CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
Dido Armstrong’s first two albums are at numbers 19 and 29 in the UK’s all time best-sellers. The 41-year-old singer became an emblem of post-millennial dinner parties, of Bridget Jones-era singleton moping, and of post-electronica easy listening. Her success was massive but with it she became an easy target, mainly because she emanates Mogadon melancholy without emotional depth.OK I admit I loathe everything she put her hand to although I confess a soft spot for the chorus of “White Flag” – “I will go down with this ship/I won’t put my hands up and surrender/There will be no white flag upon Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Currently finishing off the NME Awards Tour with Django Django and Miles Kane, this lot seem about as New Musical Express as it gets. Which is to say that, from a cynics perspective, their NME championing is almost off-putting. Given the recent history of such promotions, they were liable to be yet another retrogressive indie unit whose guitar sound is indiscernible from their peers or, indeed, multiple bands of the last two decades. And it’s true, the music on 180, named after the Lambeth venue where they had a residency, could have been made at any point between now and 1980, perhaps Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jacques Audiard's follow-up to A Prophet (2009) is an off-centre but haunting piece derived from short stories by Canadian writer Craig Davidson. Marion Cotillard is Stéphanie, whom we first meet outside a nightclub on the Côte d'Azur where she has been involved in a drunken fracas. She's rescued by Ali (Belgium's Matthias Schoenaerts, from Bullhead), a bouncer, ex-kickboxer and petty criminal who's come to the coast with his young son Sam in search of some sort of existential last chance. He tells her she looks like a whore. She thinks he's a lunkheaded schmuck.It's unexpected Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s not much of a surprise that My Bloody Valentine have eventually followed up 1991’s Loveless. They’ve been playing live with increasing regularity, with the same line-up as back then. The way the new album has arrived – with no warning via a new website – isn't so surprising either. Despite the widespread co-opting of their sonic template, what is surprising is how much m b v sounds like My Bloody Valentine.Being confronted with the real thing is a jolt, putting the pretenders in the shade. m b v is as beautifully opaque and seductive as Loveless, sounding like nothing other than Kevin Read more ...
mark.kidel
Anaïs Mitchell is one of America’s leading new folk singers, a protégée of Ani di Franco. She is a poet steeped in the archetypes of Greek mythology, old stories that she has evoked in a contemporary setting, not least in her re-telling of the Orpheus myth, Hadestown.It is hardly surprising then that her latest album, made with Jefferson Hamer, should tap into the mother of all British American sources, the Child Ballads, a compendium of Scottish and English ballads, brought together in the 19th century by Francis James Child. These tales of love, death and sorcery are cousins of the Greek Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Family: Once Upon a TimeFamily were always difficult to place. This lavish box set doesn’t make getting a handle on them any easier. They were as idiosyncratic as Jethro Tull and, in Roger Chapman, had a vocalist as offbeat as Joe Cocker. Not that they sounded like either, more that their DNA was as sharp-edged as both. The Leicester-born band had roots in soul-pop outfit The Farinas and the psychedelic underground embraced them – they were integral to the 1969 novel Groupie, a lid-lifting, supposedly fictional, exposé of rock’s seamier side. Despite these leg-ups and their popularity, they Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Skyfall is the rarest of Bond films, dividing critics and wowing doubters with extraordinary cinematography and memorable theme tune. Nominated for five Oscars and eight BAFTAS (and winning two), it is the first Bond film to earn more than £1 billion at the global box office.People who may not see another film at the cinema for years will make an effort to see Bond, and the challenge to Mendes and Eon Productions was how to refresh a spy story for the 23rd time. Effectively a Bond reboot without rebooting the lead actor, director Sam Mendes took an intricate script by Bond regulars Neal Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In theory, it’s close to impossible to achieve some semblance of mainstream success without being decried as a sellout by at least a proportion of your fanbase. Yet I don’t think there was a Scottish indie music fan who greeted this week's news that Frightened Rabbit had scored a Top 10 chart place for their major-label debut without a mixture of pride and delight.It helps of course that on Pedestrian Verse, Selkirk’s most famous sons have stripped back the slight gloss of over-production that threatened to overwhelm 2010’s The Winter of Mixed Drinks. This fourth album sees Scott Hutchison’s Read more ...
howard.male
With BBC Four currently mourning the passing of the LP, it’s encouraging that some artists still like to confine themselves to the format’s time limitations and its implicit requirement that the songs etched into its silky surface should be connected by some kind of theme or mood.Nick Cave is one such artist, never more so that with this suite of nine darkly warm numbers that have been nurtured by him and his long-standing and (here anyway) remarkably restrained band. The Bad Seeds have always understood that the needs of the song outweigh the needs of individual musicians to do their thang, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Sally Potter has forged an admirable career as an independent British filmmaker. She has avoided formulas, made daring visual experiments, and been committed to a highly personal art cinema. Among her movies, there have been two dazzling achievements, The Gold Diggers and Orlando, and an audacious vanity project, The Tango Lesson.It’s arguable, however, whether Potter has developed as a muscular storyteller. Set in 1962 against the background of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Cuba missile crisis, her depiction of the collapsing friendship of 17-year-olds Ginger (Elle Fanning) Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Californian oddballs Camper Van Beethoven are best known for their strange song “Take The Skinheads Bowling” which established the group in 1985 and was re-popularised when used in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. With the exception of a sabbatical during the Nineties, when Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery had success with the more accessible Cracker, they’ve been lurking in the shadows of US alternative music ever since.Their unpredictable assaying of multiple musical styles, usually filtered through the prism of psychedelic folk punk, has given them solid cult status. La Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
To hear them tell it, Tegan and Sara have always been pop stars. It was harder to see a decade ago, sure, when they were spitting out spiky guitar anthems in matching pixie haircuts, but the roots were always there. That the twins’ seventh record drops the guitars so low in the mix as to render them almost inaudible in favour of bombastic electropop shouldn’t really be that much of a surprise - there were hints of it on 2009’s Sainthood, which itself came not long after they collaborated with DJ Tiesto.Thankfully, Heartthrob takes the majority of its cues from the synths and posing of a 1980s Read more ...