CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
How much suffering is it possible to take? Can suffering be depicted on film in a way which evokes its true depths? Is it possible to draw anything positive from a film that succeeds in capturing the essence of suffering? In short order: the human spirit can surprise; yes; yes. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc) is a film that still affects and has an ominous power, despite being silent, being made in 1928 and eschewing the overly demonstrative. It’s also strikingly timeless.Dreyer has been celebrated this year and the opportunity to assess the films Read more ...
joe.muggs
Well that's a shame. Little Mix were likable, talented winners of The X Factor – four times Everygirl in clashing neon, funky, funny, vulnerable but self aware. They proved repeatedly on the show that they could sing and then some, and even though they were a thrown-together group harmonised like they were sisters. Their most memorable turn, doing En Vogue's “Don't Let Go”, perfectly caught the beginning of the current wave of nostalgia for the great 1990s R&B girl groups, and when they won it felt like they could be an actual characterful pop band in the way the Sugababes and Girls Aloud Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It has a cracking cover, Example’s new album. Look at it above. A boy by a lake stretching his hands skywards, emanating untrammelled childhood freedom, contrasted with a festival crowd, innocence long gone, roaring for more. Example appears to be positing his conflicted status. It works well as a metaphor and the album covers the same territory.This is London pop rapper Elliot “Example” Gleave’s confessional fourth album, a loose concept piece where many songs are raw pleas, reeking of rehab speak. In essence, he bitterly regrets and abhors the way he let his idealised former girlfriend down Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Boris Barnet may not be as well known in film circles as his contemporaries Sergei Eisenstein or Alexander Dovzhenko, but his role in the first decade of Soviet cinema was no less important. What he lacks in the more pronounced experimentation of those two, he more than makes up in his depictions of the fabric of everyday life itself. His Outskirts of 1933 was one of the very first Soviet talkies, and followed on from Barnet's highly successful silent comedies. Its subject, however, was darker - this is the story how the beginning of World War I affects life in a small Russian Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s nigh on impossible to separate One Direction’s music from their horrid, grinny, showbiz persona or their gigantic success representing Palpatine Cowell’s Syco empire. This is especially the case if you’re a 45 year old music journalist rather than a 13 year old girl whose hormonal development has exploded through staring at posters of smouldering Zayn Malik (the sultry one!). One Direction are no more aimed at me – and quite possibly you if you’re over 16 - than is a day spent watching CBBC.That said, there are obvious benchmark musical comparisons to be made, notably with their boy band Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s been a bumper year for fans of Public Image Ltd. John Lydon took his new version of the band out on the road and issued the This is PiL album. His former PiL colleagues Jah Wobble and Keith Levene reworked the landmark 1979 PiL album Metal Box live, as Metal Box in Dub. Now, the duo have re-cemented their relationship with Yin & Yang, their first new work together since co-writing Gary Clail’s “Beef (How Low Can You Go?)” in 1990.The motives for these reunions and restatements of ownership are rendered moot by the forceful, and sometimes perplexing, Yin & Yang, an album which Read more ...
theartsdesk
Bill Withers: The Complete Sussex and Columbia AlbumsKieron TylerThis box set is several cuts above the usual major-label, no-frills cheapo collection gathering together a selection of an artist’s albums. Produced with evident care, it’s a superb tribute to a distinctive soul great. The clam-shell box contains Withers’ nine albums, originally issued between 1971 and 1985. Each disc comes in a card reproduction of the original album sleeve, even including a facsimile of the fold-out triptych cover to 1972’s Still Bill. Liner notes, annotation and a brief, newly written introduction from Read more ...
mark.kidel
Brian Eno’s latest is the musical equivalent of slow food: something to savour in a state of quietude and away from the stresses of accelerated time. The ambient genre of which he was a pioneer has, in other hands, drifted into a kind of quality Muzak, background music to soothe the nerves of restless devotees of speed. With a subtle palette of soft-edged keyboard and string sounds, laden with reverb, Eno manages to stop time, avoiding the inevitably predictable tropes of narrative development, and gently drawing the listener into the presence of the here and now.Brian Eno avoids the cosy Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Possessed by the spirit of his dead mother, a young man is driven to murder women who excite him sexually. Sound familiar? Director Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo) acknowledges his debt to Hitchcock by placing the mother in a rocking chair; there’s even a shower scene, yet Santa Sangre is far from being a remake of Psycho. First released in 1989, this ravishing visual feast is far weirder and more wonderful than that.Fenix (Jodorowsky’s handsome son Axel) is confined to a mental hospital. He thinks he’s a bird and, perched naked on a tree trunk, screeches mournfully. Then, in flashback, we Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Director David Cronenberg is his own enemy. His unforgettable remake of The Fly, Videodrome and many others, raised the bar so high that it is virtually impossible for him to satisfy his fans. With Cosmopolis, he comes very close.Robert Pattinson – more than a just telegenic face but an actor who will someday outlive Twilight – is Eric Paker, a handsome wealth-maker who decides to take his live-in limo to get a haircut, crosstown to his father’s old time barber – forget that there’s a meltdown riot outside. Like his performance in Bel Ami, Pattinson is perfectly cast as the ubermensch who has Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's sad, isn't it, that we still live in a world where the more something sounds like a great party, the less “serious” it is considered? Think about how much deep meaning is attached by how many to, say, the portentous mitherings of Thom Yorke, then try to imagine that degree of beard-rubbing analysis being given over to this non-stop blast of joyous grooves that have rocked festival stages, dance clubs and hip hop shows over the summer. Not gonna happen, is it?It's a shame, because there is so much depth in those grooves. Their rowdy, complex sonorities come out of the unbroken living Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Crystal Castles are a perverse and, consequently, exciting outfit. The Canadian duo of Ethan Kath and Alice Glass, producer and singer, front it out to their public in the manner of venom-fuelled nihilist industrial punks. At their concerts their music becomes a squall of noisy attack, the band encouraging riotous behaviour and Glass mutating into a snarling dervish. As interviewees they are the height of bored rudeness, especially Glass. It’s as if Crystal Castles wish they were Skinny Puppy or Ministry or someone truly gnarly, yet their lovely, doomy albums are in a whole different league Read more ...