CDs/DVDs
Matthew Wright
In a fairly dry climate for original new music Wild Beasts have for the past six years been an oasis of fascination. With this, the Kendal schoolmates’ fourth album, their impeccable indie credentials, including an eclectic musical palette, gnomically allusive lyrics, an authentic quirky northernness, and Pulpishly progressive social attitudes, have drawn such an audience that a mainstream breakthrough threatens. The songs’ subject matter, including wrestling and dogs, is endearingly left-field. Any indie band worth the name has to have an odd-sounding singer, but Wild Beasts have two. Hayden Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“Good things come to those who wait” sings Neneh Cherry on “Everything”, from her new album, and the 17 years since her last solo album certainly has been a long wait. She’s right though - Blank Project has good things in abundance.RocketNumberNine provide industrial beats and a backing that is sparse and frequently conveys paranoia and feelings of pressure and claustrophobia. This has been shaped further by producer Kieran Hebden, of Four Tet fame, into sounds that often suggest Massive Attack or ambient dubstepper Burial. At times Blank Project also recalls the arrangements of Neneh’s 2012 Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Howie B’s new album, Down with the Dawn, is his first solo record since 2010’s Good Morning Scalene but it sounds as if it could have been put out by him at any time since the release of his debut album, Music for Babies, in 1996. This is primarily because nothing meaningful has changed or developed in his sound since he first made his name as the producer of the musical accompaniment to many an after-club spliff session in the early nineties.In a normal world that would be the full story and the full review of Down with the Dawn. However, in 1997, he was fortunate enough to be co-opted by U2 Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's hard to countenance sometimes that there was an era where Marc Almond could have been a bona fide, chart-smashing pop star. His ability to parlay the archest of high camp and the most grotesque of low life into something digestible by genuine mass culture was, from the very beginning, quite uncanny.There was always a sulphurous whiff of something downright Luciferian about him, yet enough fragility to make the act seem all too real – an infinitely more convincing and intriguing character than more recent more self-conscious attempts at “transgressive” pop like the gallumphing vaudeville Read more ...
mark.kidel
Claude Sautet’s gripping noir thriller “Classe Tous Risques”, originally released in 1960, was an inspiration for Jean-Pierre Melville’s collection of peerless films set in the French underworld. Not surprising, as the script was written by the novelist and ex-cop José Giovanni, who also supplied the story for Melville’s classic “Le Deuxième Souffle”. As the excellent TV series "Braquo", written by another ex-policeman, Olivier Marchal, has shown, experience of a profession in which the boundaries between good and evil are blurred makes for convincing and emotionally engaging stories. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Perhaps the most effective way to sum up St Vincent - the self-titled fourth album from the one-woman avant garde powerhouse known to her friends as Annie Clark - is that it’s the closest she has come on record to the visceral, engrossing experience that is seeing her live. Clark’s albums before 2012’s collaboration with David Byrne were beautifully crafted things, in turns both gorgeous and surreal, but with a certain under-glass quality. St Vincent, by contrast, is an album that revels in its strangeness, interspersing some of its more curious stories with cobweb-blasting bursts of sheer Read more ...
Russ Coffey
One of the unwritten rules of pop music is that a surfeit of talent doesn’t necessarily lead to the most affecting tracks. The rhythmic complexity of Beck’s 2008 opus Modern Guilt, was, for instance, undeniably unemotional. And then there was his 2012 release, simply a book of sheet music called Song Reader. Morning Phase, however, is a different matter. As the hype and press releases rightly claim, it really does hark back to his most lovely work, 2002’s Sea Change.Like its predecessor this is not a record of exceptional moments, rather one of sustained ethereal meditation. Now, however, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The primary DVD extra with Captain Phillips is an hour-long behind-the-scenes featurette. Most heavyweight Hollywood films have these but they’re often backslap-fests with little true revelation. The Captain Phillips featurette bucks the trend with genuine insight into the film-making methods of Paul Greengrass.Captain Phillips is classic Greengrass, close in flavour to his shockingly powerful United 93. He combines earnest attention-to-detail coverage of the minutiae of extreme situations with a fat-free forward-driving narrative and enough glimpses of real humanity to keep the emotions Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nowhere near enough was said by James Gandolfini before he died at the age of 51 in 2013. His monument is of course Tony Soprano, but in this late role he unveiled a charming doughy side as the bruised romantic lead in Nicole Holofcener’s lo-fi autumnal romcom.Enough Said was conceived as a vehicle for Julia Louis-Dreyfus, formerly of Seinfeld and latterly of Veep. She plays masseuse Eva, who ticks all the genre’s boxes: goofy, kooky, adorable and borderline desperate. She and big slobby Albert (Gandolfini), both with daughters about to desert the nest for college, swiftly laugh each other Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s always difficult to know quite how seriously bands approach the things that distinguish between an album and a collection of songs: the naming, the sequencing, the artwork. For instance, I could say that “Life in the Sky” - the sprawling, six-minute epic that opens Fanfarlo’s new album - is the perfect microcosm of an album called Let’s Go Extinct: from the sounds it opens with, like whistles and whale song; to the melodic chaos the brass brings to its middle section; to the simplicity of its closing moments and the way that the song fades into nothingness. But it could just be that the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Reverend & the Makers are known for a sound that is characterised by a hotpot of indie pop, electronica and Madchester vibes with witty and pithy lyrics, delivered in a Yorkshire accent, that venture beyond the subjects of getting hammered and hanging out. Something like Kasabian with a raised IQ or Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip with a bit more swing about them.New album, ThirtyTwo, is a slightly different take on their sound, with added ska among other flavours, but it is still most certainly recognisable as John McClure and his band of musical renegades. “The Devil’s Radio” and “Nostalgia Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The silent-era Wings is not a subtle film. Director William A. Wellman’s action-packed World War One tale of loyalty, love and war is also, at just short of two-and-a-half hours, long. At the time of its release in 1927, the film news bulletin Movie Time News declared it “the spectacular epic of the year, the national box office sensation of 1927”. In 1929 it became the first film to pick up an Oscar for Best Picture, at the first Academy Awards ceremony.As one of the extras on this new edition makes clear, the path which led to Wellman helming the film was collaborative and needed to be Read more ...