CDs/DVDs
Lisa-Marie Ferla
At the risk of coming over a bit Daily Mail, my, hasn’t she grown up? I refer not to the career management decisions that have seen the former Disney Channel star turned head Belieber handed dubious photoshoots and sexed-up roles in Harmony Korine films, but rather to the fact that on Stars Dance the just-shy-of-21-year-old sounds about 35.It’s a well-established pattern, so it’s hard not to be cynical: child star reborn with raunchy new image; a first video (featured below) replete with writhing, heavy breathing and lyrics with a suitably subjugated message despite the appearance of sexual Read more ...
joe.muggs
Drawing connections between the far margins and the relative mainstream always leaves you in a difficult position, as it invites judgement from different groups with very different criteria. And the duo of Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power put themselves in that position more than most.For all the outré edginess of their name, their occult imagery, their presentation of their music as 10-minute noise-drone epics and their claims to be “aggressive, malevolent, apocalyptic,” it was not as great a surprise as it might seem that they were selected by Danny Boyle and Underworld to soundtrack Read more ...
David Nice
How do you solve a problem like The Birth of a Nation? Do you admire the first part and turn away from the second (after all, the Germans screened The Sound of Music for years in a Nazi-free version ending with the marriage of Maria and Captain von Trapp)? Can you balance social, historical and aesthetic responses?My own were to admire every technique D W Griffith throws at the story-telling of the American Civil War as a fine, at times Tolstoyan interweaving of truth with the fiction of two families from north and south, only to throw in the towel at the flabbergasting rewritten history of Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Roma have always existed on the margins: by choice, as they are nomads, but also through prejudice, as they and their outsider status evokes the threat of the unfamiliar. The brilliant gypsy clarinet players of Istanbul, cousins of the virtuosi of klezmer and Balkan wedding music, have entertained at parties for centuries. The best known, Selim Sesler, Barbaros Erköse and Mustafa Kandarili, may be admirable musicians, but, anxious to please the bourgeoisie, they have tailored their native fury to the needs of the Turkish nightclub.The Turkish clarinet player Cüneyt Sepetçi is something Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Sophisticated Boom Boom!! – The Shadow Morton StoryWithout Shadow Morton, Amy Winehouse could not have made Back to Black. The songs the enigmatic sonic wizard wrote and produced for The Shangri-Las in the mid Sixties were integral to what made Back to Black tick. Amazingly, Sophisticated Boom Boom!! – The Shadow Morton Story is the first career-spanning collection of Morton’s work. For that alone, it would be, at the least, exciting. But with its massive, well-illustrated booklet, the involvement of and interviews with Morton – who died in February this year, before he Read more ...
joe.muggs
Somewhere round about 10 years ago the concept of “folktronica” settled down to become a relatively stable area of music. Fringe its appeal may have generally been, but it incubated some major talents who are still making great music, and for better or worse primed general music fans' ears for the sounds of folk and thus arguably laid the ground for the monstrous success of Mumford & Sons.This year has seen a subtle resurgence in the sound, with artists affiliated to the first wave of folktronica like Tunng, The Memory Band, Colleen and CocoRosie all making extremely fine albums. But Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It used to be said that singer-songwriting was one style of music that would never go out of fashion. In the past few years, however, a glut of insipid twanging – Ben Howard and James Morrison, hold up your hands – has been sending many dedicated music fans elsewhere. The common complaint is that a genre that once brought so much real soul-baring is now reduced to drippy navel-gazing. And this backlash is a real shame for Jon Byrne. He may sound, on occasion, a bit like Paolo Nutini but he’s considerably more interesting.But what makes Byrne intriguing is not necessarily what his record Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
“I hate these kids. Hate ‘em,” says Tanner (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a handsome, mature commando who wants to help a bunch of high school football players save America from, yes, a North Korean invasion in the 2012 remake of John Milius’ and Kevin Reynolds’ 1984 right-wing fightfest Red Dawn. Competently directed by second unit/experienced stunt coordinator Dan Bradley, Red Dawn was shot then shelved before being recut by the studio marketers. This means Red Dawn never had a chance to shine. Hence, it has little to recommend it in any department – not music, direction, makeup, production design Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There is something eminently smug and punchable about Robin Thicke. Born into a showbiz dynasty of US TV celebrities (media geek fact: his dad also composed the theme to Diff’rent Strokes), he appears to have lived a cossetted existence, writing slick, plastic sex songs for a multitude of stars from an early age while heavily involved in the epic artifice of TV talent shows. What’s not to loathe? Except that you don’t get signed to The Neptunes’ label or have Jay-Z work with you on the basis of dilettante dabbling. No, Thicke, punchable or no, can navigate his way around a pop song.His latest Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Watching Adam Stafford at work can only be described as magical. Thanks to his ingenious use of loop and effects pedals, the Falkirk-born songwriter can spin intricate, layered compositions using nothing but his voice and a couple of bars on guitar. At last week’s Glasgow launch show for his latest album, he ended the night with a ten-minute monster from Awnings, a 2009 experimental a capella album. Cue an audience literally stunned by a noise as wild and intense - and yet, as strangely controlled - as that from a full orchestra.It stands to reason that some of the immediate impact of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun was one of the few good news stories in Russian cinema in the Nineties. Made with his longterm scriptwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov, it picked up a main prize at Cannes in 1994 and the Best Foreign Film Oscar the following year. Its small Chekhovian story - adapted later by Peter Flannery for a successful run at London’s National Theatre - resounded far above its weight.Red Army hero-general Sergei Kotov (Mikhalkov himself, a fine actor, main picture) felt the chill winds of the Stalinist 1930s. The reappearance of Mitya (Oleg Menshikov), a friend now turned Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Like a child’s crude drawing of a crime they’ve witnessed, the cover image is of two adults: one female, one male. The female is bent forward, holding what looks to be an axe. Below waist height, the male is holding a linear object spewing something towards her. It may be a gun, it may be his penis. Phrases strew the image: “psychiatric shopping mall”; “I don’t think you should be around people”. Whatever’s inside the sleeve of Nadine Shah’s debut album isn’t going to be cuddly-wuddly tomfoolery.On Love Your Dum and Mad’s highlight “Runaway”, Shah sings “I still have that red silk dress, Read more ...