CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Chicago’s Disappears aren’t playing it easy with their fourth album Era. Their name doesn’t appear on the front cover. Nor does the title. The song titles are only on the disc and can’t be referred to while the album is playing. No internet addresses are given. The band seem to be taking their chosen name literally and leaving the music to do the talking.Era was preceded into the shops by Kone, a 12-inch EP which centred on a 15-minute track. Although abstract, it was rooted in what the band had previously perfected: a stiff-backed, guitar-driven squall which underpinned singer Brian Case’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It's a lottery. There are writers who’d see something in the return, after five years away, of this multi-million-selling Scottish four-piece. These writers, however, didn’t step in so Travis have been thrown to the dogs, a non-starter for both of us. Sooooo… there’s a song here called “New Shoes” that I wouldn’t turn off on the radio, a loping, pleasant groove, and another jangly thing called “Boxes”… no, this isn’t working, that last one is just mawkish, reminds me of early Sting. No, no, no, not bloody Travis.At the close of the last century Travis opened the door for Coldplay, Keane and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Wilfully perverse avant-hipster darling Harmony Korine has always teetered on the paper-thin border between vanguard edginess and trendy, emperor’s-new-clothes vapidity. His previous work, from the opening salvo of Kids, with Larry Clark, through various warped cinematic visions of a freakish American underclass, have set out to repel a wider audience. Spring Breakers, while equally determined to shock, is a change of pace. It has a cast that includes High School Musical’s Vanessa Hudgens and Bieber/Disney pop princess Selena Gomez, as well as Hollywood heavyweight James Franco, and revels in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tom Watson, the Labour MP who played such an enjoyable role in stuffing Rupert Murdoch during the News of the World phone-hacking debacle, resigned last month as overseer of his party’s next election campaign. His parting letter to Ed Miliband ended not on the complexities of the ongoing squabble over who’d be the next MP for Falkirk, a tangled web which hastened his resignation, but with a musical tip. Watson suggested the Leader of the Opposition take a listen to rural Derbyshire duo Drenge. He called them “awesome”.It seems then, that the band have friends in high places, a notion enhanced Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In the video made to accompany “One Half”, Julianna Barwick meets her inner goddess in a deserted multi-storey car park. When she closes her eyes, everything that is ordinary melts away and is replaced by a landscape that is as colourful as the previous scene is monochrome.It is as good a visual metaphor as any for the sonic web spun by Barwick on this third full-length album, which is itself half a world away from the bedroom recordings that have characterised much of her work to date. For Nepenthe - a title which calls to mind the ancient Greek “drug of forgetfulness” used to wipe out grief Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It’s a shame God is dead” sings Jamie Lee on “So Long”, the opening track of his band Money’s debut album The Shadow of Heaven. With a melody rooted in gospel and a musical backdrop ecstatically imbued with the grace of the devotional rather than the level-headedness of the non-spiritual, it’s hard not to wonder whose God he’s singing of. The Shadow of Heaven feels reverential – the band have played in churches – but it’s an adoration fashioned on their own terms.The Shadow of Heaven also feels important, yet it’s an album where statements are made so elegantly that it's only when it’s over Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Sporting dreams and the Second World War are both bottomless narrative mines. German-Jewish high-jumper Gretel Bergmann’s attempt to compete in the German team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics unites these genres, but it’s no Hitler-era Chariots of Fire.Black American Jesse Owen’s Fuhrer-baiting victories are the ones we remember, but the injustice Bergmann suffered is equally symptomatic of the Reich’s early days, before its propaganda could be decisively driven home by dive-bombers and panzers. As Kaspar Heidelbach’s film begins, we find Bergmann (Karoline Herfurth) celebrating in a pub after Read more ...
joe.muggs
When I used to work for the much-missed Face magazine, there was a phrase regularly used, only half in jest: “three things is a trend”. Which means that, unlikely though it might sound, hip hop marching bands are now a trend in leftfield club music. First came the Hot 8 Brass Band, then the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, both from the projects of New Orleans, and both bringing a hip hop and funk sensibility to the generations-old brass tradition of that city – and now come the “peace-lovin' aggro dance” Riot Jazz Brass Band from Manchester, who regularly perform on stage with popular local rap/ Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I write as a listener and concerned citizen. It's 2013, the legends of dad rock are facing the death squad: no liquids, no solids, no chance, baby. There's something dead in the water and a new breed is feeding on the remains. Welcome to Deathcore, Screamo, Metalcore, whatever.Asking Alexandria come from Yorkshire. They're on their third album, on the Sumerian label (got to love the name), and the lynchpins are guitarist Ben Bruce and singer Danny Worsnop. They rock like men on three legs – crunching, stop-start, arhythmic, stuttering guitar riffs that sound as if they sprouted out of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Eddie Noack: Psycho – The K-Ark and Allstar Recordings 1962–69Eddie Noack’s 1968 single “Psycho” was virtually unknown until Elvis Costello released his cover version in 1981. By that time, Noack had been dead for three years. After its resurrection “Psycho” was recognised as one of the strangest songs ever. Although musically it is straight, George Jones-styled country, in its lyrics an unrepentant killer describes his actions to his mother – whom he had just killed. There was no redemption, no punishment, no pay off. Just the cold refrain “You think I’m psycho, don’t you mama?”“Psycho”, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s one thing to sound like an oldster recording back in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, it’s quite another to look the part. In the half-century rise of gym body hegemony and homogenous Barbie’n’Ken facial aspirations, normalcy of human appearance has slowly become regarded as offbeat. All those years ago, from Hollywood stars - Humphrey Bogart to Leslie Howard - and musicians - Hank Williams to Bing Crosby - they just looked like themselves, a certain gauntness, faces and bods that were characterful but far from sculpted. Pokey LaFarge could have sprung from the same era, hair slicked Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s black-and-white style aplenty in Štefan Uher’s The Sun in a Net, an elliptical look at a youthful boy-girl relationship that intermingles with a whole range of themes left open for the viewer’s interpretation. Heralding the better-known Czech New Wave and rather ignored in the aftermath of that movement, it earned opposition from the authorities in its time, but impresses today for its filmic rather than social edginess.It’s a story of young lovers and their families: Fayolo (Marián Bielik) and Bela (Jana Beláková) meet on the roof of their Bratislava apartment block, both to Read more ...