CDs/DVDs
peter.quinn
The CD booklet note by NASA astrobiologist Daniella Scalice is just the first of many striking features on this third Basho CD by the Mercury Prize-nominated pianist Kit Downes. Joined by his core trio of bassist Calum Gourlay and drummer James Maddren (both fellow alumni of the Royal Academy of Music), plus reeds player James Allsopp and cellist Lucy Railton, Light From Old Stars sees Downes really getting into his compositional stride.With rippling arpeggiations on the piano strings and icy harmonics in the cello, album opener “Wander and Colossus” ushers you into the album's singular sound Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
While it’s impossible to recreate the impact of their astounding first Sixties sally, it’s still a thrill when a new album appears bearing the name “Stooges”. Punk’s ragged-arsed Detroit progenitors first popped up again in 2007 with visceral live shows but a lacklustre album, The Weirdness. Since then original guitarist Ron Asheton has died and, in a strange mirror to history, James Williamson, guitarist on 1973's classic Raw Power, has returned to the fold (following a 30 year career in engineering management!)For fans who dared to hope, it’s good rather than great news. This isn’t an Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s hard to imagine that anyone on earth has yet to see Ang Lee’s four-times Oscar-winning Life of Pi, the sensational SFX adventure based on Yan Martel’s hitherto unfilmable spiritual classic. But, along with Skyfall, there are reasons why anyone would want to own a film they’ve already seen at least once: it’s a visuall -soothing if existentially unsettling portrait of trauma and loss told by a master storyteller.Suraj Sharma stars as Pi Patel, a young man shipwrecked while immigrating to Canada with his family and the family zoo. Whether he survives in mid-ocean depends on the actions of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Gainsbourg-Birkin dynasty is akin to a gift that keeps on giving. Just when it appears to be dormant, another member of the extended family reveals a new role. Lou Doillon, daughter of Jane Birkin and film director Jacques Doillon, is best known as a model and actress. Last September her debut album, Places, was released in France and its belated arrival over here is sure to make a few waves. Hopefully not because of who she is, but due to it being first-rate.With Places, Doillon is some way ahead of half-sister Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose albums are written by others. All the songs are Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Art Ensemble of Chicago: A Jackson in Your House/Message to Our Folks/Reese and the Smooth OnesA New Orleans brass band plays a death march. What sounds like a saucepan is tapped steadily. The music suddenly dives into swing. A bicycle horn parps. A group of muttering voices are agitated. Reed instruments parp like angry parrots. Someone grunts and hollers. A trumpet signals a fanfare. Bells tinkle. Sonny Rollins appears to wander in and out. So does Ornette Coleman. The whole is arrhythmic, but bedded by percussion. Melodies come and go in the same piece, but are never repeated.The Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Frank Turner has been setting his life to music ever since he re-emerged as a heart-on-the-sleeve singer-songwriter type some time in 2005, and so it’s hard to avoid the temptation to play therapist when considering his most personal collection of songs to date. Tape Deck Heart, his fifth album since then, is more love and loss than love and ire.It’s been billed as a breakup album so it’s not surprising that loss of the romantic kind features right from the opening track. On first listen, “Recovery” comes across as upbeat indie-rock-by-numbers but its jaunty chorus and effervescent wordplay Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On the cover of Bye Bye 17, Har Mar Superstar – the creation of musician Sean Tillman – is still wearing his infamous underpants. Inside, however, his music has moved on. By trading Har Mar's former Prince stylings for influences ranging from Sam Cooke to Curtis Mayfield, Tillman has found a whole new sound palette to play with. And he's getting completely stuck in.This change of direction makes for a riotously entertaining listen, and a very satisfying one too. Behind Tillman’s personas – he also performs as Sean Na Na and with the “alternative supergroup” Gayngs – there has always been Read more ...
Graham Fuller
British film noir followed two courses in the 1980s. Whereas the American neo-noir revival of the 1970s prompted such contemporary crime thrillers as The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa, and Stormy Monday, three superior BBC drama serials, though also neo-noirs, drew more rigorously on Hollywood’s classic noir era.Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness (1985) and Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986) were acknowledged as masterpieces. Howard Brenton’s Dead Head (1986) was admired but not lauded to the same extent. The red tops’ predictable reaction to a sex scene that showed the woman Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s too obvious just to take the Canadian charm-monkey down in a bile-fest, so where to begin? He looks a bit peaky on the album cover and peakier still on the first page of the CD insert booklet (not that anyone under 40 listens to CDs). He’s lost weight. He used to be chubbier with a hint of that blank-eyed M.O.R.-damaged look which Daniel O’Donnell perfected and which grannies adore. Bublé was never just a geriatric sex daydream, though. His easy, TV chat-show demeanour is beloved of a much wider range of women, young and old. There, rather than his music, lies the secret of his success. Read more ...
bruce.dessau
When I suggested reviewing Ian McCulloch's new album, our glorious editor was under the impression that it was just a live collection of ancient tracks. It is actually a double album – mainly old Bunnymen beauties on the self-explanatory Orchestral Reworkings from the Union Chapel plus a newish studio album,Pro Patria Mori, which had a low-key release in 2012 funded by fans. An understandable misunderstanding, as even the press release foregrounds the live album. Whatever Ian McCulloch's future holds, it is probably his illustrious early Eighties past that will be of most interest to his Read more ...
graham.rickson
The author B S Johnson would have been 80 this year. An accessible "experimental" writer, cheekily described by the author Jonathan Coe as “Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde of the 1960s”, he’s best remembered for The Unfortunates, a book in which the chapters can be shuffled and read in random order. Johnson also took film making very seriously and a peek into his British Library archive shows the level of care and detail with which his film projects were planned – every camera angle and frame painstakingly prepared.Which is surprising when one watches the most entertaining item here: Read more ...
joe.muggs
Some 20 years ago, a series of albums called Artificial Intelligence on WARP Records aimed to promote techno as home-listening music. They made up a frequently sublime collection, but unfortunately the word “intelligence” in their title was picked up by a movement through the 1990s that became known, horrendously, as “intelligent dance music” (IDM) and tended to the belief that intricacy and awkwardness made music somehow superior to that made with more sensuous or hedonistic aims in mind.Thankfully, in the wake of dubstep in the 2000s, the experimental and the danceable began to overlap Read more ...