CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
There was a common theme to overheard discussions about Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit. Whether in cinema doorways, school playgrounds or pubs, the consensus seemed to be that it laid out Tolkien’s tale in a suitably epic fashion and was no less a feat than the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And yet, and yet… because we’d seen it all before – the silhouetted convoy traipsing over pan-shot New Zealand landscapes, the wizards, orcs and elves - because we’d seen it all before the experience was unexpectedly anticlimactic. Thus it is with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s seventh album. It does what it does Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For all the brilliance of its leads – Jean-Louis Trintignant back in the cinema after many years, Emmanuelle Riva cruelly pipped for an Oscar – it’s easily forgotten that Amour is a zeitgeist film. As the First World’s population ages, narratives of old age are starting to grow on trees. The difference is that Michael Haneke’s resounding chamber piece about fractured geriatric identity is not in the business of saccharine consolation.A romance set in the deep midwinter of a married couple’s final years, Amour watches pitilessly as Georges and Anne – refined equals in intellect and taste – Read more ...
bruce.dessau
If you want a jolting snapshot of how British pop culture has changed in the last three decades, take a look at the clip below of Billy Bragg singing "Between The Wars" on Top of the Pops in 1985. Even if the old Savile-anchored singles showcase was still around, can one imagine a contemporary singer having a mainstream hit with such a political song today? It makes you want to despair.Billy Bragg's 13th studio album, Tooth & Nail, seems to suggest that he is similarly troubled by the modern world. Despite their constant threat of nuclear annihilation, somehow the mid-Eighties suddenly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Del Shannon: The Complete UK Singles and More (1961-1966)The plaintive, urgent drama of Del Shannon’s debut single, 1961’s “Runaway”, will always identify him. But amazing 45s like 1965’s crunching “Break up” and the ferocious garage-punk of “Move it on Over” show that there was more to the Detroit stylist than his calling card. This well-presented collection of his early singles – all heard in pristine fidelity, unlike the raft of budget comps available – reveals that Shannon was constantly evolving but hampered by what surrounded him.Shannon was a singer-songwriter before such a label was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
How John Grant would follow up 2010’s universally celebrated Queen of Denmark was a knotty dilemma. He could have settled into his role as the aberrant, self-lacerating, depression-fuelled, potty mouthed descendant of Lionel Ritchie and Eric Carmen. Instead, his new album takes him into new territories which again attests to his status as a singer/writer with no peers.Pale Green Ghosts builds on the John Grant we know with “Vietnam”, “It Doesn’t Matter to Him”, “You Don’t Have To” and “Glacier”, all of which he has performed live over the past few years. Any of them could have slotted onto Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Over 30 years, Bon Jovi has remained one of the more cartoonish fixtures in soft rock. With characteristic lack of irony, the boys from New Jersey have perfected the art of singing nonsense - my favourite example is "someday you tell the day / by the bottle that you drink" - with straight faces. Now, they’re getting more ambitious. What About Now is being touted as a “big rock record full of social commentary". Its subject is Obama’s America. How odd then that half of it sounds a bit like the Stereophonics.Still, it’s not all bland, anthemic, stadium rock. The lead single, “Because We Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Master is one of several remarkably challenging epics which have somehow been financed in 21st-century Hollywood. Like Tree of Life, Synecdoche New York (also starring Philip Seymour Hoffman) and There Will Be Blood (also written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson), it attempts a fractured, literary grab at the American soul. The Master’s calamitous box-office means it might be the last.Joaquin Phoenix returns to acting after the career-immolating performance art of I’m Still Here as Freddie Quell, a dislikeable World War Two vet on the run from the post-war US dream, and everything Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Devendra Banhart has never been afraid to push boundaries and mix genres. Still, of all the ways the once-prolific songwriter could have chosen to return, releasing a dance album is surely one of the least likely.It’s why “Golden Girls” - the dense, brief opener to the Venezuelan-American songwriter’s Nonesuch Records debut and first album in four years - is so surprising, with its repetitive “get on the dancefloor” refrain. The track is so ambiguous it could lead the rest of the album in any direction: in fact it leads to “Daniel”, the sort of ponderous, lo-fi waltz that wouldn’t seem Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Straight out of Dumfries, Mull and Inverness, via Edinburgh, with a sound and songs that boast originality and imagination, Homework are small in profile but already nigh-on perfectly formed. Their name, judging from the album cover and sounds within, is a nod to Kraftwerk, but 13 Towers is no retro synth-fest.This four-piece combine electronic effects, pulses and tones with guitars and modern, driving, catchy songs. Not for them, either, the currently in-vogue Vampire Weekend-with-a-synth route. Theirs is not bland indie with slight electronic trimmings. Instead they draw on all sorts of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Stereophonics’ meat’n’potatoes Brit-rock is very easy to knock. So here goes. No, only kidding. Well, sort of kidding. The Welsh band were a fixture of the charts from the late Nineties until relatively recently. Initially punted hard as the first signing to Richard Branson’s V2 label, they rode out the arse end of Brit-pop and, in “Have a Nice Day”, made one of those songs that's irritatingly purpose built for ads and TV montages. Four years since parting ways with V2 after an underperforming album, they appear with the follow-up, their eighth, which occasionally spikes their usual lumpen Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The spirit of Glasgow has never been better caught on screen than in two movies local director Charlie Gormley made in the Eighties. His Heavenly Pursuits from 1986, starring Tom Conti and Helen Mirren, may be better known, but Living Apart Together, from four years earlier, is a low-key delight that knows how to steal the heart.Singer BA Robertson plays Ritchie Hannah, a Scottish singer-musician whose success has taken him far from home territory (Robertson provides the film's music, except for a closing title track by Carol Kenyon). Touring has Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Blue Öyster Cult: The Columbia Albums CollectionBlue Öyster Cult were about more than the music. They seemingly arrived fully formed with a ready-made mythos and mystery. Their first two albums had no pictures of the band and weird, Escher-esque art. Their symbol, an inverted hybrid question mark and cross, suggested they were in thrall to a shadowy cult. Song titles like “Cities on Flame With Rock ‘n’ Roll”, “7 Screaming Diz-Busters” and “Career of Evil” fostered the impression they were zeal-filled revolutionaries. Their third album, issued in 1974, included a track called “ME 262” and Read more ...