CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
If coming to Ganja & Hess under the impression it’s Seventies’ Blaxploitation along the lines of Blacula, beware. It does feature an immortal character as its lead. And there is the drinking of blood as well as violence. Instead of doing what he was commissioned to do, director Bill Gunn’s 1973 film is an art-house oddity.When the film was completed, Gunn’s backers cut 35 minutes and gave it the horror-friendly title Blood Couple. After that, it went out as Black Evil, Blackout: The Moment of Terror, Black Vampire and Vampires of Harlem. This release is from an original, uncut print which Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Decamping to Manchester from Philadelphia after a personal crisis seems an unlikely move. But this is what Brian Christinzio – who is BC Camplight – did in 2012. How to Die in the North was recorded in Bredbury, near Stockport.As cross-continental relocations go, Christinzio’s is improbable but – whatever the the demons he was escaping – it has proved a tonic for his music. The first two BC Camplight albums, 2005’s Run, Hide Away and 2007’s Blink of a Nihilist, were good but not remarkable, piano-borne, singer-songwriter efforts that posited Christinzio as a quirky Ben Folds or Sufjan Stevens Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Waterboys’ lynchpin, singer, guitarist and main song-writer, Mike Scott clearly has no interest in pretending that he’s still a young man. Modern Blues, the band’s first set of new material following 2013’s 25th anniversary celebration of Fisherman’s Blues, is a mature album of tunes that contemplate the world from a distinctly middle-aged perspective with all its attendant regret, nostalgia and more than a dash of hope for the future. Scott’s singing freely references the likes of Sun Ra, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Elvis. There’s even a sample of a Jack Kerouac monologue from On the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
No one could have known it would be one of his final screen appearances – there’s another still to come in a further installment of Hunger Games – but Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role in Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man proved, with hindsight, a fitting farewell. This was Hoffman living the part, as on-the-edge, largely off-the-radar Hamburg spymaster Gunter Bachman, whose life and professional energy seems fuelled by cigarettes and whisky.Adapted from John Le Carré’s 2008 novel, it can’t but help bring back memories of that writer’s other spy-supremos, though control – to appropriate the title Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Certain bands pre-empt dramatic sea-changes in popular music. The ones that almost get there first. These outfits arrive a smidgeon too early and create sounds that are nearly – but not quite – what's just round the corner. Think of the pub-rockers presaging punk, or Sigue Sigue Spuktnik's sample-centric electronic pulse three years before rave arrived, only on the wrong drugs and with the wrong haircuts. Similarly, the second album from French electro outfit Justice, 2011's Audio, Video, Disco, predicted US-conquering EDM, but drew too much from The Who and too little from dubstep. Even Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Magma: Köhntarkösz, Köhntarkösz Anteria, Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré“They were a Seventies phenomenon,” said snooker ace Steve Davies of Magma. “But they were a bit too far out there for most people, even if you liked progressive music. I didn't dare put them on the communal record player at sixth-form because they would have been booed off. Maybe it's because they were French.”Magma – the band Davies declared his “true obsession” – are still going strong under the guidance of their visionary drummer Christian Vander. John Lydon was another fan. The vinyl-only reissue of three of their albums, 1974’s Read more ...
Matthew Wright
With this likeable and quietly adventurous release, fears that Belle and Sebastian were losing momentum, amid the distractions of Stuart Murdoch’s God Help the Girl project, and the appearance of only two albums in nine years, can now be allayed. If they haven’t broken through in quite the way that the successes of their 1990s albums might have predicted, after nearly 20 years the band hasn’t broken up either, and the creative fecundity of this collection suggests a rejuvenation in progress.These songs combine a subtly modern sense of generic blending, combined with an old-fashioned Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Walter Summers (1892-1973), formerly Lt. Summers of the East Surreys and a highly decorated veteran of the Western Front, had already directed the Great War reconstruction films Ypres (1925) and Mons (1926) for Harry Bruce Woolf’s British Instructional Films when he embarked on BIF’s docudrama The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927). This silent but thunderous war film, galvanized by Simon Dobson’s tense new score, is remarkable for its impartiality.Though it centres on the two devastating naval confrontations off South America in late 1914, convincingly recreating what happens Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Last month, Theo Parrish released his album, American Intelligence, on vinyl and CD. Now it’s available on digital, but make sure you’ve got room on your hard drive – it’s long. Seriously, marathons have been run quicker than the two hours and three minutes here.Things start well. “Drive” is a long, straight road of a track with all exits barred by stuttering cymbals. It’s compelling stuff, but Parrish, having created an audio autobahn, sticks to 70 all the way – presumably trying to pace himself. “Life Spice” is next and the sample, which sounds like it was cut on a slant, is more in keeping Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At first it seems akin to entering a world conjured by Efterlkang at their most elegiac. Strings swell and what sounds like a cimbalom chimes. A wordless vocal sighs. After the opening instrumental – titled “Intro” – “Lovers Lane” (sic) surges forward with cascading post-punk guitar recalling Manchester’s Chameleons and a deep, deep mumbled vocal which through the murky delivery seems to be concerned with trying to get the song’s subject to wake up and realise who the singer is. After that squall, the Mittel-European two-step rhythm of the acoustic “Come on Then” and more of those stygian Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Wild Billy Childish has released well over a hundred albums (as well as numerous art projects) since the late 70s and so it's quite a shock to discover on Acorn Man that his muse doesn’t seem ready to desert him any time soon. This is all the more surprising given that the Childish world view ends in the pre-psychedelic mid-60s and is dominated by no-nonsense garage rock – with absolutely no truck with any musical developments since that time.Opening track, “It’s So Hard To Be Happy” is lively Nuggets-influenced stuff that sounds like Archie Solomons (from the TV series Peaky Blinders) Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Ever wondered what being a psychic would be like? Not the "being a fraudulent, cheap-trick magician drunk on the mere suggestion of power over a willing and eager mark" thing – but really being able to know people’s thoughts as they think them. In reality, hearing the insipid mind-screams of strangers would be spirit-crushingly dull, like watching Question Time without the mute button, but there is a less prosaic window into the mind that music offers us – improvisation.Gaussian Curve is a project featuring ambient veteran Gigi Masin, Land of Light multi-instrumentalist Jonny Nash and Read more ...