CDs/DVDs
Matthew Wright
Susan Boyle’s 2009 Britain’s Got Talent audition was one of the great coups of reality TV, her success surprising and inspiring in equal measure. It’s some time now, though, since she has surprised anyone, and while her voice is still the lithe, purring instrument that so astonished Piers Morgan, her act clings to the tried and tested which, despite a mixed reception for her live tour, can still empty Sony’s warehouses like no other.Having a limited expressive range doesn’t necessarily matter when you’re good at what you do. We shouldn’t expect Boyle to turn into Piaf or Winehouse any more Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Jon Hassell / Brian Eno: Fourth World Vol. 1 - Possible MusicsIts opening is exotic. The music shimmers like heat haze and incorporates a sing-song instrument which might be a treated trumpet, or a high-register bass guitar reverberating like water on distant rocks and pattering percussion. “Chemistry”, the opening track on Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s 1980 album Fourth World Vol. 1 - Possible Musics, melded the ambient to serialism and what became both electronica and world music.Possible Musics is a stunningly beautiful album. Its reissue on album and CD brings an opportunity to Read more ...
Barney Harsent
I’m not sure exactly how much it costs to rent out Abbey Road’s Studio 2, the room in which the Beatles recorded all their good stuff; the studio where, now, the “Lady Madonna” piano is shoved to one side to make way, but I’m guessing it’s lots. I, along with 30 or so other people, am here to listen to Listen, David Guetta’s fourth album. Judging by the venue, the opulent decor and the free bar, it’s one that, I suspect, he really wants us to like.David arrives and is, in equal parts, funny, polite and engaging. He starts by introducing “What I Did For Love”, a collaboration with Emeli Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Pawel Pawlikowski took a leap into the unknown with Ida. The reasons for advance box office scepticism were clear: the film was black and white, made in an old-fashioned ratio, in Polish (until then the director had only worked in English), and more than bleak in subject. But the risks have more than paid off: as the highest grossing Polish-language film in the US ever, Ida has proved his most commercially successful work to date.And critically, too, a category I suspect Pawlikowski is much more concerned with. It’s on the shortlist for next month’s European Film Awards in both best film and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Is there something literary in the air out in the left field? Kate Tempest as a close runner up for the Mercury Prize while other streetwise spoken word artists like George The Poet wait in the wings; a forthcoming album by electronica doyenne Jan St Werner being held together by sinister narration by American rock dark lord Dylan Carlson of Earth; and this single hour-long piece of Beckettian beatnik rambling by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Franz Wright over piano plinks and plonks from John Tilbury and ambient soundscaping by experimental producer and guitarist Christian Fennesz – all Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Since Gemma Hayes' Mercury nomination in 2003, the Irish singer-songwriter has largely experienced the familar indie fate of meagre commercial returns but increasing cult appeal. How appropriate then, that for her most recent adventures in folk and low-fi, Bones and Longing, she should go down the (increasingly popular) route of crowdfunding. The result is an album that's bound to form an intimate bond with its audience.Bones and Longing kicks off with “Laughter”, a reworking of 2011’s “There’s Only Love” with a more shoe-gazy feel. Its minimal production sets the tone for much of the record Read more ...
David Nice
If you have trouble grasping all the plot-lines of Fritz Lang’s 1928 silent thriller, fear not: they’re chimerical, existing only to display all the accoutrements of a spy-movie genre which Lang is credited with having launched. All paths lead to the sinister Lenin-Trotsky visage of master-spy Haghi (Rudolf Klein-Rogge, slickly transformed from his villainous roles in the Doctor Mabuse films and Metropolis). The essence is a love-triangle between him, the infinitely various Sonja Barnikowa of Gerda Maurus, Russian exile at his command, and “No. 326” as played by Willy Fritsch, who brushes up Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The five lads who comprise the biggest slice of Simon Cowell’s pension fund are back with the follow up to last year’s Midnight Memories. One Direction, are not, in all fairness, canvassing my vote with new album Four. In fact, on the basis of this new collection of songs, they’re doorstepping eight-year-old girls to ask whether their mum’s in.1D have long had a knack of delivering songs that sound, in part, like already established hits, however the reference points here seem less pop and more… well, MOR. Single "Steal My Girl" has a piano introduction that echoes Meat Loaf, before the Read more ...
mark.kidel
Antony Hegarty has one of those voices that’s poised on the edge of tears. With a singing style at times reminiscent of the great Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli, who broke a thousand hearts in the 1930s, he knows how to draw deeply from his most vulnerable self, gently but firmly taking his audience to the same fragile inner spaces.Explorations of androgyny in popular music have often made possible a form of creativity that rides a knife-edge. Fuelled by transgender freedom, Antony Hegarty plunges resolutely into the cloud of undoing, a place where courageous speaking from the heart can assume Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground Super Deluxe EditionMGM, The Velvet Underground’s label, didn’t have a clue how to promote the band’s third album. The press kit accompanying its March 1969 release described drummer Maureen Tucker as “not your typical virgin. She looks like a red-headed music hall tart and pounds the drums with the force of a weight lifter. A female Brendan Behan.” Lou Reed was said to have “a face that arouses interest but gives no satisfaction.”So it was no suprise that the album indeed became a poor seller and aroused little mainstream interest, which Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you glanced too hastily at the sleeve you might think Bryan Ferry had made another album called Avalon, that epitome of the sleek autumnal heyday of Roxy Music. But no. Avonmore, though it may sound like a single malt whisky, is named after Ferry's studio complex in West London, not far from Olympia which gave him the title of a previous album in 2010.Avonmore is a worthy addition to the string of solo albums (the self-written ones, rather than his parallel stream of covers discs or the peculiar Twenties throwback The Jazz Age) which Ferry has made since the Eighties, with 1985's Boys and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The world is getting hotter. Unbearably so. Along Fleet Street, the centre of British newspaper production, on-the-skids, drink-sodden Daily Express reporter Peter Stenning (a square-jawed Edward Judd) begins looking into the reasons for the change. With the help of his charismatic science editor Bill Maguire (a wonderful Leo McKern), he begins piecing things together – nuclear weapons testing has shifted the Earth’s axis. Even worse, the orbit has changed and a spiral towards the sun has begun. On his hunt for information, Stenning finds love in the arms of the beautiful Jeannie Craig (a Read more ...