CDs/DVDs
Lisa-Marie Ferla
GAGGLE (n.): According to the Oxford Dictionary the collective noun for a flock of geese - or, less formally, a disorderly group of people - actually finds its root in the noise that a goose makes. It’s a fact that raises a smile as one attempts to create a back story for Deborah Coughlin’s 21-member all-female choir, as they stare out from the mysterious, brightly-coloured promotional shots with black eyes and tightly-set, blue-painted lips.The bird references carry over to From the Mouth of the Cave; whether in the form of titles, sound effects or a perfectly-choreographed cacophony Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There seems to be a perverse trend among bands these days to give themselves names that render them near-invisible to the modern search engine. Hot on the heels of US boy duo Girls comes BOY, a pair of Hamburg-based female voices whose infectious hooks and rapturous harmonies have already caused a bit of a stir in their native Germany and Switzerland – as well as on YouTube, to the tune of about four and a half million views.The duo take on harmonious ground already well-tread by the likes of First Aid Kit and American sister duo the Pierces, infusing it with unexpected instrumental twists at Read more ...
fisun.guner
Fresh from the final Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe plays a grieving widower with a four-year-old son in this truly spine-tingling adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 gothic horror novel. Produced by the newly resurrected Hammer Films, written by Jane Goldman and ably directly by James Watkins, the film dispenses with the framing narrative device familiar to the genre, in which the story is related some time after the event. Instead we plunge straight in with our encounter with Arthur Kipps, the young solicitor sent up from London to a bleak coastal town to sort out the affairs of the recently Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The moment you reach “I Call This Home”, the third track of Saint Saviour's debut album, it’s obvious this is an album to stick with. A pulsing rhythm beds guitars that reverberate like vintage Cure. The voice is quavering, anguished. Then it opens up. Suddenly driving and tense, the dramatic, shimmering song sounds like an anthem in waiting – albeit one with a maverick sensibility akin to that of Fever Ray, Goldfrapp and Marc Almond. It fits that Saint Saviour has played live with Hurts.Saint Saviour is Becky Jones. Formerly with the electropop outfit The RGBs, she then sang with and fronted Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Apparently Cheryl Cole is now “the nation’s sweetheart”. These days that doesn’t mean broadcasting sung radio support to a besieged island while the Nazis plot our demise 21 miles across the English Channel. No, instead, all it requires is smiling dutifully behind the gnome-like ancient Queen beside a load of passive, botoxed old pop stars while Madness’s saxophonist goofs about as if he were the only actual human being left in the entertainment industry. And then there’s this, her third album.Do we really have to talk about the music? Surely that’s not the point of Cheryl Cole? Or “Cheryl Read more ...
theartsdesk
Can: The Lost TapesKieron TylerDespite being compiled from previously unreleased material, the extraordinary The Lost Tapes is as wonderful as last year's 40th Anniversary edition of Tago Mago. This archive trawl outpaces previous exhumations like Limited Edition, Unlimited Edition, Delay ‘68 and Prehistoric Future by a very long distance. Not because it’s a three-CD set, but due to the sheer quality of what’s heard. Can still had material on the shelf equalling what they issued. Little is from the post-Damo Suzuki configuration of the band (it’s roughly half-and-half between the Suzuki and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Naturally it couldn't be anything as straightforward as a mere album. Rather, Smashing Pumpkins supremo Billy Corgan would have it that Oceania is "an album within an album", and that its 13 songs form a subset of the ongoing Teargarden by Kaleidyscope project, part of which appeared in digital download format in 2009. But prune away all the baggage and Oceania stands up as a very plausible specimen of Pumpkinness. It also marks the arrival of a brand new line-up, namely drummer Mike Byrne, guitarist Jeff Schroeder and the band's latest female bassist/vocalist Nicole Florentino, but as ever Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The press release for The Woman in the Fifth says it’s “a twisted and intense love story” that's about a “passionate and intense relationship”. It is, to a degree. But that undersells the film. As an oblique examination of mental breakdown, director Pawel Pawlikowski's film shares a lineage with Polanski’s Repulsion.The Woman in the Fifth adapts Douglas Kennedy’s novel. American author Tom Ricks (Ethan Hawke, sporting an excellent haircut) arrives in Paris to seek out his estranged wife and their daughter. Whatever barriers there are between them are insurmountable – she has a restraining Read more ...
howard.male
As all the background information to this new release can be found in Nick Levine’s recent interview with Neneh Cherry for theartsdesk, let's get straight down to scrutinising the music. For this serious contender for album of the year deserves more than just a reshuffling of the information on its press release.Just as one can take pleasure in the physical substance of paint on a canvas (dragged, splattered or elegantly arced), it's also enjoyable when the music issuing from the stereo seems to violently push the air aside before threatening to ransack the room. Take this Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When your albums tend to drop into a frenzy of anticipation after gaps of six or seven years, the creation of a certain mythology becomes inevitable. So much has been written in certain circles about Fiona Apple since the release of 2005’s Extraordinary Machine - an album which itself seemed certain to never see the light of day at one point - that it has become impossible to distinguish the music from the character - reclusive, frustrating, challenging.And yet the opening track to Apple’s fourth album (its poetic full title - The Idler Wheel is wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In the English-speaking world we know most about France's Ursuline possessions of the 1630s through Aldous Huxley’s 1952 The Devils of Loudun, and of course through Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils. But a decade before Russell’s scandalous work, Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz treated the same subject in his 1960 film Mother Joan of the Angels, now re-released from Second Run in a restored version.Kawalerowicz was at the height of his powers, heading up the Kadr state film unit, which was the effective central axis of the Polish film school, that took off from the mid 1950s as political Read more ...
joe.muggs
Though he first came to public attention via the Los Angeles-based Brainfeeder psychedelic electronic hip hop collective led by Flying Lotus, 25-year-old producer Lorn comes from “the middle of nowhere in Illinois”, and it's easy to see in his music a less sunny disposition than many of his comrades. Most of the Brainfeeder crew have a loose-limbed funkiness to their sound and an accumulation of sonic detail that speaks of heat and humdity. But while Lorn shares their aesthetic of complex rhythms that slip off the grid, there's something chilly and chilling about his industrial-sounding Read more ...