CDs/DVDs
joe.muggs
Here's a funny one: used as an adjective, “lifestyle” has lately become a popular pejorative term for music (see, most recently, the kerfuffle over Jamie xx's debut solo album). It's taken the place of “coffee table”, which was the Nineties phrase of choice to deride trip-hop and other styles that were considered too smooth or sedentary to meet required criteria of rebelliousness or authenticity or whatever.This tends, of course, to be a thin veil for inevitably middle-class commentators' neuroses and noble savage view of musicians – and it never involves any examination of who listens to the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Robert Glasper has recently been making a name, and winning Grammys with his electronic fusion outfit, the Robert Glasper Experiment. After years of Casey Benjamin’s croaking vocoder on the Black Radio albums, the pealing acoustic notes of Glasper’s conventional trio are almost a surprise. Also novel by Glasper’s standards is the source material: there’s only one standard, “Stella By Starlight”. Many of the rest of are, as the title suggests, covers. While the sound of Glasper’s trio is fairly traditional, with his choice of tracks he’s clearly reaching out far beyond the jazz comfort zone: Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Pinpointing exactly what makes Force Majeure so disquieting is difficult, and a second viewing on DVD confirms this. Overall, the elements of the film are unified so smoothly that focusing on any one of them doesn’t indicate the unexpectedly powerful effect of Ruben Östlund’s dissection of the collapse of male character.The impact could be a result of the director and writer's avowed reversal of the filmic hero trope. It could be Johannes Kuhnke’s intense depiction of father Tomas’s denial and subsequent breakdown in the wake of his transgression. Or it could be that such a sensitive theme Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Since her gorgeous self-titled debut album in 1979, Rickie Lee Jones has been all round the houses. Her music has plotted a sinuous path through jazz, blues, pop, soul and straight up-and-down rock. Her fortunes have soared and dipped, and the lovers apostrophised in the songs have come and gone, starting with Tom Waits, subject of “We Belong Together”. Last year she sailed past her 60th birthday without having released any new material since her 50th. The Other Side of Desire comes out on a record label of the same name, and was crowd-funded.It wouldn’t be a Rickie Lee Jones album if it didn Read more ...
mark.kidel
The songs of Richard Thompson have always been tinged with a hint of bitterness and anger, passions that are tempered by guitar paying of near-miraculous fluency. His new album, produced with brilliance and tact by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, is no exception. The standards are as high as ever, and the self-penned material, with the exception of “Guitar Heroes”, a somewhat tedious homage to masters of the instrument, is characterized by Thompson’s usual mix of poetry and irony.As with much of Thompson’s previous work, he ranges from the tropes of folk-rock – jaunty yet slightly melancholy tunes Read more ...
graham.rickson
If you’ve ever cycled down a potholed inner city street, dodging white vans and errant pedestrians, you’ll howl with envy at the cycling safety shorts collected in this BFI compilation. What did these riders have to worry about? 1947’s Pedal Cyclists shows a suited wag combing his hair whilst riding, and the same year’s Stringing Along illustrates what will happen if you patch your brakes up with, er, string. The surprise is the dearth of traffic, apart from the occasional slow moving bus. Leave a bicycle unattended in any major city and it’ll probably vanish within minutes; in these films, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Do you remember Alisha’s Attic? The '90s sister-duo’s debut was the first album I bought, and it was full of pretty pop songs soaked in vinegar and malice. Wolf Alice, a grunge-pop four-piece from north London, remind me of Alisha’s Attic, at least on those songs fronted by angelic-voiced co-founder Ellie Rowsell - or more specifically, they remind me of Alisha’s Attic if the latter's Shelly and Karen were fronting My Bloody Valentine.My Love is Cool is a debut five years in the making but its protagonists – Rowsell and guitarist Joff Oddie, who takes lead vocals on meandering late-album Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Peter Zinovieff: Electronic Calendar – The EMS TapesRoxy Music’s June 1972 debut appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test found them miming to “Ladytron” from their debut album, released that week. A prime focus for the camera was Eno, in a fake leopard-skin jacket and shiny gold gloves. Twiddling knobs and waggling a joystick, he stood at what was obviously an instrument but not a conventional one. There was no keyboard and the noises generated bubbled and swooped. This was an EMS synthesiser.The EMS synthesiser was British and a favourite of Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, The Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Being on everyone’s list of top jazz singers isn’t always helpful. Elling’s eleventh album, a kind of musical travelogue inspired by his onerous touring schedule, is a compendium of international repertoire extending from traditional pieces such as the “Loch Tay Boat Song”, to new arrangements like “Bonito Cuba”, Elling’s adaptation of Arturo Sandoval’s melody.The pieces are played with exquisite precision by an enviably world-class procession of instrumentalists, including Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, French accordionist Richard Galliano and the WDR Big Band. Elling himself is in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s way too much proficiency in music these days. There’s way too much interest in high production values. Also, half the people involved in popular music seem more interested in the business side, the branding and the online imprint. It is very, very boring. They are very, very boring. The Parrots will not change this, but I doubt they care and that’s a good thing. I’m not even sure they’d call this an album. Maybe they’d term it an EP. Who cares, it has six songs on it so we’ll say mini-album. Mika was supposed to be today's review but it never arrived. Probably for the best. That dude Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The LaFontaines are one of Scotland’s biggest new bands but have yet to make the same impact south of the border. There is, however, nothing about their debut album that’s parochial. To make a crude comparison, they sound, at first, like a grime-flavoured Biffy Clyro. What makes them stand out is the rapping of frontman Kerr Okan, whose lyrics occasionally land a punch. What’s less appealing is an over-reliance on predictable air-punching choruses, tiresomely tailored for giant venues. These make them sound ordinary.The five-piece from Motherwell have gone the traditional route of endless Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Every 75 years or so, Halley’s Comet comes round to say, "Hi". When it does, there’s genuine excitement, not because there’s any kind of stock trade in fond reminiscence when it comes to glowing lumps of rock, but because it’s a genuinely captivating event. The Orb’s latest offering is similarly hurtling through space once more, and reminding us of their conceptual debut that slapped us around our collective face back in 1991. It feels like a similar event.The first thing to say is that this is, without doubt, the most coherent offering from the Orb (currently comprised of Alex Paterson and Read more ...