CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Although the collaboration between Jane Arden and Jack Bond was truly two-way, their films were wholly driven by a female perspective. They also evolved from Arden’s explorations into the nature of self and how external forces affect that. Yet instead of being a form of therapy, the Arden-Bond films are magical journeys blurring the boundary between the real and unreal.Separation (1967) has some mod-ish trappings: music by Procul Harum, visuals from light-show artist Mark Boyle and clothing from Ossie Clark. The character Jane (Arden herself) drifts through a world where she interacts with a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ry Cooder is an unpredictable quantity. He’s a prickly, opinionated old coot who doesn’t seem the type to pass a night in the pub with. He’d probably not get your jokes and moan about the Rolling Stones nicking his songs. His musical output is equally tricksy. For every fab film soundtrack (Paris, Texas, Southern Comfort, The Long Riders) or Buena Vista Social Club, there’s some less loveable tangential whim, such as his Buddy concept album, about a cat and a toad.However, there’s little doubt Keith Richards did find a golden seam of new songwriting via Cooder in the early Seventies, or that Read more ...
mark.kidel
James Yorkston, the very able singer-songwriter from Fife, is now on his fifth album for Domino. This comes hot on the heels of the reissue of his first and excellent release, Moving Up Country, which established him as one of the most talented artists in the crowded field of nu-folkies, musicians who have drawn inspiration from British folk traditions but worked the forms up in an imaginative and risk-taking way. James Yorkston’s well-crafted songs, swathed in atmospheric strings, and tinged with melancholy and mystery, are never far from “this strange country, with its strange old gods Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Kinks: The Kinks at the BBCKieron Tyler“Meet a group that recently came from nowhere to the top of the hit parade. A rhythm and blues outfit with long, shoulder-length hair and the strange name of The Kinks.” With that, Brian Matthew introduced The Kinks to BBC listeners on 19 September 1964. Two months later, Matthew declares the band “members of the shaggy set”. On being asked why they grow their hair so long, Ray Davies says that “girls go for it”. His brother Dave offers that girls are going kinky.Almost 50 years on, these off-the-cuff remarks are amongst the wealth of fabulous Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Electronic dance music is notorious for its multiple sub-genres and niche categorizations. One of the more obscure is a style known as "dark ambient" (or "darkwave"). Its micro-interest status is unsurprising since it combines lethargic downtempo with unsettling moodiness, hence it’s best suited to depressed darkened Winter bedrooms and bleak art-film soundtracks. That said, the best of it has a modern classical flourish that can be sonically exciting.Before the term “dark ambient” existed, Dead Can Dance were making it and, along the way, consolidating the reputation of 4AD Records. In the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Britain’s New Towns – constructed to address post-World War II housing shortages – were meant to be places of dreams. Modern amenities abounded. The clean lines of post-Le Corbusier architecture screamed “this is the future”. Yet there was no sense of community, more a sense of alienation for residents. That wasn’t an issue for on-message government agency the Central Office of Information, whose 1974 film New Towns painted them as places of wonder. Retitled A Dark Social Template, this ad for the miracles of concrete, bathrooms and a bank on your doorstep has been recast with a new Read more ...
howard.male
The North African desert blues, as played by Tuareg musicians like Tinariwen, may well be the most popular kind of “world music” amongst mainstream rock fans since South African township jive post-Paul Simon’s Graceland. However, this presents a problem in that it’s intrinsically a rather limited form and so there’s a risk that its audience may soon grow tired of those circling, intertwining guitars, that mid-tempo lope and those understated almost-spoken vocals that make up a typical song. So does this debut solo album from the one-time Etran Finatawa member bring anything new to the Tuareg Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Considering how over-stuffed Brooklyn is with music, south London’s Dignan Porch being issued by that locale’s super-hip Captured Tracks imprint smacks of coals to Newcastle. But they fit in a treat, sharing an outlook with Brooklynites Crystal Stilts and Frankie Rose, or label mates Wild Nothing and Holograms (who are Swedish). What this means is that Dignan Porch have taken a raft of Eighties indie rock - when it meant independent – influences from the pre-Grunge era, whizzed them up together to remake them afresh.The Chills, first album Dinosaur (before they added the Jr.), Sonic Youth ( Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Those familiar with Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s elegant political feature Il Divo (2008), or perhaps the beautiful, cynical The Consequences of Love (2004) may find themselves struck (pleasantly) dumb by the direction of his latest. Inspired by Lynch’s The Straight Story, This Must Be the Place takes its name from the Talking Heads track (with David Byrne providing original songs and popping up for a cameo). This curio sees Sean Penn’s mischievous goth rocker turn Nazi hunter, taking up his dead father’s mantle of revenge.Penn plays retired rock star Cheyenne, the sartorial twin of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The best music has the power to lift the listener out of whatever else she may be doing, to transport her somewhere else. I listened to Traces, fifth album from doyenne of Scottish folk Karine Polwart, in a cafe in Edinburgh in what for that city is the busiest month of the year. Outside it was raining and the pavements were crowded, but as the record expanded to fill my headphones there was space in my reality for very little else.That being said, Traces is an album that is firmly grounded in reality - whether it's the burning political issues of contemporary Scotland or the singer's own Read more ...
mark.kidel
Antony & the Johnsons’ melancholy songs of love and loss, steeped in a contemporary classical aesthetic, lend themselves to the full orchestral treatment. There is also something theatrical about the singer’s delivery, not so much high opera hysterics as more subtle explorations of the darker ranges of human emotion. Cut the World brings together live orchestral versions of a number of Antony’s best tracks drawn from his four studio albums. The title track alone is a new composition, featuring the artist’s signature sense of poetry, vocals whose quality of almost unbearable vulnerability Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Trojan Presents Freedom Sounds, a Celebration of Jamaican MusicKieron TylerThree-and-a-half minutes in, a heavily reverbed drum suddenly rattles and the track heads off into outer space. Morse-code bass dominates, the hi-hat swishes and odd bits of the full instrumental track waft in and out. Something like a home fire alarm bleeps. “None Shall Escape the Judgement” begins normally enough, a mid-tempo two-step reggae shuffler with a swooning, devotional vocal from Johnny Clarke. But really, it's two songs in one, that second half the creation of sonic auteur King Tubby and Read more ...