CDs/DVDs
peter.quinn
Truly an ensemble cast, the Wayne Shorter Quartet's playing on Without A Net - marking Shorter's return to Blue Note Records after 43 years - fuses disparate elements into something transcendent and utterly original. From the slow burn of “Myrrh” to the searching, high-velocity romanticism of “Starry Night”, two of six new Shorter compositions featured, the album takes small group music-making to another dimension. The uniquely collegial four-way dialogue has been developed since the quartet - Shorter plus pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade - first assembled Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Poetic restraint dominates Ligy J. Pullapally’s 2004 Kerala-set lesbian drama The Journey (Sancharram). Based on a true story of a relationship between two young women that ended in one's suicide (a conclusion that’s left open in the film), its opening symbol is a butterfly, and flight would indeed be the only escape for its schoolgirl heroines.It would be away to a city from the small town - which looks rural and idyllic, centred around the school from which both girls are due to graduate - where social pressures dictate that conventional family life must be adhered to. When the slow- Read more ...
joe.muggs
There are so many people ready to hate pop-rock-dubstep crossover band Modestep, and no wonder. They are good looking young men, taking what they want from whatever styles are around them, without any regard for cool or hipness. They make a massive racket full of screeching and crashing noises blended with cheesy melodies, which seems pretty much aimed at attracting girls and getting boys throwing themselves around like fools. They are, in short, everything old people have always hated about young people's music.If you want to hate them too, it's not difficult: there are some very crap bits Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
On first play No Selfish Heart, the solo debut from The Phantom Band’s stately baritone Rick Anthony, sounds a world away from the sonic experimentation often played out in the singer’s work elsewhere. Take the time to listen closely, however, and a collection that seems to take its cues from traditional folk songwriting reveals itself to be far more complex: beautiful, menacing and darkly comic.While it’s not uncommon for such solo efforts to be several years in the making, No Selfish Heart has had an even longer genesis than most - with some of this material from Anthony’s ‘Redbeard’ alter- Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Biffy Clyro's sixth album certainly wins in the value for money stakes. Opposites is a double album clocking in at 78 minutes which finds the Kilmarnock trio developing their big, expansive sound and getting to grips, both lyrically and musically, with their arena-bestriding status. It is bold, brash and exciting in places, but it also feels as if it is continuing the process of smoothing over the rough edges which made the band so interesting when they first emerged in the early noughties.It is easy to dismiss Biffy as part of the genus Hotelus Tidyupus – that well-mannered literate Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Director Ira Sach's autobiographical tale of Erick and Paul's 10-year relationship shows the passion and destruction that can occur in any relationship. Here, we follow the decade of ups and downs that happen between documentary filmmaker Erik (Thure Lindhardt) and his attorney boyfriend Paul (Zachary Booth) as drug addiction takes its toll.Shot in crowded city spaces and cafes, the drama closely follows Sachs' own relationship with literary agent Bill Clegg (whose memoir was published last year). What may shock is how lives can be changed by a chance meeting on the way to the subway. Sachs, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When Mancunian trio Delphic appeared a couple of years back they said all the right things. They were modest about themselves but fiercely into the music, acknowledged their home city’s heritage but were keen not to use it as a tacky profile raiser, and they also adhered to an appealing and faintly Kraftwerk-ian deadpan visual aesthetic. The music on their debut album, Acolyte, however, while spirited and a blast in concert, had a job creeping out from under the shadow of New Order. It charted, nevertheless, and the band built a sizeable following.This time, in the wake of their song “Good Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The last proper Ulrich Schnauss album – there have been collaborations and pseudonymous outings since – was going to be hard to top. Goodbye, released in 2007, breathtakingly took shoegazing further out than ever before: although gossamer, its sonic depth inexorably pulled you in. Now, with A Long Way to Fall, the Berlin producer and remixer has finally returned, solo, under his own name. He’s moved on, but is as assured as before.Some of the collaborations between then and now took Schnauss into techno and drum & bass, elements of which cross over into A Long Way to Fall. Initially, the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
A confession: for much of this debut album from London fuzz-pop fivesome The History of Apple Pie, I have little to no idea what vocalist Stephanie Min is on about. Sweet and half-whispered, floating above crunchy bass and tuneful guitar riffage, it’s almost as if her vocals are there for effect rather than having something to say.But it’s not like contemporary pop is underrepresented by sloganeering and cheesy rhyming couplets, and when the music is this good who cares? Ten giddy teenage anthems thudding to earth packed with lust, heartache and the need to dance all night, Out of View is a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hawkwind: Space RitualAlthough it was released 40 years ago, Space Ritual sounds contemporary. Hawkwind’s repetition, simplicity and single-minded focus effectively created trance-inducing mantras. Now, they cast a shadow over Six Organs of Admittance, Om and other voyagers into inner space. Space Ritual was a statement of intent and there’s no excuse not to get this reissue should your life lack one of British art-rock’s supreme achievements.In its original form, Space Ritual was a double album with a spectacular fold-out sleeve designed by the late Barney Bubbles. It was recorded live – it Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Punky young girl needs a middle aged man/ Whose mid-life crisis you began/ …such a work of art…lift up your skirt, let me lick the alphabet/ …what’s under there? I hope to Christ it’s lingerie.” The voice is sinuous, cajoling. The creepy, ridiculously catchy Kate Moss-inspired “Punkyoungirl” immediately grabs the attention on the former dandy highwayman’s first album since 1995. Along with “Stay in the Game”, a spindly, eerie dirge which could have been in Adam and the Ants' repertoire circa 1977/78, it revisits an era when whips were withdrawn from the valise.Adam Ant is the Blueblack Read more ...
mark.kidel
Aaron Neville’s ache-soaked voice was nourished by the romance of doo-wop tearjerkers and late 1950s black rock’n’roll: the Drifters, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters and other silken-toned purveyors of proto-soul. It’s hardly surprising that he should record an album that recreates the glory of repertoire classics such as “Money Honey”, “Under the Boardwalk", “Bye Bye Baby” and other much-covered hits of an era whose innocence we have definitively left behind.Neville’s signature success, “Tell it Like it Is”, demonstrated how much mid-'60s soul owed to an Read more ...