CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
A few years ago the ultimate in post-modern bollocks appeared – Guilty Pleasures, a club night built around the notion that tepid crap from yesteryear is brilliant. So let’s go dig Toto, Go West, Andrew Gold, Dr Hook, any old toe jam. Of course, there’s no reason why anyone shouldn’t dance around to anything, and it’s refreshing, now and then, to give the po-faced Punk Year Zero thing a kick-in, but actively celebrating drivel is another matter. "Dreadlock Holiday" is not a guilty pleasure, it’s just shite. Move on.That aside, all music lovers have actual guilty pleasures, records we know are Read more ...
howard.male
This Tanzanian crew of eight youngsters play a galloping bongo-led music called “Mchiriku” that spews torrentially from the speakers, exhausting your reviewer after just the first couple of songs. Perhaps if the arrangements and instrumentation had been more varied and nuanced I might have felt differently, because there’s certainly much here that charms and intrigues. But that’s probably akin to suggesting that the first Ramones album would have been better if they’d done a couple of ballads and added orchestra strings to “Chain Saw”.But having said that, I’ve been a huge fan of producer Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Island of Lost Souls might be from 1932, but its release on DVD verifies that it’s one of the freakiest, most disturbing films made. This adaptation of H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau is dominated by Charles Laughton as the eponymous Doctor. Creepy and monomaniacal, he puts in a towering performance. Convinced he can turn animals into humans via surgery, he’s undermining evolution and playing – as he declares – God. The film arrived in cinemas the same year as the equally transgressive Freaks and also went on to become a cult, inspiring new-wave weirdos Devo to co-opt the half-human, half- Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It's been six years since Regina Spektor released Begin to Hope, a festival-friendly breakthrough album with a poppy sheen that easily loaned itself to mobile phone network marketing campaigns and the like. Six years then since the Moscow-born Bronx-raised artist, a tiny human beatbox with a shock of curls, took the kooky-girl-with-piano shtick into the mainstream. And yet, as this follow-up to 2009's Far makes clear, there's only so much of what makes Regina Spektor, well, Regina that can be major-label sanitised.What We Saw from the Cheap Seats begins simply enough: a poppy, piano-and-vocal Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lydon is currently having a slight return. I caught PiL’s gig at Heaven a few weeks ago (featured as a bonus DVD disc on the deluxe edition of This Is PiL and reviewed elsewhere on theartsdesk). I wasn’t expecting much. Lydon, once the edgy heart of British punk, a mercurial, snidely uncomfortable presence, has graduated over the years into an eye-rolling pantomime dame and, of course, the butter ads and other misguided media forays forever tarnished his pithy societal spite. The concert, however, was visceral. PiL’s current incarnation are a musical force to be reckoned with and played for a Read more ...
theartsdesk
Sandy Denny: Sandy (Deluxe Edition), Like An Old Fashioned Waltz (Deluxe Edition), Rendezvous (Deluxe Edition)Graham FullerSandy Denny completists unable to drop a thousand to acquire the now scarce 2010 19-disc box set can fill their collections another way. They can add to their Denny-era Strawbs, Fairport Convention, and Fotheringay CDs last year’s remastered The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, the melancholy 1971 masterpiece with which she launched her solo career, and these three newly spruced and expanded albums: Sandy (1972), another classic full of loneliness and yearning; the Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Don't be fooled by the top hat and tails that they've got, The Hives is still the dirtiest garage band on the block. The high velocity Swedish quintet's fifth album marks a change in sartorial terms, as anyone who spotted vocalist Howlin' Pelle Almqvist doing his cartoonish Boris-at-the-Bullingdon, rubber-hipped Jagger swagger on Later this week will have seen. But in musical terms it is classic riff sandwich business as usual. Lex Hives is so old school maybe it should be released on wax cylinder rather than download.The 12 tracks certainly wear their influences on their well-turned sleeves Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
We in the UK have much enjoyed our contemporary Sherlock Holmes recently, courtesy of Cumberbatch et al. It’s amazing to think that, at the height of the Cold War, Soviet television was bashing out TV versions of the Holmes stories. And they were water-cooler discussion productions (despite obvious absence in those days of water-coolers). Director Igor Maslennikov made no fewer than nine Conan Doyle-themed works in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first of these to reach further shores in DVD format is this 1981 account of The Hound of the Baskervilles.It has production values to rival Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The songs here that work are lush treats which hit the buttons they’re aiming for. The ones that don’t are a bit stinky. The two varieties are divided about half and half. Difficult to score out of five, that, hence the neutral three. Job done.More? Fair do’s.London-born Paloma Faith hails from the crop of burlesque-y, quirky female singer-songwriters who appeared post-Gaga-Florence-Lily. Petite and well spoken, she also appeared more genuinely ensconced in cabaret-land than peers who adopted the same schtick. Her debut album, 2009’s Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful?, displayed Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Boys Don’t Cry is a collection of flawless reinterpretations of songs originally performed by men by the honey-voiced singer known as Rumer, whose million-selling debut Seasons of My Soul chalked up high-profile admirers and a clutch of award nominations.The female-singer-puts-her-own-spin-on-traditionally-masculine songs is nothing new, having become a staple of live performances by everybody from country starlets to X-Factor contestants. Laura Marling, who beat Rumer to the Best Female Brit back in 2011, put out an EP featuring songs by Neil Young and Jackson Browne and, as far back as 2001 Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The bad taste left by The Black Panther lingers like a mouthful of cinders long after it’s been expelled from the DVD player. This latest entry in the BFI's Flipside series of rescued British film obscurities is the shocking adaptation of the story of British murderer and psychopath Donald Neilson, dubbed The Black Panther by the Seventies’ press. The film arrived in cinemas in 1978 within months of Neilson's conviction and was swiftly banned by local authorities concerned it was a gratuitous cash-in.It opens with Neilson preparing for crime. Ex-army, with a head full of the sound of marching Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The use of Sigur Rós’s aural drama for the soundtracks of Life on Earth, Vanilla Sky and its subsequent sound bed ubiquity has meant their music has become divorced from who they are. The enthralling Valtari emphasises that these four Icelanders are a band rather than a machine supplying lazy directors with ready made atmospherics. Even so, Valtari’s “Ekki múkk” and “Varúð” are so spectacular they’ll no doubt warm the hearts of filmmakers world wide.Thankfully, Sigur Rós have ditched the outside elements that made their last album, 2008’s Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, a compromised Read more ...