CDs/DVDs
Tom Birchenough
Access and trust are the key issues facing any documentary director, especially when the film concerned touches on questions that arouse controversy in society. It’s a long time since I've seen a work that achieved so much on those two fronts as Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer. The HBO-Storyville documentary by double directors-producers Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin tells the brave story of the Russian conceptual art, feminist punk collective. Two of the group's members are still imprisoned in Russian penal colonies for their participation in the "punk prayer" they staged at Moscow’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The songs of Jacques Brel and Juliette Gréco are old friends. She has revisited them many times since she began performing with Brel’s former accompanist, the pianist Gérard Jouannest, in 1968. Brel and Jouannest had worked together since 1958. Gréco married Jouannest in 1989. Gréco Chante Brel features him on nine of its 12 tracks. As well as being integral to what it is to be Gallic, the album can be considered a family affair.A new album of new interpretations is no surprise, but what is surprising is that it’s so compelling. Gréco is 86 and her voice is not what it was. But she has not Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Like his sometime nemesis Robbie Williams it’s all too easy to dismiss Gary Barlow as lame mainstream tosh. In fact, that’s not such a bad idea. Let’s do that. Job done.Those who wish for more might like to check the next pageAlternatively…Like his sometime nemesis Robbie Williams it’s all too easy to dismiss Gary Barlow as lame mainstream tosh. This is especially the case if you were male and young in the Nineties for then you’ll have borne the Take That-mania of hormone-addled female peers (as well as the crappy disco-pop that accompanied it). Nowadays Barlow’s media presence is ubiquitous Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Rebecca Ferguson’s first album, Heaven, blew in like a summer breeze in the freezing winter of 2011. What made the Liverpudlian’s debut stand out was not so much the quality of her voice – although it was undeniably big and infectious – but rather that, as an X Factor alumnus, she actually seemed to have something worthwhile to say. As such, it gives me no pleasure to say that the follow up, Freedom, sounds insipid; more Magic FM than, well, magic. Previously, Ferguson had succeeded in conveying personal struggles through bright, muscular soul melodies. This time around, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
That Thorold Dickinson (1903-84) directed only nine features can be attributed to the British film industry's mistrust of the intellectual left-wing cineaste and union activist – and his own distaste for making pablum. That he didn't make 30 pictures, including his planned The Mayor of Casterbridge, was a major loss. He was not only a master manipulator of light, space, movement, sound, and actors, but a shrewd judge of psychological and sociological dynamics.Gaslight (1940), adapted from Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play, is as European in flavor as Dickinson's sublime Pushkin adaptation The Read more ...
joe.muggs
The past year or two have seen a staggering return to popularity of house and techno music in the UK. For the first time since the mid-1990s, records which have grown steadily through club play over many months are breaking through into the charts on a regular basis – but just as exciting and significant are those records that remain resolutely underground. Because it's there that you start to see the real reason for the longevity of these sounds – both well over a quarter of a century old.Take Livity Sound, for example, a trio of young Bristol-based producers – Pev, Kowton and Asusu – with Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There’s something in the vocal delivery that calls for comparison to countrywoman Leslie Feist - a subtlety, an unreal-ness - but on her third, self-titled album Canadian songwriter Hannah Georgas has honed a sound of her own. What could easily have been your run-of-the-mill, heart-on-sleeve singer-songwriter material spent a little time in the studio with Graham Walsh of Toronto-based electronica act Holy Fuck and came out with its soul intact, but with just enough bite to make these songs stand out.I confess to writing Georgas off a little last year, while she was opening for, and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Clochemerle is the very odd one out in Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s scriptwriting career. It was their only adaptation, from Gabriel Chevallier’s 1934 comic novel set in the titular Beaujolais small town a decade before, and their only step away from the post-war, pre-Thatcher England they mined such socially rich, dark comedy from in Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son. The latter had two more years to run when this relatively lavish BBC-West German co-production was filmed, on location with a fine cast in Beaujolais in 1972. The tale of the catastrophic consequences when an ambitious Read more ...
Serena Kutchinsky
I have always found Bob Dylan immensely irritating, so it stands to reason that the music of folk rocker Jake Bugg, who is often compared to the poetic Sixties icon, should evoke a similar reaction. At a time when British rock is on the wane, this reedy-voiced Nottingham lad is being hailed as its rockabilly saviour, and with a number one album, multiple award nominations and a brief fling with a supermodel under his belt, he is doing his best to justify the hype.The speed with which he has followed his self-titled debut is at least impressive. This effort, named after the legendary Malibu Read more ...
James Williams
Oh good, Robbie Williams is back. Now fully emerged from the self-imposed wilderness that saw him become immersed in the world of extraterrestrials and the paranormal while living a Howard Hughes-esque existence in Los Angeles a few years back, Williams is evidently attempting to make up for lost time. Unfortunately for him, his Rat Pack schtick is as tired as it was 13 years ago with the release of his original swing-influenced project, the revoltingly popular Swing When You’re Winning.The format of Swings Both Ways is almost identical to that of its predecessor. Williams is a canny fellow: Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although most readily pigeonholed as a minimalist pianist whose compositions are as much about the space between the notes as what he actually plays, Germany's Nils Frahm has also worked with the Juno synthesiser and released pieces which edge towards techno. Until now, he hasn't made it easy to get a handle on his full scope. Spaces is the first release to capture this. A live album which doesn’t sound live, it includes compositions which never been released before. Despite occasional bursts of applause, it feels like a studio album.At his last London performance, at St John at Hackney in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Beyond being made in the 1930s, being a British production, being a musical and two having the same director, nothing links these four films. But the randomness of this double DVD set brings bucketloads of charm. There’s a songwriter trying to break into showbiz with the help of a plucky chorus gal (Harmony Heaven, 1930), a frothy Vienna-set love story about a star and her secretary who cannot reveal their emotions (The Song You Gave me, 1933), a tangled comedy of class and manners (Over She Goes, 1937) and – the jewel in this crown – a vehicle for bandleader Henry Hall (Music Hath Charms, Read more ...