CDs/DVDs
Karen Krizanovich
Snow White in silent Seville is glib shorthand for director Polbo Berger’s tasteful Blancanieves, a beautiful, quirky take on the recognisable fable. Nicely shot and well cast, this silent melodrama, shot in black and white, is not sweetness and light. It’s more gleaming Spanish gothic that will charm and shock, dismay and delight in equal measure.Daniel Giménez Cacho – the narrator for Alfonso Cuaron’s breakout Y Tu Mama Tambien - is wealthy, handsome bullfighter Antonio Villlalta. He’s the father of Snow White, whose story begins after a careless Kodak moment leaves the bullfighter Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This is a buoyant, likeable album but – to be dismal and pessimistic – maybe the moment has passed for The Polyphonic Spree. This would be a shame as they’re more interesting than 90 per cent of the wannabe guitar pop stars out there. However, a dozen years and four albums (five, if you include the Christmas one) into their career they appear no closer to catching on. Yes, It’s True is not a great deal different in quality or style from any of their previous albums. The band are experts in light psych-pop that beams out a benign smile and melodic warmth. This is no slight on their music, just Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Since the announcement that he is suffering from Alzheimer’s, the music industry has splashily paid tribute to Glen Campbell: a big celebration at the Country Music Awards, a lifetime achievement Grammy. Campbell himself went out on the road to make a more personal farewell. This album is clearly his last word. The title – See You There – invokes the religious faith that has worked its way into Campbell’s songwriting since he turned away for the unholy country trinity of drink and drugs and divorce.When Campbell was recording Ghosts on the Canvas in 2011, he also re-recorded the vocals for Read more ...
peter.quinn
Think of the ingredients you look for in a great jazz record – inspired, exploratory improv, the complete reinvention of standards, ear-catching arrangements, sonorities you've never heard before – and this new big band recording from Mike Gibbs delivers them all. By the bucketload.In a career that's spanned four decades, the 76-year-old composer, arranger and trombonist has worked and recorded with many of the music world's leading lights including Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, Joni Mitchell, Peter Gabriel, Kenny Wheeler and Django Bates. This latest addition to the Gibbs discography Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nilsson: The RCA Albums CollectionThe irony with Harry Nilsson is that despite being one of pop’s most distinctive and lauded songwriters, his two best-known singles were cover versions. In 1969 he hit the American and British charts with “Everybody’s Talkin’”, written by the ill-stared Fred Neil. Nilsson’s rendering was helped on its path by being featured in the film Midnight Cowboy. Then, in 1972, his interpretation of “Without You” topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. It was penned by Tom Evans and Pete Ham of the Beatles-propagated band Badfinger, both of whom would Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The prettiest-sounding album so far this year, the glistening Moon Tides evokes the ghostly atmosphere of The Cocteau Twins and the intimacy of Eighties melancholia fashioned by Liverpool’s Black. But it’s more than a revivalist album, since it’s firmly rooted on Earth and its melodies are fresh. Pure Bathing Culture are neither spaceheads nor nostalgists.Pure Bathing Culture are the Portland-based Daniel Hindman and Sarah Vesprille, a duo who have previously surfaced in Vetiver. The only sonic link between that incarnation and Moon Tides is the muzzy, Tango in the Night-era Fleetwood Mac Read more ...
Russ Coffey
No-one does slick, commercial folk music quite like the Americans. And there are few better examples than Barton Hollow, the Grammy-winning debut from Nashville's The Civil Wars: a record that most felt was pretty and smooth, if occasionally bland. This year’s release, however, was expected to be cooked from a slighty different recipe. It has been widely reported that Joy Williams and John Paul White can no longer stand the sight of each other. Many hoped that such conflict might have resulted in some chilli being added to the mix.However, that’s not quite how it turned out. At least not for Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In her recent book The Love-charm of Bombs, Lara Feigel explains how World War Two, and the Blitz in particular, elicited from Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Grahame Greene, Rose Macaulay, and Austrian émigré Hilde Spiel their fiercest passions and their finest novels. The war had the same effect on the visionary British documentarist Humphrey Jennings, who in the five years left to him after Germany’s defeat never reached the heights he’d scaled with Listen to Britain (1942), Fires Were Started (1943), and The Silent Village (1943).The concluding volume of the BFI’s exemplary trio of DVDs/Blu Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s been a few years and a handful of albums since Booker T Jones did the well-played heritage artist comeback thing, which has to be the only reason that Sound the Alarm has not been greeted with the hype you would expect. It’s his first on Stax Records, the Memphis label where Jones & the MG’s spent much of the 1960s as the house band, since 1962’s Green Onions.Paying homage to those roots, as well as building on the many intriguing collaborations Jones has been involved with throughout much of his long career, Sound the Alarm features contributions from a range of contemporary talent Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The latest album from blues veteran Buddy Guy is a must for air guitarists. At 77 years of age he fires out a double CD set, one’s Rhythm, the other Blues. Both sound similar in that the main feature is Guy’s extended solos and background fret-widdling over a boogie-rockin’, piano-tinklin’, good-time jam. It’s a retro and very American sound - in excelsis - performed by a long term expert who doesn’t need to break a sweat to nail it.Guy made his name in the late Fifties and early Sixties as the man who joined the dots between rock’n’roll and the blues. At live shows as early as 1958, despite Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Influencing Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity, director Andrei Konchalovsky’s underrated marvel Runaway Train is finally available on crisp Blu-ray: think masculine philosophy meets Alaskan wilderness in an existential thriller as exciting today as it was in 1985.Two convicts – Oscar “Manny” Manheim (Voight in an Oscar-nominated role) and the beautiful, irritating Buck McGeehy (Eric Roberts, also nominated for an Oscar) – flee an Alaskan high security prison. Only moments ahead of vindictive warden Ranken (John P Ryan), Manny chooses an ominous locomative (the forboding, box-like powerhouse EMD GP7, a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A disembodied, wispy female voice declares “this is not true”, the only emotion left a resignation so acute she may as well be contemplating her imminent demise. On Soft Metals’ “Tell me”, her deliberation is accompanied by electronic music drawing from the pulse Giorgio Moroder created for Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”, 20 Jazz Funk Greats-era Throbbing Gristle, French cold wave and the drifting vapourousness of the early Orb. On the next track, “When I Look Into Your Eyes”, she sighs “we all die”.Patricia Hall and Ian Hicks, the Portland-formed and now Los Angeles-based duo who operate as Read more ...