CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
Taking the electronics-heavy instrumental pieces from David Bowie’s, late seventies albums, Low and “Heroes” and arranging them in a hard-bop jazz style might seem a bit audacious. After all, electronic experimentation was largely the point of this music – primarily as an attempt to escape from the usual expectations of pre-punk seventies’ rock music. Nevertheless, these tunes soon proved to be significant game-changers in modern music themselves, conveying a feeling of alienation through proto-ambient soundscapes which were a huge influence on Aphex Twin, Black Dog and many others of the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
For a long time, Kathleen Hanna was ensconced in a world where she cared more about the noise she made onstage than off. Despite being in a band that couldn't really play their instruments, her political message was what mattered.
The Bikini Kill front-woman and outspoken feminist punk idol’s life is explored in this biographical documentary, hinged on the mystery of why she suddenly stopped performing in 2005.
Directed by Sini Anderson in a fanzine style, the film pays homage to a singer that rocked the riot grrrl movement, sparking a sub-culture of female empowerment and launching third Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Flaming Lips are one of the most annoying bands on the planet. They're fawned over in a pseudo-spiritual fashion by people who should know better for their arena show stunts which supposedly create a vibe of togetherness and community but really seem every bit as messianically egotistical on the part of band leader Wayne Coyne as any of the antics of, say, Bono or Chris Martin. They are essentially a new generation prog-rock band with all the self-involved and portentous stoner goofing that entails.However... a little frustratingly, they're also capable of making good records, and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It seems a little ambitious to be thinking of those omnipresent end-of-year album best-of lists when it is barely summer, but there’s something about How To Dress Well’s “What Is This Heart?” that puts me in that frame of mind. Not because I can see it topping any such list of my own but rather because I can see this album - this sumptuous, melodic, intricate, claustrophobic third full-length from the electro-R&B project of one Tom Krell - topping everybody else’s. It’s another way in which Krell’s music is similar to that of Frank Ocean, whose similarly falsetto-laden work of laudable Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Ed Sheeran is a young lad with an acoustic guitar, an armful of tattoos and a head of unruly red hair. He is also the most unlikely of global superstars in the age of Autotune and X-Factor. However, an unthreatening guy with a bagful of heart-felt love songs can always come good, given the right push. Ed saw his chance in 2011, with his “A-Team” single, a ballad dripping in teenage sentimentality, and hasn’t put a commercial foot wrong since.X sees Ed playing to his strengths with plenty of songs of love and loss that will keep his core fanbase more than happy. “One”, “Photograph” and “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: NME C86, The Motown 7s Box – Rare and Unreleased Vinyl Volume 2With music – or anything really – few things develop or evolve neatly, and British grassroots music from the mid-1980s is a case in point. When, in 1986, the NME issued a cassette tape of 22 current and (hopefully) up-and-coming bands the stylistic jumps it presented were jarring. Beefheart-style herk-jerk sat side-by-side with Sixties-derived jangle pop. Dance-music polemicists battled it out with bands saturated in far too much of The Fall.The C86 cassette caught the rag-bag nature of what infested pub Read more ...
Katie Colombus
A pervading sense of melancholia runs through this film, and yet it is neither chilling, nor disaffecting. Akin to one of the key characters, watching it is a bit like having an out-of-body experience. The Past hovers somewhere between fight and flight, with characters in myriad sliding door moments. They dissect the past and analyse the future, but are stuck in an impossible limbo between the two. It is a labyrinthine tangle of what might have been - accidentally leaving your child on the metro as you head out of the station; a complete and happy marriage; an extra-marital affair; a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Traditionally, reviewers of Mastodon albums employ the language of the avant-garde to describe the sophistication behind all that ear-splitting noise. Recently, however, their sound has changed. The riffs are less industrial and the vocals more melodious. Unsurprisingly the purists complain – but does this evolution really make their music any less accomplished? Less worthy of describing them in high-falutin’ terms? The band certainly seems to think not. Their press release for “Once More ’Round the Sun” talks of the “intense polyrhythmic guitar groove” of the lead single “High Road”. Read more ...
peter.quinn
Impressively old sea shanties with stacked up vocal harmonies and sing-along choruses. Check. Captivating explorations of desire, drink and death. Check. Luxuriant, high spec arrangements presenting an ear-catching crazy quilt of influences. Check. Newly signed to Island Records, in this fifth studio album the award-winning 11-piece folk band sprinkle their usual magic over a bracingly fresh and brilliantly constructed collection of songs.While some albums drift benignly into your consciousness, others begin with a figurative grabbing of your lapel. Revival falls very much into the latter Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Klaxons are a great band. They’re also a brutal example of how a great band can make the wrong decisions and scupper themselves. Their Mercury-winning debut album Myths of the Near Future not only captures a moment when dance, rock and pop collided to offer colourful reinvigoration for all parties, it’s also a stand-alone classic. After it they went off the rails and made a drug-addled psychedelic experiment. That is what great bands do, right? Instead of realising this, and releasing the results to intrigued bemusement – the key word being “intrigued” – they dumped it and, instead, recorded Read more ...
Graham Fuller
With Unrelated (2007) and Archipelago (2010), the filmmaker Joanna Hogg staked out unfashionable territory: the anxieties and frustrations that stem from communication failures and deep-seated resentments among the insular English bourgeoisie. Exhibition, her latest, is as coolly observed and as exquisitely acted, visualized, and sound-designed as its predecessors, but it's more opaque.A series of mostly low-key vignettes, it depicts the secure but uneasy marriage of the contemporary artists D (Viv Albertine, the musician) and H (Liam Gillick, the conceptual artist) at a moment of crisis. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
You’d have to go back to 1996’s Spirit to name a Willie Nelson album with more than one or two original new songs, so the nine for Band of Brothers is something like headline news. Produced by Buddy Cannon – their previous collaboration, To All the Girls, took Willie back into the Top 10 for the first time since the 1980s – it features a deft band of guitar, steel, piano, bass and drums, with Mickey Raphael’s harmonica roaming around Nelson’s wandering way with a vocal and his totemic guitar, Trigger. This isn’t music that goes over the top; it gets under the skin. There’s no melodrama or Read more ...