CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
M.I.A’s recent single “Bad Girls” - a post-modern mix of Bhangra beats, and frustrated vocals - undeniably shows her at her most effective. It's an example of her unique take on culture and society that's long garnered critical praise. And yet, there is also a kind of empty stare in her music that others feel demonstrates a deep-down naïveté; or worse. In other words, no one really doubts that, musically, M.I.A can often brew up a pretty toxic potion, but is it real subversion or merely trendy posturing?Matangi contains both. The strongest tracks are psychotic dance-punk poems to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
William Onyeabor: World Psychedelic Classics 5 – Who is William Onyeabor?A primitive drum machine rattles out a Latin rhythm. Keyboards begin. The gaps between the repetitive spirals of notes are plugged by blobs of fat synth. A disembodied yet warm voice sings “Good name is better than silver and gold. And no money, no money, no money, no money can buy good name.” The melody nods towards Kraftwerk’s “Computer World”. The music is as intense as early Marshall Jefferson and the whole suggests Tom Tom Club.William Onyeabor's “Good Name” is compelling and electrifying: minimal and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s taken Avril Lavigne more than a decade to release a self-titled album, but in some ways it’s appropriate: after all, the Canadian singer’s best music still sounds exactly like what she was releasing as a teenager. The difference is that when she first burst onto the scene, all sweatbands and heavy eyeliner, Lavigne was a breath of fresh air - but now, on her new album, she seems to be taking her cues from the women she blazed the trail for.What she ends up with is the fun pop hits Katy Perry didn’t have room for in her spiritual new direction (“Sippin’ on Sunshine”, “Rock ‘n’ Roll”); Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Within moments of World War Z beginning Piers Morgan is onscreen. Zombies, schmombies - this is surely the face of true horror. Where that smug mug blossoms, the apocalypse cannot be far behind. Morgan pops up among intercut US news-streams and media that open the film. This collage hints at eco-disaster before we settle into the everyday Philadelphia home life of Gerry and Karin Lane (Brad Pitt and Mireille Enos, who was the lead in the US remake of The Killing) and their two daughters. Gerry is a house-husband but, as we slowly find out, he used to be a superhero UN investigator. Before too Read more ...
joe.muggs
Oh dear, there it is – the career-plateau pot-shot at “journalists” and “critics”. It comes about halfway through the album, on the otherwise really good 1970s blues-rock-sampling “Looking Down the Barrel”, and it cements a sad feeling that's been growing throughout the record that here is an artist who's achieved some success and now has nothing to talk about except what it's like to be an artist who's achieved some success.See, the problem is not the pot-shot, but the fact that Tinie Tempah needs to make it. Having achieved big-time pay-day and proved his talent, he should be cutting loose Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Many bands would pack it in after the departure of their lead singer, especially if he was their main songwriter. In Midlake’s case, the damage was compounded by Tim Smith leaving after work had begun on the band’s fourth album. Antiphon is what it became, and it’s not what had been started with Smith. One track aside, they began afresh with guitarist Eric Pulido stepping up to fill the gap.Nonetheless, Antiphon is recognisably a Midlake album, albeit one more languorous and soft-focus than ever before. The traces of folk, Americana and Neil Young which surfaced from time to time have largely Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Directed by a Frenchmen, Foxfire adapts an American book to create a film with an archetypical stance and setting which could rank it alongside The Outsiders, Stand by Me or even Rebel Without a Cause. The problem is that despite depicting a passionate, wayward and issue-fuelled gang, Foxfire is not animated enough. It unfolds in deliberate steps, like a stage play. The young women may be on fire, but the measured approach of the overlong film tempers their spirit.Foxfire - Confessions of a Girl Gang is Laurent Cantet’s rendering of the Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name. It’s been Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Schalcken the Painter looks like a documentary shot inside a Dutch Golden Age painting, out of whose black depths the Devil one day materialises. Taking the truly ghastly guise of the invincibly wealthy merchant Vanderhausen (John Justin), he buys Rose (Cheryl Kennedy) for his wife from the great Dutch painter Dou (Maurice Denham). Dou’s pupil Schalcken (Jeremy Clyde), though thinking himself in love with Rose, does nothing to save her, and as the years pass, ambition for his painting career (destined to be minor) and brothel visits replace his callow feelings for the girl. But neither she Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Oh Yes We Can Love – A History of Glam Rock Despite Marc Bolan fashioning glam rock’s starting block in 1971 with T. Rex’s “Hot Love”, 2013 has been the year when pop's era of androgyny, inappropriate and shiny trousers, and stomping, sometimes arty music has been marked. The 40th anniversary passed largely unmarked, but the 42nd saw Tate Liverpool mount the Glam! The Performance of Style exhibition. Now, this confounding five-disc box set – the first to tackle glam – has arrived to tell the story too.The choice of 1973 as a marker makes some sense: it was the year Read more ...
Tim Cumming
People go on about how many members have been in The Fall, but I reckon even more have passed through Hawkwind. The Notting Hill counter-culture of 1969 in which they formed is a lifetime away, on another planet, and only Dave Brock remains from those wild, formative years under the Westway with Lemmy, Bob Calvert and co. But they still travel with that aura of proper rock'n'roll mythology – extreme, even insane, too far out, uncompromising and sometimes brutally overpowering.On this typically peculiar new album of old songs refreshed, new mixes, and new tracks, intimations of their Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Though never really part of the country’s groundbreaking New Wave, František Vláčil was a Czech master who's best known for his films like Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees, both complex historical works. His first feature The White Dove, which appeared at the very beginning of the momentous Sixties, is the exact opposite of those two large-scale movies: it's a small film of poetry and mystery, which has a fabular quality remote from any political dimension (very likely the reason why its production in 1960, a time of continuing censorship, was possible).The symbolic nature of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Union J are a boy band consisting of George Shelley, Josh Cuthbert, JJ Hamblett and Jaymi Hensley. They finished fourth in last year’s X Factor.In November 2012, after being voted off the talent contest, teen competitor Ella Henderson revealed to Look magazine that she had actually been hoping for romance with Union J’s Josh Cuthbert, not George Shelley as everyone had previously assumed. Jaymo Hensley, meanwhile, revealed to the Sun on Sunday the same month that he was gay and also growing close to Katie Price.Twenty-five-year-old JJ Hamblett’s girlfriend, model Caterina Lopez, recently Read more ...