CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Who’s That Man – A Tribute to Conny PlankThe list of acts Konrad Plank worked with is a Hollywood Walk of Fame of Krautrock. As an engineer or producer he was behind seminal albums by Neu!, Cluster, Harmonia, La Düsseldorf and Kraftwerk. From outside Germany, Ultravox and Eurythmics came to him. Later-blooming locals like DAF sought him ought. Naturally, Brian Eno was around, both collaborating with Plank and bringing Devo to his studio to complete their first album. As the liner notes of this four-CD box set note, Plank turned U2 down, something Eno did not.Plank died Read more ...
Russ Coffey
As with the likes of Sia Furler or Nerina Pallot, Ron Sexsmith’s songs always seem to outperform him. “Secret Heart” did Rod Stewart proud, Feist regularly plays “Brandy Alexander", and he has even offered Justin Bieber a tune. Yet despite Sexsmith’s Tin Pan Alley skills, his shabby schoolboy looks and limited vocals make his own albums mainly connoisseur items. His new offering, Forever Endeavour, is unlikely to buck that trend. Still, it’s chock full of beautifully crafted, thoughtful songs.The keynote here is soft Seventies country-rock. There are twangy guitars, strings and horns aplenty Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's difficult to categorise Benh Zeitlin's feature debut, which is engaging and flawed in equal measure. Part drama, part dream-like experience, it was made as a riposte to the catastropically poor management of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.We don't know when this story is set, though; it could be modern-day or it could be just as easily in a post-apocalyptic future when climate change is wreaking havoc in the bayous of southern Louisiana, whose strange beauty the camera lingers on in several scenes without drama or dialogue.It's set in a wetland area called the Bathtub by its poor and Read more ...
joe.muggs
If you listened to the last archived Arts Desk Radio Show you'll have heard me play a couple of tracks from this, and it was all I could do not to play more. As so often I'd gone into the studio with the previous couple of days' post pile and started picking through it for CDs to play. Usually this is a faff involving flicking through tracks and hoping one will jump out, but as soon as this one went into the machine, every single track got a tick by its name.The name Fimber Bravo meant nothing to me and I hadn't read the press release to find out the provenance of the album, but the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s a certain kind of melodic post-millennial metal band where the songs seem to be merely a process of ritualistic, firmly fixed reference points. From Avenged Sevenfold to Bring Me The Horizon and thousands more, gargle-shouted thrash vocals and juddering - but supremely over-produced - hardcore guitars are interspersed with howled, harmonised choruses. It’s a formula that ostensibly roars yet is actually pristine clean, lacking dirt, grit or punk venom. It rarely wanders from a well-beaten path. Welsh four-piece Bullet For My Valentine have done very well out of it, multi-millions in Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Years before Cleopatra (1963), Richard Burton played an orphaned shopkeeper in a quaint melodrama. It was his film debut. The Last Days of Dolwyn is written and directed by Emlyn Williams, a fellow Welshman, who gave Burton his first stage role in 1944. In Dolwyn, out five years later, Burton is magnetic.The film zooms in on a Welsh village under threat from English gentry planning to supply Liverpool with water and flooding the area in the process. Burton seems awkward at times, but lends a rich complexity to his sensitive and volatile character, Gareth. Read more ...
mark.kidel
Toumani Diabaté is the uncontested star of the Malian kora, but his Bamako neighbour Ballaké Sissoko is a close rival. His natural modesty, reflected in the coolness of his musicianship, has prevented him from acquiring the international status of Diabaté, but what he lacks in worldly ambition is amply compensated by an unassuming yet heart-warming spirituality.At Peace is in some ways a sequel to Chamber Music, the award-winning album Sissoko made with the versatile French cellist Vincent Ségal. Ségal, the producer of the new CD, has avoided merely serving up Vol. 2. This time around, the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Marcos Valle: Marcos Valle/Garra/Vento Sul/Previsão do TempoIn 1968, having already done time in Sérgio Mendes & Brazil 66, Marcos Valle was selling bossa nova and samba to America, appearing on The Andy Williams Show in a blazer and roll neck. By the year’s end he was back in Brazil, which at the time was ruled by a fully-fledged dictatorship. Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil would go into exile but Valle wilfully chose the opposite path. His music and appearance changed: the former moving away from popular Brazilian styles and incorporating outside influences; the latter becoming Read more ...
bruce.dessau
"Gonna shake the house," rasps Mark 'E' Everett on "Bombs Away". It is the first track of his tenth album and it certainly sounds like a statement of intent. Everett has often come across as something of a gloomy rock and roll runt in recent years, but this time around the worm appears to be turning and he ain't taking any cotton-pickin' nonsense any more.It is pleasing to note that the lyrics definitely have a gutsy, defiant optimism about them, albeit alongside Everett's usual misery: "watching the death of my hopes", he sings on the Johnny Cash-tinged, countrified sob story "On the Ropes Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dagenham MC Devlin, who initially made a name for himself on the London grime scene, has often been called the British Eminem. This would, at first appear, to be a rather trite assessment, down to his being a talented white guy at the heart of a black scene, but on further inspection it holds a certain amount of water.The 23-year-old’s second album, following 2010’s amusingly titled Bud, Sweat and Beers, showcases pop suss, a tendency towards the operatic, a theatrical sense of self-mythologising melodrama, and dense, aggressive, pithy verses interspersed with melancholic, melodic choruses. Read more ...
mark.kidel
Joe Wright’s screen adaptation of Tolstoy’s giant of a masterpiece, scripted by Tom Stoppard, takes a big risk that pays off: the many-layered late 19th-century novel is stripped to its bare bones with astonishing brio. He sets most of the story in a theatre, playing with the illusion created by a proscenium arch and the mirrored worlds of audience and stage. On paper, the whole thing sounds absurdly gimmicky, but Wright has a feel for both literature and cinema and his translation of a cherished classic into a piece of dazzling film works wonders with a genre that often drains literary Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Thao Nguyen is a versatile lady. Nearly two years on from her blissful, tUnE-yArDs-produced collaboration with indie songwriter Mirah, this third album with her own band the Get Down Stay Down brings her back to her exuberant, experimental roots. From the title track’s bouncy rallying cry to the softly-spoken duet with Joanna Newsom at the album’s mid-point, We The Common would be a boundary-pusher for most acts. For Nguyen, it’s just another day at the office.Inspired by her first visit to Valley State Prison through her involvement with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, “We The Read more ...