CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
When producers Diplo and Switch released their collaboration Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers do under the guise of Major Lazer in 2009, it gave the electronic dance scene a much needed kick up the backside. Dance grooves, ragga beats and lively MCs collided to create a frantic Dancehall fusion that attracted plenty of attention. Six years later and with Switch long gone, Peace is the Mission comes as a huge disappointment characterised by middle of the road EDM sounds and even a track featuring the awful Ellie Goulding.Opening tune “Be Together” is a pleasant enough introduction. Featuring Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“No other city has in its centre such an opportunity for profitable progress.” Anyone depressed and outraged by London’s gentrification plague will find this the most chilling statement by visionary gangster Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins), as his criminal guests sip champagne and his boat eases down the Thames, where Docklands cranes stand in stilled salute, and he sketches his plans for East London’s redevelopment around a 1988 Olympic stadium.The apparently prophetic nature of this 1979 gangster film is merely symptomatic of its greatness. John Mackenzie’s direction and Barrie Keeffe’s script Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The mysterious figure of Man Power has been making waves for a while now. A series of mixes and remixes and frankly jaw-dropping EPs have seen his star rise, though his actual profile has remained obscured – largely by his hand in a series of promo shots. His true identity remains a secret. So, who is Man Power and why should you care?The first of those questions will remain unanswered. The second is, in any case the more important. You should care because this is clever music aimed at the head, heart and feet, made by an artist capable of wringing emotion out of machines in a way that, if I’ Read more ...
Lydia Perrysmith
At gigs by Irish blues-rockers The Strypes or Dutch swing fanatic Cara Emerald, what’s shocking is how old and staid their audience often is. Mums and dads – even grannies and granddads – turn out to hear younger voices express dynamic rehashes of their own generation’s music.Pokey LaFarge is, arguably, even more retro yet he draws a wider audience, establishing a youthful fanbase for his folk-Americana revivalism. Supported along the way by that doyen of rockin’ roots music, Jack White, LaFarge has been around for a decade but his seventh album is a real showcase of his Midwestern roots. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Damned: Go! 45At the end of 1979, Britain’s first three 1976-born punk bands were in very different situations. The Sex Pistols had imploded in early 1978 and John Lydon, their front man, was back with Public Image Ltd’s challenging dub- and Krautrock-influenced multi-disc collection Metal Box. The Clash had released the epic, cross-genre double album London Calling. The Damned’s crisp Machine Gun Etiquette was in the shops on the back of that year’s hit singles “Love Song” and “Smash it up”, both of which featured on the album. No one, not even the band itself, could have predicted Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Having come of age with their second LP, The Vaccines had developed a sound that, though borrowed, they wore with confidence. This, their third album, sees them wilfully discard it, which is, if nothing else, quite the surprise.If you’re a fan, "Handsome", "20/20" and "Radio Bikini" are the tracks that will be going on the playlist, as they’re the only ones that sound remotely like the Vaccines of old. Even then, there’s something distinctly (and newly) infantile about them. “Handsome” is McBusted playing the hits of The Jesus and Mary Chain, with the Reid brothers’ shiftless ennui replaced Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a great, neglected film of Nazi Germany. After being savaged by German critics for its “subjective” and “sentimental” perspective on the Third Reich at its 1980 Berlin Festival premiere, it was released with 30 minutes slashed. This is the restored director’s cut’s DVD debut.Writer-director Helma Sanders-Brahms’s view certainly is subjective, and feminine. Germany Pale Mother is a fictionalised version of her early childhood with her parents: here young lovers Hans (Ernst Jacobi) and Lene (Eva Mattes), separated and destroyed by war. Lene’s home front heroism and bond with daughter Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Michael Keaton – like Cary Grant, Bill Murray, and George Clooney – is one of those stars who frequently convey their awareness that the situations they’re in are preposterous. He tautens his jaw muscles; his eyes express a mix of incredulity and suffering. That look is one of the many pleasures of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), 2014’s Best Picture Oscar-winner and Keaton’s crowning achievement as a mature actor.Alejandro González Iñárritu's heavy dramas (Amoros Perros, 21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful) tend to the portentous. Turning to blackish comedy has rejuvented him. He didn’ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The pendulum of Róisín Murphy’s creativity has long swung wildly between massively pop and trickily artsy, right back to her hit-making millennial days in Moloko. She followed these with a wilful dive into the abstract, working with found sound techno maverick Matthew Herbert on her debut solo album. It was an intriguing proposition but one that never proved contagious. She followed it, however, with Overpowered, whose eponymous lead single should have been a massive hit but wasn’t. On that album, she allowed her inner Lady Gaga out for a frolic. The results were contagious, colourful fun. Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Remember how in the Eighties, lead-singer solo albums would consist of a few songs left over from the day job played on synthesisers? That’s how Killers’ Brandon Flowers' second solo effort feels. At first. The big difference is, back in the day, extra-curricular efforts by the likes of Freddie Mercury or Mick Jagger would exude a thrown-together air. Flowers’ record, on the other hand, has been polished like a Las Vegas hub cap.The net result, though, is much the same: The Desired Effect sounds like Flowers' main band but with (a fraction) less punch. The blue-collar vignettes are, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any album with a guest appearance from Eric Cantona is going to attract attention. The eighth track of Sophie Hunger’s Supermoon, “La Chanson d’Hélène”, is a sumptuous, string-infused reflection on identity with Serge Gainsbourg-style spoken interjections by Cantona. But it’s not the whole story of this by turns direct and subtle album.Head straight to what follows “La Chanson d’Hélène”. “We are the Living’s” jazzy swing and sparse arrangement suggests a liking for Jimi Hendrix’s pensive side. Elsewhere, on “Superman Woman,” Australian musical autobiographer Courtney Barnett is namechecked. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bobby Womack: The PreacherCover versions of standards like “Fly me to the Moon” and “I Left my Heart in San Francisco” were hardly going to make a mark with a hip – or, for that matter, any – audience in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Nor was reinterpreting The Beatles’ “And I Love her" and “Something”. Chuck in the adaptations of The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’”, Jonathan King’s “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon”, Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” and Ray Stevens’s trite bubblegum-gospel hit “Everything is Beautiful” which pepper the first five solo albums from Bobby Womack, Read more ...