CDs/DVDs
Nick Hasted
Model for Murder sits at the polite end of Fifties British exploitation B-pictures, a stiff, washed-out world of bloodless Mayfair murder, and sexless fashion world intrigue. Strip Tease Murder, a still more salaciously titled, Soho-set near-contemporary of this 1959 curio is also released this month, getting its hands grubbier with some actual, heavily censor-snipped stripping. But in this imaginary Mayfair, the looming Sixties of kitchen-sink cinema, blazingly colourful pop music and clothes, Psycho and Peeping Tom are still unimaginable.The pot-boiler plot finds merchant seaman David ( Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There’s a certain sound - one that I’d describe as “pastoral folk”, without ever being certain of what that means - that has always struck me as quintessentially English. Jenny Lysander’s debut album is one that ticks many of those boxes: sparse arrangements, ageless vocals, even a song called “Lavender Philosophy”, which is about as pastoral as it gets without involving grazing animals. To immerse oneself, dreamily, in Northern Folk is to feel as you did the first time you heard Laura Marling and wonder how one so young could create something so wise and so timeless (at 21, Lysander is just Read more ...
peter.quinn
From fulsome, modally inflected string lines (“Sintra”) to the funkiest of New Orleans brass grooves (“Atchafalaya”), this first major label album from Grammy-winning, NYC-based collective Snarky Puppy, paired here with Holland's crack Metropole Orkest under their principal conductor Jules Buckley, is a brilliantly arranged and artfully executed tour de force.Penned by Snarky Puppy bassist and bandleader, Michael League, while on tour with the band, each of the album's six movements was inspired by a different forest he has spent time in, from the swamps of Louisiana and giant redwoods Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although understated, Still Life asks some profound questions. What happens to those who are alone after they die? How should they be treated? Do their memories matter? Once life ends, is it OK to throw common decency out of the window?To any right-minded person, the answers are obvious. But for the boss of Eddie Marsan’s John May, none of them matter when life is over. The dead are dead: they don’t care. Mister May, as he is often referred to in the film, works for a south London local authority. He's in charge of dealing with the affairs of the deceased who have no obvious relatives or have Read more ...
Guy Oddy
In his recent theartsdesk interview, Squarepusher (or Tom Jenkinson to his mum) stated: “A subtle wave of conservatism has washed gently across electronic music over the last five years. One of the things the new record smashes against is that.” On this he really isn’t kidding, and Damogen Furies is unlikely to be heard as mood music to your shopping experience in any high street stores in the foreseeable future. Hardcore rave sounds bump up against abrasive electro and abstract funk in a powerful tempest that is far from chilled out.Opening track “Stor Eiglass” suggests an imaginary remix of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bert Jansch: Bert JanschNorth Villas is a short street parallel to Camden Road, the main artery linking Camden Town to Holloway in north London. It’s off Camden Square, where Amy Winehouse lived and died. In August 1964, Bill Leader began recording what would become Bert Jansch’s debut album in his home at 5 North Villas. The first-floor flat had two living rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. Leader would set up his tape recorder in the same room as who he was recording and monitor what was being caught on tape through headphones.At the same time as Leader was using his home as a recording Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
To let you understand the spontaneous grin that burst across my face when I first heard Foil Deer probably needs a little context: I studied, and now have a job involving, corporate law. Still, there’s no getting away from the fact that the powerful feminist themes and dirty, grungy guitar work form only part of the reason that Massachusetts indie rockers Speedy Ortiz’s third album is such a fantastic listen: frontwoman and songwriter Sadie Dupuis’ wordplay has never been stronger. The line that made my day, since you ask, was “we were the law school rejects so we quarrelled at the bar Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Mike Rosenberg kept the name "Passenger" for his solo folk-pop project even when the rest of the band left in 2009, even though, for a one-man outfit, the concept of being a passenger is a curious one. (Who’s driving then?) For the most part, this 16-song, two-CD release continues the gentle-sounding but hard-hitting storytelling of last year’s Whispers. That album didn’t make too many waves (the hit single “Let Her Go” made up for that) but confirmed Rosenberg’s reputation among folk-pop connoisseurs – happy for Ed Sheeran and James Blunt to be spoiled by raving attention – for grit and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Iconoclast” is the word used in one of the booklet essays accompanying Second Run’s rerelease of two films by the great Czech director Věra Chytilová (1929-2014) to describe her work. Other terms that have appeared over the years include: feminist, formalist, “overheated kettle that you can’t turn down”, and “first lady of the Czech New Wave”. Not all of those are of similar value, but nevertheless catch an element of her diversity.Chytilová is best known for her early film Daisies, from 1966. Traps (Pasti, pasti, pasticky, 1998), from the re-commencement of her film career in post-Communist Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Alabama Shakes' 2012 debut album, Boys & Girls, was well-liked by both critics and music-lovers. It was appreciated for its tuneful, sassy reimagining of US southern rock, via the persona, songs and voice of front-woman Brittany Howard. The question for album two, then - as always for young bands wishing to blossom both creatively and commercially - is whether they can perfectly balance new ideas and inventiveness with whatever made them likeable in the first place. In short, they can and do.Where Boys & Girls unashamedly played with a retro template, staying within certain parameters Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Liverpool-based female trio Stealing Sheap’s second album Not Real frustrates. By turns immediate and deliberate, its Meccano-kit pop isn’t bolted together as a harmonious whole. Instead of meshing, electro beats and chanted vocals clash. It sounds as if an old-fashioned road-testing of the songs would have worked the bugs out, helped strip away extraneous textures, and injected some much-needed pep.It’s doubly frustrating as Not Real is not a bad album. It’s good. And often great. But the manifold buzz-friendly constituent parts often swamp what’s great about it. Head straight for track Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ken Russell remained British cinema’s enfant terrible till his death in 2011, aged 84. Rather than fade into respectability, he retreated to amateur provocations filmed in his back garden, and returned to the dramatised documentaries on classical musicians which made his name for the BBC in the Sixties. His notoriety peaked with Women In Love’s nude male wrestling in 1969, the nude nuns and corrupt bigotry of 1971’s The Devils and his chat show assault on its critic Alexander Walker, and The Who’s Tommy (1975).Russell’s decision not to direct Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday as his cinema debut Read more ...