CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Krai – Край – is employed in Russia to label tracts of land separating regions or marking borders. These liminal places each have their own name, defined limits and character, and have inspired the second solo album by the Brooklyn-based Olga Bell. An exotic musical travelogue through the nine Krais, Krai the album is delivered entirely in Russian.The music shifts from minimally arranged pieces drawing from Troika to melodies which could suit the balalaika. Orthodox religious chanting sits alongside Cossack melodies and the drumming of the Arctic-region Chuchki. There’s electronics, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
John Tavener: The Protecting VeilIn its tribute to John Tavener which followed his death last November, theartsdesk acknowledged the difficulties his devotional music brought. David Nice asked “what was there here that I couldn’t get from a standard traditional service?” He continued to describe The Protecting Veil as a masterpiece which “certainly cast its spell.” The tribute also included a fond and frank reminiscence from cellist Steven Isserlis, for whom The Protecting Veil was composed. Tavener was “was complicated," he said, "and could be very difficult.”This reissue of the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten to America – music for radio and theatre Hallé/Sir Mark Elder, Ex Cathedra/Jeffrey Skidmore Samuel West (narrator) (NMC)The official catalogue of Britten’s music currently runs to 1183 pieces – so, besides the 95 works with opus numbers there’s an enormous amount which remains little-known. The works assembled here can’t be described as juvenilia. Not everything stands up to repeated listening, but much of the music is highly engaging. Britten’s score for Auden and Isherwood’s mountaineering drama The Ascent of F6 was written largely on the hoof, and he was exasperated by the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
British brothers Simon and Robin Lee – AKA Faze Action - have been bubbling under the radar for a couple of decades. There was a point in the late Nineties when the disco-powered duo were poised to break through as the super-hip Nuphonic label’s signature act. But this was in the days before Daft Punk, multiple Norwegians and your Aunt Mildred had rediscovered, reinvigorated and reinvented disco. In some alternate universe Faze Action invaded the charts from the disco-house underground circa 1996, while the Disclosure siblings were still busy watching Clifford the Big Red Dog, sat in their Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Sixty years a masterpiece, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is being released by the BFI on DVD and in a Blu-ray Steelbook. Digitally restored by Toho from an original 35mm master positive, it ought to be a mandatory purchase for movie-struck kids raised on CGI, 3D, and hyperbolic action epics that bear no relation to reality. They and everyone else should, of course, see it in a cinema, too.Set in 1587, during Japan's late Warring States period, it tells the story, both stirring and elegiac, of five seasoned ronin, a boastful charlatan, and a starstruck rookie hired to spearhead a mountain Read more ...
joe.muggs
I'm starting to get irritated that the term “indietronica” steadfastly refuses to catch on. We live in a world now where Hot Chip, Metronomy, Fujiya & Miyagi, tUnE-yArDs, M83 and on and on and on are as much the norm in just-left-of-centre music as any kind of guitar-centric bands. It's not dance music, it's not particularly avant garde, it's got nice songs and interesting, vulnerable lyrics: it's indie, but electronic. It's indietronica, surely? But no, the years tick by, and this whole area remains essentially unnamed.Anyway. Phil Kay – not the under-rated stoner Scottish comedian, but Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s hard not to admire Kelis Rogers’ spirited and unpredictable approach to the music business. She’s been through multiple incarnations, approaching them with real zest, the spiritual successor to Nena Cherry, albeit more prolific and emanating a very American hip hop raunch. At her career’s start she explored the shouty borderland where R&B meets rock; in “Milkshake” she created one of the sexiest, starkest, best R&B numbers of the century, yet her last album was produced with EDM-pop Satan, David Guetta. Even outside her music, there’s always some new enthusiasm. The only time I Read more ...
graham.rickson
That Bill Forsyth’s 1979 debut feature is so polished shouldn’t be a surprise; he’d been working on documentaries and short films since the 1960s. Several of these are included as generous bonuses on this disc. KH-4 and Mirror are offbeat mini-dramas, but more pertinent is Oscar Marzaroli's Glasgow 1980, an upbeat short edited by Forsyth in 1970, outlining in optimistic fashion how the city would soon be transformed for the better. The depressing gap between aspiration and reality is clear in That Sinking Feeling. Glasgow remains grubby and congested, its pasty-faced denizens negotiating a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The ease with which Wallis Bird can flit between genres armed with nothing but a guitar and her warm, raggedly bluesy voice has been apparent since at the very least her 2012 self-titled third album. Even still, those of us who fell for that album’s considerable charms could hardly have expected its architect to celebrate a move to Berlin by going full-on Eurodisco.It’s an acquired taste, the throbbingly incessant disco beat that punctuates “Hardly Hardly”, the opening track - and first single - from Architect from about four bars in, but the multiple Irish Meteor winner Bird has never been Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Chicago Hit Factory – The Vee-Jay Story 1953-1966According to the book accompanying this 10-disc tribute to the Chicago independent label, “in one month alone in 1964 Vee-Jay records sold 2.6 million records. Two years later the company was bankrupt.” The reason for it flying so high in 1964 was a deal made in 1962 when the label began licensing material from Britain’s EMI. The prize then was yodelling popster Frank Ifield, whose “I Remember You” Vee-Jay got into the US Top 10. Along with Ifield, they got an unknown quantity called The Beatles. When 1964 arrived, Vee- Read more ...
Guy Oddy
2014 marks rock-jazzers/post-jazzers Led Bib’s tenth anniversary as a going concern and three years since their Bring your Own album. It also sees the release of The People in your Neighbourhood: an album that in no way suggests a band that is merely marking time. Weird electronics rub up against psychedelic bebop and there are even hints of dub reggae on closing tune “Orphan Elephants”. There are, however, still plenty of the pounding grooves and driving sax riffs that we have come to expect from Led Bib. Tracks like opener “New Teles”, “Giant Bean” and “Curly Kale” see them Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In the five or so years since Paolo Nutini’s last release, the profile of the tousle-haired Scotsman has hardly diminished. Ladies, of all ages, continue to find his raspy voice seductive whilst his laid-back style still gets of the nerves of many men. Or should I say laid-back styles - for Nutini's first two albums were nothing if not eclectic. Caustic Love, however, is appreciably more coherent. The overriding mood is a Seventies-ish mix of blues, soul and funk with a strong undertow of Al Green. But whilst the tone is defiantly retro, Nutini’s gravel voice prevents tunes like “Let Me Read more ...