CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
Whether you view him with reverence as the Modfather or rather more sneeringly as the King of Dad Rock, there is no doubt that Paul Weller is a bone fide musical icon. Thirty-eight years after the Jam’s debut, In the City, there is still a sense of anticipation for many each time he releases a new album and Saturns Pattern is certainly no disappointment.“White Sky”, a collaboration with Manchester space-cases Amorphous Androgynous kicks things off, and initially comes on in a wash of swirling ambient spaceyness. It soon explodes into a howling blues rock stomper though, with Paul barking “ Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Hot Chip are a band who have, over the years, brought a different personality to the hedonistic house party – one that often seems caught halfway between the kitchen and the designated dancefloor. This, their sixth album, sees them trying to edge their way towards the latter while questioning their place – and relevance – in the wider musical firmament.Things kick off well enough with “Huarache Lights”, a song strong enough even to bear the weight of a hamfisted First Choice sample and hackneyed Daft Punk-esque vocoder and still cross the finishing line smiling. Similarly, the fidgity bounce Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As he died in 2010, we can never know what John du Pont was like in person, but if Steve Carell’s rendering of the maniacal American multi-millionaire with a wrestling fixation is even close to the real thing, the experience must have been disturbing. Foxcatcher, the story of du Pont’s immersion in wrestling, is disquieting but Carell stands out. Creepiness defines every moment he is on screen.Foxcatcher draws from the real-life story of du Pont, the heir to his family’s fortune. He wrote books on ornithology, donated money to good causes and was also increasingly consumed by an interest in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A heretical thought. Films released on the big screen are designed to be devoured in one swallow. But if ever a three-hour epic was made for consumption in bite-sized chunks, it is National Gallery, Frederick Wiseman’s discreet profile of the much- loved institution and all who sail in her. An episodic tour through the galleries and the backrooms the public never see, it greatly lends itself to DVD. Indeed, much as one goes back to a gallery to look at just one painting, its 15 chapters can be visited and revisited on an individual and selective basis.Wiseman is as interested in people as Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell first put out a joint album only a couple of years ago but their association goes way back, before either’s mainstream US fame. Crowell was working closely with Harris as long ago as the mid-Seventies, still within immediate memory of the latter’s folk origins and groundbreaking partnership with Gram Parsons. He later found major success Stateside but has never been renowned in Europe like Harris. Perhaps it’s their steadfast friendship that makes The Traveling Kind such easy-going and pleasing listening.Harris can always write and deliver a decent song but Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Almost two decades into a distinguished career, nobody would have judged Thea Gilmore for indulging herself with a greatest hits collection – indeed, it’s something that record labels have been bugging her about for years. Album number 15 Ghosts and Graffiti is perhaps intended as a compromise – part new songs and part old favourites, featuring an all-star cast of collaborators and reinterpreted with the same affection and irreverence the singer-songwriter recently brought to Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and the lost lyrics of Sandy Denny.Two of the songs from Don’t Stop Singing Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Todd Rundgren is not known for sitting on his laurels and churning out the same old stuff year after year. Since Runt, his debut solo album from 1970, he has tried out a vast array of genres from heavy metal to prog rock, EDM and power pop, as well as having a prominent role in Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell. Runddans, his second album of 2015, sees him venture further into pastures new by teaming up with Scandinavian electronica boffins Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Emil Nikolaisen for a one-track ambient beast – albeit one with a hefty injection of prog sounds.Runddans came about after Rundgren Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Fall has always delivered great album titles, and Sub-Lingual Tablet is right up there with the best – Witch Trials, Hex, Caustic, Are You Are Missing Winner… The song titles, too, have a medicated, sub-lingual ring that no other artist could pull off – “Junger Cloth”, anyone? – guaranteed to wipe away all psychiatric waste...Several songs take on the soft-focus Stasi surveillance of mobile social media – the rage and fury of “Facebook Troll” – Smith’s multi-layered vocal stylings, whiplash shrieks and raw blizzard of gleeful hatred are breathtakingly purgative, the song's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Spooky Tooth: The Island Years (An Anthology) 1967–1974After Spooky Tooth called it a day in 1974, various long-time members struck out in directions as unpredictable as their former band’s identity was hard to get a handle on. Drummer Mike Kellie joined the Lou Reed-influenced, punk-era band The Only Ones. Their main songwriter, co-vocalist and keyboard player Gary Wright scored a massive US hit in early 1976 with the fantastically atmospheric proto-yacht rock single “Dream Weaver”. Guitarist Mick Jones formed the immediately successful (in America) formulaic rock band Foreigner. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is the sort of intoxicated, mythic romance rarely seen in Britain or Hollywood. It is a tribute from the latter’s defiantly literate maverick, Albert Lewin, to the former’s Powell and Pressburger. Using the hallucinatorally vivid colours of their cinematographer Jack Cardiff and a couple of their stock players (Marius Goring, John Laurie), Lewin’s 1951 film is set in Spain “about 20 years ago”, under an “erotic and disturbing” moon, outside its Anglo-American leads’ normal place. When a mysterious Dutchman (James Mason, pictured below) moors off shore, events move outside time, too.The Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Back in the Seventies, in between keeping an eye out for the unwanted attentions of radio DJs and waiting for punk, the internet or colours to happen, there was real beauty if you knew where to look. By which I mean telly, of course. From the haunting fairground tones of the introduction to schools programme Picture Box, to the rolling sci-fi thrill of The Tomorrow People theme, it seemed that, far from not wanting to scare the horses, these oddball music makers would have sampled their galloping retreat and used it as a rhythm track for an animated short about a deaf boy and his magic snail. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Chungking are Brighton's great could-have-should-have band. Appearing around a decade ago the trio, enigmatically fronted by singer Jessie Banks, offered up an opulent alternative take on the whole indie-dance thing. Songs such as “Stay Up Forever” had irresistible, hedonic punch but the band were equally capable of channelling a delicacy that recalled The Carpenters at their most melancholy. They seemed to be on the cusp of hugeness. They were, after all, potentially accessible to a wide pop audience at the same time as appealing to clubland connoisseurs.The cusp, however, was where they Read more ...