CDs/DVDs
Adam Sweeting
It's surely among the most grotesque factoids in the history of Hollywood that despite being nominated for 10 Oscars, American Hustle won a grand total of none. Its big mistakes were presumably being too entertaining and failing to concern itself with a historic social issue. My own theory is that the cast was just too good - the flick boasted five potential gong-winners, and perhaps it was beyond the capabilities of the Academy to choose wisely between them.Anyway, even compressed to TV-sized viewing, Hustle is a wild ride and a non-stop hoot, a crime caper with buckets of soul. In the DVD's Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone who remembers the critical mauling that The Horrors received on the release of their first album, 2007’s Strange House, might be surprised to learn that seven years later, they have just put out a fourth set of new songs. Not only that, but that it wouldn’t be a stretch to describe Luminous as eagerly awaited by many.However, while the release of each previous Horrors album has seen significant stylistic musical leaps, Luminous sees the band settle into the sound of 2011’s Skying and build further upon its early Simple Minds-esque template. This isn’t to say, however, that Luminous is Read more ...
mark.kidel
Brian Eno is a born collaborator as well as a highly esteemed producer. He is one of those musicians with a strong personal signature but who work with a minimum of ego. Branded as an egghead – a barbed label which reflects as much as anything a deeply British mistrust of intelligence – Eno might seem an unlikely partner for Underworld’s Karl Hyde. But he’s, among other things, a lover of intricate rhythmic patterns – a love first revealed in the groundbreaking collaboration with David Byrne, My Life in a Bush of Ghosts, as well as a fan gospel's inspirational vibrancy. Both these Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“I’m going to make a porn film with these two,” Charlotte Gainsbourg remembers her Melancholia director Lars von Trier telling the press, indicating her and Kirsten Dunst. Nymphomaniac sounds like that film. In fact it’s another sometimes baggy, sometimes gripping study of a female rebel’s psychological state. Gainsbourg’s Joe (pictured below), is a nymphomaniac, but the erections and penetrations which mark her passage through the world are both fundamental and incidental. Porn is the aspect of sex this film is least interested in.When wide-eyed, monkish Stellan Skarsgård finds a badly Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Dreaming about teeth, teeth falling out specifically, is supposed to represent anxiety and transition. Already this year The Hold Steady have based an album around the concept and now, on his own band’s fourth album, Greg Barnett of Pennsylvania punks The Menzingers seems to be wrestling with similar visions. “Dreaming that my teeth are falling out,” he sings on “Bad Things”, the album’s second track; “I’m driving, there’s no steering wheel.”Sure, the four-piece are old hands at this by now, but it’s hard to believe that there isn’t a social subset of anxiety devoted to the album after the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The career of Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero is an anomaly. It’s heartening that such curveballs occur, with artists taking an alternative, individual route to success. To those with any rock’n’roll romance left, it’s a sign that, even in these ADD., Tweet-trending, homogenous times, there are still unexpected ways for atypical acts to sustain a career. The pair were metal-loving Mexican teens who became virtuoso acoustic Dublin street buskers, leading to an Irish hit album and, eventually, a global career that’s seen them working on Hollywood blockbusters. Appealingly, they fit no pop Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Was Britpop really two whole decades ago? As rumours fly around about an Oasis Glastonbury reunion, Noel’s nemesis Damon Albarn has certainly not stood still. After Mandarin opera, world music and fronting a cartoon band among other things, he has finally found time for his debut solo album. Everyday Robots is hardly likely to challenge Parklife in the sales department or receive retrospectives in 2034, but it is a strikingly memorable, strangely melancholy work.The tone from the start is distinctly mellow. Nothing jumps out at you but it all seeps in on repeated listens. Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Have you ever had one of those moments where your imagination has played out a situation the way you wish it had been? A witty comeback after a putdown, an irresistible one-liner after a brutal rejection. Meet Walter Mitty, full-time negative asset manager for Life magazine; part-time idealist who lives out his fantasies whilst appearing to be in some sort of trance.In the first and most exciting of these daydreams we see Mitty take a running leap from the train station platform to dive into a burning building. He emerges from the explosion with his co-worker's three-legged dog and wins Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Back in the Eighties fans of Fish (of Marillion) considered his groovy wordbending to be art. Others begged to differ. Lloyd Cole and Atzec Camera-types would rubbish him as a slightly preposterous merchant of sixth-form poetry. Perhaps both had a point. Mk 1 Marillion certainly could be pretentious, but they also, undeniably, had some killer lines. "On promenades where drunks propose/ to lonely arcade mannequins" is, for me, a suburban evocation worthy of Richard Thompson. A Feast of Consequences - finally on general release – is Fish’s 10th post-Marillion studio album. On forums Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“What Goes On”, opening track of Pixies first album since 1991’s Trompe Le Monde, proves a suitably thrilling beginning for a set that has been much anticipated by fans who may have been concerned that Black Francis’ crew were happy as a heritage act. The chugger-chugger rhythm combines with plenty of volume and feedback and suggests a band that isn’t just going through the motions. This should cause massed sighs of relief to those who haven’t heard these songs over the three EPs and a download that were released over the last few months.When Pixies first appeared in the late 1980s, Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Mighty oaks from little acorns grow – meet Allen Ginsberg, before the beard. Daniel Radcliffe plays an 18-year-old version of the infamous beat poet in the defining moments of the artist as a young man, and the true-life episode that created the genre.A bespectacled, sheltered, bookish Jew, Ginsberg frees himself from the shackles of a mentally ill mother and dodges the shadow of a middle-class education provided for by his bourgeoisie poet father Louis Ginsberg, by heading off to Columbia University. There, he is intoxicated by the kicks of jazz, a plethora of drugs and the heady thrill of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
She may only be 23, but Iggy Azalea got off to a good start with those of us a good decade older last month when the video accompanying her single “Fancy” - an homage to 90s teen comedy Clueless - debuted online. Nostalgia sells, of course: any idiot with access to the nightwear department at Primark, where right now pyjamas featuring Alicia Silverstone and the rest share shelf space with My Little Pony, could tell you that. But fans of the film will know that its imagery, if not its heart, is the perfect accompaniment to the stylish swagger the Australian rapper brings to the verses, Read more ...