CDs/DVDs
mark.kidel
Dave Edmunds is one of a generation of rockers who came of age in the 1970s and excelled in channeling decades of American popular music: cue the pub rock bands, think Nick Lowe or Elvis Costello. There is a mixture of total knowingness and a nostalgic yearning for innocence that characterized the power pop of the period and a return to the three-minute single after the symphonic excesses of pomp and prog rock.Dave Edmunds channels The Beach Boys, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley and Otis Redding on this newly released album, most of which was originally available on his 1994 release Just Plugged. Read more ...
joe.muggs
Dev Hynes's path of artistic development is one of the most pleasing in 21st century music. The flamboyant black indie-kid risking life and limb to ride the local buses growing up in Hackney, who channeled his frustration at the lack of a place for him in the world through the awkward, aggro, occasionally inspiring but awfully named early 2000s electro-punk trio Test Icicles, has since then through sheer force of will carved out a space within the music world where he can be himself.Hynes clearly adores the whole aestheticHis sophisticated indie singer-songwriter guise Lightspeed Champion had Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The revitalisation of interest in films and TV dramas immersed in British folklore has seen the BFI issue Here's a Health to the Barley Mow, which is a 2011 DVD compilation of poetic documentaries going back a century, and last year's discs of the classic 1970s BBC ghost stories. This year's cinema releases of A Field in England and the restored The Wicker Man are now followed by the BFI DVD Robin Redbreast (1970), written by John Bowen and directed by James McTaggart for the BBC anthology series "Play for Today".It strongly anticipates The Wicker Man in its story of an outsider trapped Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Confection is sonic ear-candy of a most seductive type, it’s hard to grasp what the point is. The album is lush, orchestrated and enfolding, but it does nothing new and says little beyond being the product of meticulous craftsmanship. Essentially, it’s the soundtrack to a film that does not exist. Themes are stated and then restated. A half-time interregnum comes with a playful synth outing which could be an alternate theme to the Magic Roundabout. Confection is the sound of hamster on treadmill – energy, lots of it, is expended but it is going nowhere.Of course, with Sébastien Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
This need to classify music with all sorts of made-up words might be irritating, but "toytronica" - a label frequently given to Psapp - is as succinct a description as any of the next 40 minutes after you hit "play" on their fourth album, What Makes Us Glow. The label comes from the odds and ends that the duo, made up of ex-Londonders Carim Clasmann and Galia Durant, have been known to incorporate into their signature sound, but it’s just as apt a descriptor of their playful rhythms and bursts of sweet melody.Yes, the album opens with a 17-second burst of the sombre mooing of milk-laden cows Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Brenda Holloway: The Artistry of Brenda Holloway / Various Artists: ERA Records Northern SoulAs the home of the Motown empire, Detroit dominated American soul music in the Sixties. Yet the label’s boss Berry Gordy bowed to the inevitable and opened a Los Angeles office in November 1963. The West Coast’s home of film was taking over as America’s music business hub. Brenda Holloway was among Motown’s first California signings and spent her time with the label shuttling between LA and Detroit, recording in both cities. ERA Records was Los Angeles born, and competed with Motown on its new turf. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lady Gaga is many times more imaginative, intriguing and entertaining than her pop peers. Rihanna, Katy Perry, Ellie Goulding, Rita Ora, Jessie J, Miley Cyrus, et al - she beats the lot of ‘em, hands down. It’s always a pleasure when she arrives back into the fray, when she starts courting the media for her latest project. Her world is informed by avant-garde art, extreme fashion, literature, underground gay culture and much more. She martials it into a mesmeric melee of narcissism, performance art and high kitsch (ARTPOP’s cover, for instance, was created by Jeff Koons). What’s more, while Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The team behind The East also created 2011’s stunning Sound of my Voice, which scrutinised an enigmatic cult with a charismatic leader. It was going to be tough act to follow. The East has many of the same elements: a secretive cult with a charismatic leader on a mission; co-writer Brit Marling in a lead role and weird, unexplained semi-ritualistic behaviour. Unfortunately, The East is a halfway house of compromises, tropes and characters following well-worn emotional arcs. Unlike Sound of my Voice, the film does not surrender itself to the world it depicts.Marling plays Jane, an employee of Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Foul-mouthed Eminem is back. On his latest single, “Rap God”, he tells us he’s still as “rude and indecent as hell” before spitting out homophobic slurs like those which once brought him so much trouble. But then being foul-mouthed is kind of the point of the veteran rapper, whose combination of wit and anger often gives his music a rare cathartic power. Especially when his music is as catchy as that contained in the first Marshall Mathers LP (where, lest we forget, he even managed to turn a Dido song into a compelling narrative). How worthy a successor, then, is the second instalment?It’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When asked about sex, the newly famous Boy George cocked an eyebrow and said he’d rather have a cup of tea. He was actually at it with the drummer. Compare and contrast with Cliff Richard, into whose afternoon beverage a vat of bromide was dumped somewhere back in the Fifties. His songs have reeked of sexlessness ever since. All that mucky business involving eager groins and sweaty throbbing is not really his department.But they are the department of rock'n'roll, which was so offensive to the parents of its fans because it was overtly about kids getting into each other's knickers. Cliff Read more ...
David Nice
We’re in a Tokyo bar. As the first of two fixed cameras dominating the opening quarter of an hour gives a selective picture, a girl’s voice is heard offscreen remonstrating on her mobile with a pathologically jealous fiancé. The situation comes slowly into focus: the girl, Akiko (Rin Takanashi), is being compelled as a top-end call-girl to visit a client. Though some of the trajectory is what we think, or fear, it might be, many of the outcomes are far from expected.The symmetry is as carefully observed as everything else in this piece of genius filmmaking. There are only three main indoor Read more ...
Serena Kutchinsky
Enigmatic troubadour Connan Mockasin returns with his second album, a follow-up to 2010’s critically acclaimed Forever Dolphin Love which won him a cult following. Championed by the likes of Erol Alkan, Radiohead and Charlotte Gainsbourg, the elfin New Zealander is governed by his creative whimsy, writing music only when the mood takes him. This album is the musical equivalent of an indulgent Galaxy Caramel bar – smooth, sweet and stupor-inducing.Apparently inspired by the mellifluous qualities of the word, Caramel was self-recorded over a month in a Tokyo hotel room. It’s a concept album, of Read more ...