CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Public Image Ltd: Public Image – First Issue“I’d like to kill Jimmy Savile, I think he’s a hypocrite. I bet he’s into all kinds of seediness that we all know about, that we’re not allowed to talk about. I know some rumours.” This bombshell comes 46 minutes into the hour-long interview on the bonus disc of this reissue of the debut album by Public Image Ltd, John Lydon's post-Sex Pistols combo. Recorded for the BBC in October 1978, it was edited for broadcast.It’s hardly surprising the former Johnny Rotten had strong views, but the real eye-opener is that this outsider figure – then such Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is not an easy record to get a handle on. When I first got it, I bounced through a couple of tracks idly, and it felt like it was coming from the messy genre fusions of the mid-90s – somewhere between trip-hop, indie-dance, rap-rock and mildly crusty festival-dub. There are growling guitars, indie-rock basslines, anthemic reggae horns, and frontman Joshua Idehen's voice, which lies somewhere between rapper, poet, singer and orator, all making it sound like a livelier take on Tricky, or maybe Roots Manuva fronting a rock band.But idle listening is not enough for this record. For one thing Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe's twelfth studio album sounds strangely familiar. I thought for a moment they had already released an album with the same title and then I realised that I was thinking of the Tennant/Johnny Marr/Bernard Sumner collaboration Electronic. There is definitely an air of deja vu about Electric though. But in a good way. Sorry, make that a great way.This is certainly an improvement on their last album, Elysium. If that was all about end-of-an-era melancholy, there are no such comedowns here. From the Moroder-ish opener "Axis" through to the forthcoming single "Vocal Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There is a burgeoning of Scottish films that refuse to romanticise the Highlands and islands. Writer-director Scott Graham’s feature debut Shell does not satirize the capitalistic exploitation of the nation's heritage culture as do several of the movies directed by Ken Loach and written by Paul Laverty. However, the braes and mountains surrounding Shell's single location, a remote petrol station by a loch, have a bleaker and more implacable presence than is usual in Scottish cinema. Yoliswa Gärtig's spare, wintry cinematography makes no concessions to pictorialism or iridescence Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Darren Hayman isn’t a chap who stands still. The former Herfner frontman’s last-but-one album, Lido, was a series of mood-music compositions inspired by open-air swimming pools. In 2011 came The Ship’s Piano, a collection of piano pieces. Rather than being a follow-up to his most recent album The Violence, Bugbears complements it. While researching East Anglia’s Civil War-era witch trials for The Violence, he was compelled to dig further into the 17th and 18th century’s songs. Bugbears is the result.Instead of being a straight folk album, or even trying to recreate the sound or ambience of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Every so often, an album comes along that reminds you why you love the medium: not because it’s a simple collection of individual songs, no matter how good they are, but because it’s a carefully curated statement of artistic intent. Taken individually Emily Barker’s clear voice and pretty melodies are pleasant enough, but what sets her fourth album apart is its immersive flow.It’s there right from the album’s seductive opening notes: Barker, close to unaccompanied, intoning the album’s title and opening words; crooning and cajoling the “dear river” to lead her away from her Australian Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
For the child who wants to see everything, Japanese anime Studio Ghibli’s Blu-ray double bill of 1989’s Kiki’s Delivery Service and 1988’s Grave of the Fireflies – called one of the saddest movies ever made – brings a fresh truckload of emotion. Based on novels, both films are award-winners pivotal in the history of Japanese animation. In Kiki’s Delivery Service (aka Witch’s Delivery Service) a young witch, according to custom, spends one year in another town surviving on her own magic. Grave of the Fireflies tells the harrowing tale of a young boy and his younger sister in the harsh climate Read more ...
joe.muggs
The part-Japanese Brit Maya Jane Coles displays elaborate asymmetric hair, interesting piercings and enormous tattoos in her moody photoshoots, makes sounds that are uniformly smooth and high-gloss, and has a sonic palette that takes in populist trance, chillout and straight-up pop music as well as more nerd-cred underground sounds. And in an era of techno that's been dominated by Berlin-centric cosmopolitanisms – by sophisticated internationalist crowds with creative haircuts and intricately-knotted scarves as well as sometimes tediously tasteful musical minimalism – it'd be very easy to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
What’s the point of Harry Connick Jr in a world where Michael Bublé exists? Twenty years ago Harry Connick Jr was the Bublé of the day. He was among the first to run a comprehensive and commercially successful update of swingin’ Sinatra schtick, adding youthful sex appeal. Suave, good looking and a charmer, he also had other strings to his bow. An easy presence as an actor – which led to a parallel career on TV and on Broadway – has been matched by a connoisseur’s appreciation of jazz. The latter led to an interest in the musical history of his native New Orleans, resulting in a number of Read more ...
mark.kidel
Mavis Staples keeps on comin': with a contralto voice soaked in gospel and soul, she delivers consistently heart-warming music.This is her second collaboration with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, a rocker with enough knowledge and taste to create a contemporary ambience in which Mavis can deliver classics such Washington Phillips’s spine-chilling religious classic “What are They Doing in Heaven Today” alongside Funkadelic’s secular lament “Can You Get to That”.Mavis grew up under her father’s musical and spiritual guidance: Pops was a Mississippi man, from the same plantations that gave us Charley Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The youngest of the seven children officially fathered by 1908-16's liberal Prime Minister, the writer-director Anthony Asquith was a socialist who wore a blue boiler suit on the sets of his films. If that was a gesture of solidarity with his crew’s gaffers and grips and the British working class generally, it carries over into the second of his four silent films, Underground, a light romantic-triangle melodrama that morphs unexpectedly into a cruel thriller and culminates in a vertiginous chase.Asquith appears to pluck three of his four main characters at random from the hoi polloi packing Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Being assigned to review Editors on the Other Stage at Glastonbury 2007, when Shirley Bassey was on the main Pyramid, was not a good way to consolidate my already fragile critical relationship with the Brummie quartet. Their music pushed my mind to predictable comparisons, ones many had drawn before – Joy Division, notably. Thus I avoided them from thereon, left them alone and they left me alone, going on to sell millions of albums of gloom-flecked indie, tinted with a – to my ears, rather unsatisfying - smidgeon of electronics.Now their fourth album arrives bearing possible good news (at Read more ...