations, exhortations to self-care, expressions of gratitude to the universe, homely snippets of advice... It's all so wholesome you almost feel as if it should be printed in a curly script over tranquil beach scenes and shared on your more uncomplicated school friends' Facebook feeds. Almost.In fact, Scott pulls off the miraculous, and makes all these homilies not just bearable but really uplifting. This is, after all, the singer who turned the Read more ...