CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Oasis: Definitely Maybe“His onstage presence is supernatural, a good looking boy exuding primal sexual allure while standing stock still, hands behind his back, all effort going into his big chested, raw throated pure and essential singing.” The beyond-hyperbolic liner notes to Deluxe Box Set edition of the 20th-anniversy reissue of Definitely Maybe, the first Oasis album, read like a parody. Liam Gallagher may be many things. But supernatural?Elsewhere, they gush that “the holy grail of British pop music is surely a bunch of longhaired boys with guitars playing swaggering, melodic rock Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Blood is thicker than water. Or is it? For anyone who’s struggled with this proverb, August: Osage County is a fascinating exploration of the ties that bind us. Examining an extended, quintessentially American family in the sticky summer heat of small town Oklahoma, Meryl Streep leads the film as Violet, a volatile matriarch addicted to pills, suffering from “a touch of” mouth cancer and awaiting news of her alcoholic husband’s disappearance. The aftermath of this dysfunctional family’s crisis allows deep insight into their darkest secrets and biggest fears. The cast, which includes Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Miss this “gay” film at your peril - a thriller with a stronger story than most. Directed and written by Alain Guiraudie (King of Escape), Stranger at the Lake’s a stealthy ineluctable drama that draws the audience in as few other films can, with explicit nudity and sex integral to its unfolding.A gay cruising lake is the solo setting where Franck (Pierre Dalndonchamps) goes to socialise and have casual sex. Out of shape, older bloke Henri (Patrick D'Assumçao) becomes his friend and a kind of Greek chorus, outlining the film’s subtext. It is Michel (Christophe Paou) who attracts attention as Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Neil Young has been pretty much making albums of two types for most of his 45 year solo career. There have been the proto-grunge rockers like 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps and 1990’s Ragged Glory and the more subtle, acoustic folk-rockers like 1970’s After the Goldrush and 1972’s Harvest. All these four albums are titans of their genre but Young has never been the most consistent of artists and his career has not been without its misfires, like 1983’s Everybody’s Rockin’ and 1987’s Life.A Letter Home sits firmly in the folk-blues end of the Young spectrum and sees him accompany his own soft and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Declaring that your new album can help conquer insomnia seems, initially, self-defeating. If it induces such a calmness that potential listeners drift off to sleep, then there’s the potential it may never be heard in full. Yet this is what lies behind Matt Berry’s fifth album. It was written and recorded at his home studio in the small hours while he was suffering from insomnia. He wanted to create a music which would still his mind so set to devising his own therapeutic soundtrack. Music for Insomniacs is the result.Music for Insomniacs is neither the expected single drone or blandly Read more ...
David Nice
Nearly everything may have been said or written about the relationship of artist-filmmaker Steve McQueen’s masterpiece to Solomon Northup’s 1853 book relating how he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. But there can be no end to observations on how the true story is unfolded. We know from the title that the protagonist begins, and will end, as a free man, so it’s a question of pacing the narrative. Which McQueen does with absolute mastery, binding the visual beauty or horror of every frame to a genius art of storytelling in film.There are countless examples of dramatic juxtaposition which Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Nobody ever accused, say, Dylan of having a voice that didn't mature with his songwriting. It’s something that springs to mind every time I try to put my finger on exactly why I’ve never warmed to the country-folk sounds of Conor Oberst’s latter work. Stylistically, the music is beautiful and while the lyrics may not be steeped in the same visceral poetry of Oberst’s Bright Eyes days they’re still a cut above most contemporary songwriting. But the quivering timbre of the voice that gave that band its visceral, emotional core or that wrung itself raw fronting early 00s emo act Desaparecidos is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The literal miracle in this earthily comic 1956 romance happens at the end. The deeper magic for producer-screenwriter Emeric Pressburger was the “small daily miracles” he found in its “extraordinary” Soho setting. He wrote the script in 1934, at the start of life in England as a Hungarian Jewish refugee, via France, from Germany’s newly Nazi film industry. In the two decades it took to make it, Pressburger wrote, produced and edited one of the greatest sequences in British cinema with director Michael Powell - A Matter of Life and Death, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Philadelphia International Records – The CollectionThe O’Jays’ “Love Train”, The Jacksons’ “Show You the Way to Go” and McFadden & Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” share an undeniable power. All make the body move and have a potency which could be devotional. Each is also about going forward and could slot into a church service. Despite being products of a musical production line, these were more than simple pop records.All three were issued by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s Philadelphia International Records and are heard on Philadelphia International Records Read more ...
mark.kidel
They say the devil has all the best tunes, but melancholia is another source of musical inspiration. Coldplay’s new album is the product of a period of emotional turmoil in lead vocalist Chris Martin’s life – the much–publicized ‘uncoupling’ from his wife the actress Gwynneth Paltrow.The album was made before the announcement of their separation but it expresses a painful inner journey in anticipation of break-up, the realization of loss, and the mortality of relationships, all of which are the stuff of melancholy moods.There is no trace of anger or vituperation here, no sign of blood on the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble may well be the film that foretold the end of Communism in Poland. Its script gestation period lasted almost 14 years, starting from 1962, and though its official release in 1977 was kept to a minimal level by the authorities, even in that form it’s believed that almost a fifth of the nation’s population saw the work.Aleksander Scibor-Rylski’s script plays loosely with the Citizen Kane narrative device of hunting down the personal truth behind a past legend. In this case it’s a socialist hero bricklayer, Mateusz Birkut (played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz, centre, main Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A little early, this review, as the album’s not out until Monday 2nd June, but if you take a look, everyone from 50 Cent to Clean Bandit has something out that week, so let’s have a listen now or it may fall by the wayside. Jah Wobble, after all, is one of those sturdy but essential periphery figures whose nearly three decades of music, often with a who’s who of alt-pop talent, is almost always worth a look (ie, with John Lydon, Adrian Sherwood, Screamadelica-era Primal Scream, the astounding Sinead O’Connor collaboration “Visions of You, his wife Liao Zilan’s Chinese Dub project, and so on). Read more ...