CDs/DVDs
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If you’ve ever found the idea of “cock rock” to be unnecessarily gendered, then the debut album from Ex Hex – an all-female trio who, between them, have created the best 35 minutes of ballsy rock 'n' roll I’ve heard since Sleater-Kinney’s “The Fox” – is for you. If you haven’t, and you’re just looking for something new to listen to that’s uncomplicated and up-front that will blow the cobwebs out from between your ears, then Ex Hex is also for you. And if you’ve been struggling to find a record that would match the giddy girl-rock high you got the first time you listened to Wild Flag’s first Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Bevis Frond: MiasmaMiasma wasn’t meant to have an afterlife. The Bevis Frond’s debut album wasn’t even by a band. Its creator, Nick Saloman, wrote all the songs, played every instrument and recorded it in a Walthamstow bedroom on a 4-track system which used cassette tapes. Saloman pressed the album in 1987 and had few expectations beyond, as he says in the liner notes included with this reissue, “giving it to friends and family and sticking the rest [of the copies] up in the attic forever.”Today, The Bevis Frond are still a going concern and a Saloman-fronted band as such. Their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is no other actress on the planet like Juliette Binoche. For the latest proof watch Camille Claudel 1915. Most screen actors, even the very best ones, can never quite obliterate themselves from a performance. You know it’s Chiwetel Ejiofor or Cate Blanchett or Ralph Fiennes embodying the experiences of a character. It's somehow different with Binoche. Be they big or small, she lets feelings wash through her that seem to have nothing to do with the construct of performance.There having been another film about Rodin’s mistress starring Isabelle Adjani, the title of Bruno Dumont’s film is Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Red Shift is a fascinating, if flawed, gem of ambitious and disturbing 1970s TV drama. It was adapted by Alan Garner (The Owl Service) from his own novel, and set in the south Cheshire landscape he grew up and lived in. Its director, John Mackenzie, also helmed Play for Today dramas by Dennis Potter (Double Dare) and Peter McDougall, and would go on to make Bob Hoskins a star in The Long Good Friday.We begin in present time – the late 1970s – and the teenage travails of clever, wound-up Tom (Stephen Petcher) and calm, preternaturally knowing Jan (Lesley Dunlop), who’s about to leave for Read more ...
Guy Oddy
No Romeo is the debut album by Nottingham-born, singer-songwriter Indiana. If this suggests acoustic guitars and warbling on in a vaguely folkie way, it is misleading. For while Indiana sings throughout, her musical accompaniment is electronica. Electronica that has no truck with 21st century hip hop beats or post-dubstep grooves, but often reaches back into the 90s for inspiration.“Never Born” sees Indiana rain curses on some poor unfortunate to a tune that is initially reminiscent of veteran trip-hoppers Lamb, before it whacks up the volume to a chant of “I will rise up!” “Solo Dancing”, a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“Wildern” means “poaching” in German. That’s as in pheasant, rather than egg. On this album, German jazz singer Tobias Christl goes poaching (foraging might be more accurate) for iconic rock songs, which he adapts for his jazz quintet. Retaining on some level the basic emotional character of the song, he otherwise manipulates freely, to the point where in a couple of cases it’s not obvious which song he started with. We end up with familiar melodies made radically unfamiliar, with saxophone improvisation, eruptions of krautrock, distorted vocals and stretched rhythm turning familiar songs Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Oblique and gentle, Lilting is a tender, tough drama about Junn, a Cambodian-Chinese widow played by the legendary Pei-Pei Chang (HK’s martial arts icon known as “Queen of Swords” and recognizable to western audiences from Crouching Tiger...) and her dead son’s lover, Richard (Ben Whishaw), as Junn tries to sort out the untold nature of the men’s relationship.The opener of the London LGBT Film Festival, Lilting is as sensitive as one would expect, but raucous and ragged when it shows how one gets to the touchy truth. Not only is Junn alone, she is also quite without English (though she can Read more ...
Russ Coffey
According to Johnny Marr people with gigantic egos are generally miserable. Jokes about Morrissey aside, it follows Marr must be a pretty contented guy. For what other guitarist with his reputation would have put vanity aside to spend 20-odd years as a gun for hire? Now, however, it seems the affable muso finally wants to be a solo artist. Last year he released the interesting, if patchy, The Messenger. Now he’s back with Playland. So what’s it like?In interview, Marr says it sounds just like “where he’s from”, and it’s true that some of the album feels like rain on gray Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jackson Browne's output has slowed since the mid-Nineties, and this arrives six years after Time the Conqueror. The latter was much preoccupied with the Bush administration and the Iraq war, and Standing in the Breach – with a sleeve depicting a war-ravaged African village – is still stamped with Browne's social and political concerns. "Take the money out of politics and maybe we might see /This country turn back into something more like democracy," he rages in "Which Side", an extended tirade about greed and political corruption he first played at the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2012. As Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Oasis: (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?Adding anything to a story so familiar, so raked over and one played out in public is tricky. Most probably, there are few revelations left about the Oasis of 1995, the year they released their second album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? In its slipstream they racked up a set of mostly unbroken records: it sold 347,000 in the week of release; 2.6m applications were made for tickets to their Knebworth shows.A large proportion of the latter figure must have bought the album, begging the question of whether it’s worth buying again 19 Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
How does an artist follow a debut album as well-received as Jessie Ware’s Mercury-nominated Devotion? With something just as insistent, just as beautiful and just as likely to stick in the brain. There’s something incredibly unassuming about the London-born diva, who despite having the sort of voice that would lend itself perfectly to big, belting R&B ballads, is content to play it subtle and let the music speak for itself.Tough Love is, according to Ware, one last record about unrequited love before she becomes a happily married woman; and there’s a sepia-tinged late-night sadness to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Are you going to be to Canada what Ingmar Bergman is to Sweden?” “Oh, I think so.” David Cronenberg’s response to a TV interviewer at the time of Shivers’ release must have seemed like unwarranted boastfulness in 1975, but he did indeed become one of cinema’s most significant filmmakers and remains such. After his first full-length feature had hit screens, Cronenberg’s chutzpah was enviable.Originally conceived as the schlokily-titled Orgy of the Blood Parasites to attract as much attention as possible, Shivers became a box-office (but not instant critical) success. It was followed by Rabid Read more ...