CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Jackson C. Frank: Jackson C. Frank“I am afraid of the ocean as much as the possibility it is my mother,” declared Jackson C. Frank in the liner notes to his sole, eponymous album, issued in September 1965. “Songs that I write aren’t mine to admit to,” he went on. “They dwell a little too heavily on the grey area behind my eyes to become my friends.” Presciently, he admitted “you’ll never know me as I do until it’s impossible twilight too late to do anything about it.” This was a singer unafraid to reveal the content of his psyche. He was not pop's usual contender. The album Read more ...
Russ Coffey
As fans of Dylan’s Bootleg series will testify, “odds and ends” albums may require a small modification of expectations. High Hopes falls into a similar category: it’s a collection of 12 re-recordings, outtakes and covers of material that the Boss couldn’t find a home for in his previous 17 albums. Listeners may not find the experience especially consistent, but, still, there are some real nuggets here.Much of this is down to guitarist Tom Morello. Last year, Morello toured with the E Street Band whilst Steve Van Zant was off acting. Chemistry developed between the Rage Against The Machine Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In one of the extras on the DVD release of Computer Chess, director Andrew Bujalski explains that the film came about after he realised how to marry two ideas which he had been conjuring with for a while: a then undeveloped interest in the period when computers were programmed to play chess, and a yen to make a film with vintage black-and-white video technology.An exercise then, Computer Chess is hardly about the film itself. Making it was a means to enact these ideas. It’s a knowingly meta film. It looks amazing and comes over as an authentic-seeming archive resurrection, with all who appear Read more ...
Matthew Wright
For his new band, Pigfoot, trumpeter Chris Batchelor has gathered three virtuosos of British jazz. Between them, pianist Liam Noble, tuba player Oren Marshall and drummer Paul Clarvis have made some of the most original British jazz of the past few decades. In this, Pigfoot’s debut album, they not only blow the cobwebs off eight favourites of the trad repertoire, they sandblast away decades of treacly cliche, revealing music of both immense joy and subversive power.Footage of 1950s crowds dancing to trad jazz shows an audience not unlike modern clubbers, wild-eyed and ecstatic at the novelty Read more ...
joe.muggs
Country music in the 21st century is the weirdest thing, and not much of it seems to have to do with the country any more. At its commercial end, it sells billions of records by men with tight T-shirts and women with very white teeth who all drive gigantic 4x4s, making gigastars (in the US at least) of the likes of Tim McGraw and Taylor Swift. Elsewhere there is rootsy bluegrass for urban hipsters, avant-garde classical-electronica-folk, and a vast swathe of “alt.country” and Americana acts that blur the lines between indie rock and retro country.It's in this last category that Shonna Tucker Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sacrilege alert: half the films released in the cinema can almost as happily be seen on a smaller screen. Flatulent Hollywood comedies, low-budget domesic dramas, most romcoms, the oeuvre of Leigh and Loach. The Great Beauty is not one of those films. As it comes out on DVD, it is important to advise anyone contemplating a purchase that the cinema is, if at all possible, the place to see this magnificent love letter to Rome, la città eterna. But it may not be possible, which is why this DVD is still an essential purchase. And even if you’ve already had the pleasure, this is also a covetable Read more ...
Aimee Cliff
Angel Haze learnt the art of crafting an identity from gigantic pop icons. Raised in what she describes as a cult, she was unable to hear pop music until the age of 14, when she discovered - and devoured - everything at once. Her backstory, involving repeated abuse, sheds light on the rapper and singer’s major label debut Dirty Gold, an album that weaves together the scathing confessionalism of Eminem, the bombastic fire of the EDM boom, syrupy R&B choruses and a series of self-mythologising field recordings that mirror those all over Beyoncé’s recent opus.Everything comes to a head in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Chisholm was born and raised in Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, and was tutored by great fiddler player, composer and instrument maker Donald Riddell. He's a regular player with Julie Fowlis and with his own band Wolfstone, and this is a live recording of his epic Strathglass Trilogy. Originally released on the Copperfish label, the trilogy was six years in the making, and features the award-winning Farrar (2008), Canaich (2010) and Affric (2012). The trilogy - and this live set - is a musical representation of the ancient Chisholm Clan lands north-west of Loch Ness. It’s one of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Love, Poetry and RevolutionThe subtitle “A Journey Through the British Psychedelic and Underground Scenes” – with “A” as the operative word – suggests this box set isn’t going to tell a familiar story. Most of the bands were and still are barely heard of. Twenty-four of the 65 tracks compiled were not originally issued.The opening shot is “Pretty Colours”, by obscure West Midlands band Deep Feeling which included future Traffic member Jim Capaldi. Although unreleased at the time of its October 1966 recording, The Animals’ Eric Burdon cocked an ear and declared it “ Read more ...
peter.quinn
In jazz, 2013 belonged to Wayne Shorter. In recognition of a remarkable six-decade career as a saxophonist, educator and composer, Shorter, who turned 80 in August last year, received a lifetime achievement award from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz – only the second time in the Institute’s history that it has bestowed such an honour (Quincy Jones being the first recipient in 1996). There were yet more awards from the Jazz Journalists Association: Lifetime Achievement in Jazz, Soprano Saxophonist of the Year, and Small Ensemble of the Year. Then there were the numerous headline Read more ...
fisun.guner
Frances Ha has been likened most obviously to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, but the influence of French New Wave cinema, with films such as Godard’s Breathless, can also be seen. This very likeable and stylish film certainly captures the look and texture of both.But while Sam Levy’s black and white cinematography may not be a match for Gordon Willis’s stunning photography on Manhattan, the film’s New York location is just as key: as a wry study in aspiration and real estate, the film’s episodic narrative follows the impecunious Frances as she drifts through various apartments, her living Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It was almost exactly a year ago (January 8, 2013, to be precise) that we awoke to the news that David Bowie, far from dying, retiring, or living the half-life of a rock and roll renunciant in his Riverside apartment, had blindsided us all by sneak-releasing his first new work in a decade on the morning of his 66th birthday.The weary reflection of "Where Are We Now?” was so perfectly measured, and its nil-by-mouth marketing strategem – in which absence, to paraphrase James Joyce, became the most potent form of presence – so perfect that one wondered whether Bowie shouldn’t just quit while he Read more ...