CDs/DVDs
Nick Hasted
Early in The Fog of War, Errol Morris’s first, Oscar-winning documentary about a former US Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara admits that, if the USA had lost World War Two, he would have been convicted as a war criminal for his part in the fire-bombing of Japan. “Some things work out, and some things don’t,” Donald Rumsfeld observes with contrasting breeziness in Morris’s new film. This is as near to a critical perspective as the Iraq catastrophe’s principal architect cares to get.The cunning and humane Morris, who spent 33 hours interviewing Rumsfeld, only presses his subject once, on Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Pianist Jerry Léonide arrived on the international jazz scene with a splash when he won the Montreux Jazz Festival solo piano competition last year. Born and raised in Mauritius, then transplanted to France at 17 to further his musical education, Léonide’s musical appeal, reflected here with much larger forces, depends on a refreshing blend of Mauritian melodies, jazzed up with the standards Léonide used to play to tourists at home, then filtered through the more cerebral and contemporary sounds of his French academic training, in the form of the keening blend of soprano sax and flugelhorn. Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Sinéad O’Connor has adopted quite a range of personas over the 30 years or so of her singing career. There was the proto-Riot Grrl of her first album, The Lion and the Cobra; the ballad singer of “Nothing Compares 2 U”; the Irish folkie of Sean-Nos Nua; and the pseudo-Rasta of Throw Down Your Arms. In 2014, she presents herself as a romantic lover, but then obscures this by wading into the “Ban Bossy” debate and calling her new collection I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss. It was originally to be named “The Vishnu Room”, after one of its songs.While O’Connor has turned out many magnificent songs Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We were making a film about the ideal summer holiday,” says actor Sophie Neville in one of the extras on this "40th Anniversary Special Edition" of the 1974 adaptation of Arthur Ransome's book Swallows & Amazons. As Titty Walker, she played a girl camping out with her three siblings on a Lake District island while engaging in wholesome outdoor fun and mounting a play war against the Blackett sisters, the Amazons of the title.Swallows & Amazons is the evergreen and totemic book from 1929 in which Ransome celebrated the Lake District and its power to delight. The 1970s cinema version Read more ...
joe.muggs
Just in case anyone thought the hype surrounding Gloucestershire-born Spanish/Jamaican singer FKA Twigs was based only on her unique looks, startling styling and slightly silly videos, this album begins with her voice alone. It too is utterly singular, a choirboy-like chant layered over itself like some New Age confection, before the sci-fi whirrs and booms of "Preface" remind us that we're in the currently hyper-fashionable territory of reconfiguring US R&B through the prism of British soundsystem music post-dubstep and grime.That voice is way upfront in the mix throughout this album. Of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hadda Brooks: Queen of the Boogie and MoreThe rolling piano is irresistible. Upbeat and swinging, it powers forward with an unstoppable momentum. Accompanied by walking double bass and brushed two-step drums, the right hand suddenly peels off a descending cluster of notes while the left pounds out a solid, repetitive rhythm. Although almost rock ‘n’ roll, this is the sound of 1946 and Hadda Brooks’ “Juke Box Boogie”.“Juke Box Boogie” became the opening cut on Brooks' first album, 1948’s modestly titled Queen of the Boogie. Its reissue brings not only an opportunity to revel in and Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Three releases into their career as a duo, the Sydney-based Stone siblings have named an album after themselves. Whether the muse simply couldn’t supply an alternative (several of the tracks, particularly “Main Street” and “Heart Beats Slow” might have communicated more) or new producer Rick Rubin was aiming at a mini relaunch after the pair supposedly split and embarked on solo careers, has not been disclosed.Musically, we’re in the middle of the road, with American folk going one way, rock the other, and the Stones are on the small island between lanes, waiting for the little green man. Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Volume X is the tenth album by American post-rock originators Trans Am – which could, quite reasonably, encourage listeners to assume that there is nothing new here. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as the band push themselves to reinvent their approach not just for the album as a whole but as each new track unfolds. Despite taking on by turns the likes of industrial trance, hardcore punk thrash, trippy motorik sounds and prog-folk though, Volume X never strays too far from the dancefloor – albeit in a parallel world where lowest common denominator, EDM, is given the short shrift Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not quite true to say no one would have heard of JJ Cale without Eric Clapton. Clapton’s cover of “After Midnight”, released in 1970 as the first single on his debut solo album, put Cale on the map as a songwriter and paved for his own inimitable recording career. But Clapton didn’t actually record “Cocaine” until Slowhand in 1977. In between Lynyrd Skynyrd slipped in with their account of “Call Me the Breeze”, the song which lends its name to this Clapton-led tribute a year on from Cale’s death.Cale was a reticent inspiration to more than Clapton. The major singer-songwriters of a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Context is everything. It’s the difference between that “lady without a baby” line that’s got everybody talking delivered straight up, and the knowing smile and cross-dressing Hollywood actresses that come with it in the song’s accompanying video. It’s why Jenny Lewis, child starlet turned indie rock frontwoman turned accomplished alt-country singer-songwriter, is that rare artist who has made not only the best album for herself at every stage of her career, but also the one that her fans needed to hear.Depending on your reading of “Just One of the Guys”, it’s a song about confounding Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Action film fans should stay away from this Roman Polanski duet. But those who like their sexual politics served in symbolic form will be delighted. Polanski's wife Emmanuelle Seigner stars as an actress, Vanda, and Polanski-lookalike Mathieu Amalric as the writer-director Thomas.It's not entirely an adaptation of the 1870 novella by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (from whom the word masochism derives), but a version of the David Ives play about the link between sexual obsession, pleasure and pain. Venus in Fur is like a play: the entire 95 minute duration is set within the confines of a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A theatrical pop song-cycle of musical postcards from the hotspots of memory from a semi-immortal polysexual sensualist’s life” is how the fourth solo album from Erasure's Andy Bell describes itself. The story and album begin with “Freshly Buggered”, where Torsten, born 1906, arrives at school to tell all that he is gay. “He had found a love so real, so pure” declare the lyrics.The extraordinary Torsten the Bareback Saint can't fail to provoke, raise a smile and carry anyone along with its sheer verve. Torsten’s itinerant life is evoked in 22 songs portraying encounters, frustration, Read more ...