CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Arriving in Paris from New York after graduating from university and splitting with his girlfriend, Simon has no idea what he’s going to do there beyond trying to find the focus lost during the break-up. What he actually does is the subject of Simon Killer, an unsettling, atmospheric yet not wholly satisfying second film as director from Antonio Campos, the producer of the more-recent Martha Marcy May Marlene, which also featured Brady Corbet. Simon Killer was devised while that was being completed.As the repellent and unfathomable Simon, Corbet is on screen the whole time. He may or may not Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When Brighton hip-hop boys Jordan Stephens and Harley Alexander-Sule first came on-radar in 2011 with the summer smash “Down With the Trumpets” they appeared to be a good-time flash-in-the-pan, possibly even a nascent boy band. When Fatboy Slim got involved, producing the infectious “Mama Do the Hump”, sneaking his old big beat sound back onto daytime radio, it pricked the interest, but it was in the live arena that Rizzle Kicks proved themselves. They went on the road with a full band, replete with a top-range brass section, and slayed the festival circuit.Co-written and produced by long- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The last album released by Iceland’s múm was Early Birds, an archive trawl from 2012 which unearthed previously unheard material recorded between 1998 and 2000. Before that was 2009’s Sing Along to Songs You Don't Know. Smilewound is a comeback, and a welcome one. It’s also a statement of who múm are and closer in sound to an early album like Finally We Are No One than the – for them – relatively grandiose …Songs You Don't Know.For Smilewound, múm’s core duo Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason are reunited with founder member Gyða Valtýsdóttir. Kylie Minogue also crops up. Despite Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Plays for Britain was a short-lived ITV equivalent to the BBC’s long-running Play for Today, and doesn’t suffer in comparison. Strong writers, directors and actors on their way up – Alan Clarke, Stephen Poliakoff, Howard Brenton, Ray Winstone, Pete Postlethwaite, Miriam Margoyles – all do good work in the sole 1976 series’ six one-hour plays, complete here.Brenton’s The Paradise Run follows three soldiers in a Northern Ireland rendered almost science-fictionally non-specific, though director Michael Apted makes the terror of a soldier’s rural ambush and execution clammily authentic. Future Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I have little patience with those that link mental anguish with creativity, glamorising the former as if the latter were any consolation. That said, there is comfort to be drawn from songs that spin the blankness of depression into something desolate and beautiful. It’s why I’ve had “Night Still Comes”, the second track from Neko Case’s new album, on repeat for the past week: it slips in, hopeless and otherworldly after a typically strident album opener, and runs on unchecked like the internal monologue of the depressive. “Is it because I’m a girl?” Case muses, rhetorically. “If I puked up Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sly & the Family Stone: Higher!Sly & the Family Stone’s hits “Dance to the Music”, “I Want to Take You Higher” and “Stand!” delivered a sharp wake-up call to the American charts in a period when psychedelia meant new styles of pop were becoming less concise and the mellow vibes of Laurel Canyon were about to begin reducing energy levels. Sly Stone’s gang showed that music could go to fresh places without losing vitality and precision. The case doesn’t need to be made that Sly Stone – born Sylvester Stewart in 1943 – is one of America’s greats, but Higher! makes it anyway with Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is an incredibly hard album to work out. One major clue comes, though, with its second track, “Maxim's 1”, the backing for which is a dead ringer for a lost track from Cocteau Twins's 1990 Heaven or Las Vegas album. Not that any of the rest of the album sounds like Cocteau Twins, but it does hit a very similar magic formula. That is, though it ostensibly comes from an “indie” milieu, it has vast sonic ambition closer to the biggest pop/soul/R&B records of its time than to any guitar-wrangling mitherers, but it is also psychedelically alien to the point of indecipherability.Los Read more ...
Serena Kutchinsky
When the best thing you can say about a band’s comeback album is that it sounds vaguely like their era-defining punk funk debut, you can either wonder why they bothered or admire their dogged devotion to a single sound. The music world has moved on from the dance rock sound popularised by the Glasgow foursome’s foot-stomping first single "Take Me Out" (a title now more synonymous with TV dating hell), but Franz Ferdinand have not moved with it. A decade of success has seen flashes of experimentation but after a failed attempt at producing a more dancefloor-friendly album (2009’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s always irritating being told “you had to be there”. Even more irksome is when some author, film director or nostalgic creative decides to record – naturally, they “fictionalise” it – their contribution to some golden era or significant event for posterity. Whether they’re being truthful, bigging themselves up or playing fast and loose with history is beside the point. They’re saying they were there. Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air is the French director and writer’s entry in the canon and, shockingly, it’s great.It’s great because Assayas has thoughtfully crafted a rich, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There have been those who have uncharitably suggested that Crystal World is in fact a sixth Ladytron album rather than the solo debut of the band’s frontwoman, Helen Marnie. It’s an easy, if lazy, conclusion to jump to when said album flirts with many of the same electro-dreampop calling cards and features a bandmate on production credits, but take a trip into Marnie’s world and there is plenty to set it apart.Curiously it’s on the vocals that the differences become most obvious. This is still the same Marnie of the sometimes sultry, sometimes glacial persona she adopts on the best known of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There is no guarantee of success in any area of rock and pop but those who wish to succeed through sheer graft might look to metal as their main chance. While multiple bands in other genres have fleeting, unpredictable moments in the sun, a decent metal act ticking the right boxes with the fans and initially willing to slog the circuit for 350 nights of every year, especially in the endless wilds of Middle America, can build and build and build. Look at Iron Maiden, possibly the biggest band of their vintage in the world. They do what they do with thundering, enjoyable efficiency, are beloved Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Cinema's unrivalled silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981) was influenced by Arthur Rackham's illustrations and by Chinese and Indonesian puppet theatre. Like her fellow German filmmaker Fritz Lang, she must have appreciated the intricacy and spite in Rackham's pictures. Those qualities abound in The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the oldest surving animated feature and, at 65 minutes, the longest film Reininger made.It's a near-avant garde pastiche of Arabian Nights stories, primarily The Ebony Horse and the 18th-century addition Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp. Handsome Achmed is Read more ...