CDs/DVDs
bruce.dessau
Not sure about the title. Is it inspired by the place Graham Coxon used to finish up in each night during his drinking years? Not sure about the cover. Who wants to see a scabby knee? But there are no quibbles about the music. While Damon Albarn continues to scour the global undergrowth for inspiration like a musicological David Bellamy, Graham Coxon goes back to scratchy alt-punk, lobbing in some alto sax jazz noodling for good measure.Things kick off briskly, with the itchy "Advice" reflecting on boredom past: ”I wrote a new song while I was touring/ Man it was no fun, totally boring”. Read more ...
graham.rickson
De Falla: Nights in the Gardens of Spain, The Three-Cornered Hat, Homenajes Jean-Efflaum Bavouzet (piano), Raquel Lojendio (soprano), BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena (Chandos)Spanish conductor Juanjo Mena has recently succeeded Gianandra Noseda as the BBC Philharmonic’s principal conductor. You trust that the choice of repertoire on this release was driven by Mena himself, and this disc has loads to commend it – playing of real verve, and the more-than-decent acoustic of the BBC’s much-maligned Media City in Salford. The Three-Cornered Hat isn’t heard enough in its complete form; Mena’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In 2009 Orbital returned too soon. Dance music icons Paul and Phil Hartnoll only called it a day a little over four years previously so it was hardly a magnificent comeback. The resulting live shows smelt more of tax bills than art. Fair enough, we all have to live, but it was a shame to see such a great creative pairing fizzle rather than shine.Orbital ruled dance music throughout the Nineties. Their self-titled “brown” album remains an all-time great and the decade’s other four albums were also astonishing, even beautiful - lush listening music that turned into a driven foot-moving sonic Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not hugely to the advantage of Hugo that its release on disc opens with a trailer for The Artist. The two homages to cinema’s silent age slugged it out for supremacy at this year’s Academy Awards. Where Martin Scorsese’s first foray into both 3D and children’s narrative justly cleaned up in all the technical categories, on the small screen there is less disguising the frailties of a redemptive story adapted from Brian Selznick’s breezeblock novel.Hugo Cabret’s clockwork lair remains a sumptuous visual treat, as is the bustling world of the Parisian station whose timepieces he Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Before I came to what I was surprised to discover is a fifth album from hard-rock six-piece Lostprophets, there were two things I knew about the band: firstly, that they are Welsh; and secondly, that they showed up in magazines like Kerrang! a lot back when I was in high school.Alternative rock in the 1990s wasn’t well known for either its staying power or its crossover appeal, so for a band to still be filling mid-sized venues 15 years on they must be getting by on more than tattoos, skateboards-as-accessories and misguided rap interludes (although I’d maybe steer clear of track seven). At Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The 1972 Jethro Tull opus Thick as a Brick was offered by Ian Anderson as a parody of progressive rock concept albums. Its sub-Pythonesque packaging proclaimed the record’s lyrics to be an epic poem composed by an eight-year-old swot, Gerald Bostock, who was disqualified from winning a literary prize after swearing during a BBC interview. Anderson talks up the jape to this day, neglecting the Oedipal struggle central to the album’s opaque narrative, its layered, intricate musical motifs, and its cinematic sweep. Never given its critical due, Thick ranks beside its predecessor, Aqualung, as a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Theo Angelopoulos (pictured below) was hit and killed by a motorcyclist on 24 January, as this now final collection of his work was readied. The films of this 76-year-old Palme d’Or-winner (for 1998’s Eternity and a Day, included) wrestled with the tragic recent history of his native Greece and Balkans at sometimes notorious, slowly unfolding length. An old-time maestro aspiring to novelistic depth, he lured Willem Dafoe, Michel Piccoli, Bruno Ganz and Irene Jacob to his unintended swansong, 2008’s The Dust of Time (unreleased in the UK in any form till now). These DVDs are an elegy to the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In their native Australia Sarah Blasko, Sally Seltmann and Holly Thorsby are award-winning solo artists in their own right, even if their reputations have for the most part not yet preceded them internationally. Seeker Lover Keeper is both the name of their collaborative recording project and its first release, the name easily calling to mind a tripartite structure in which the identity of each major player shifts with each track - writer, frontwoman, harmony.With three formidable talents on board the project could never be anything less than a true meeting of minds, with each artist writing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Poles is a significant step for Lonely Drifter Karen. For their third album, the pan-European trio have moved their trademark piano-led, torch song-influenced introspection into new territory. The graceful Poles is a pop album of the very highest calibre.The shimmering harpsichord glissando that opens the album and “Three Colors Red” lays the table for a rhythmic, minor-key song which traces a path from Martha and the Muffins to the yearning pop of Rose Elinor Dougall. The Eighties are in there, so are John Barry and Lykke Li. As the album unfolds, Lonely Drifter Karen reveal a new fondness Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Everyone wants their own Madonna. Some want the mischievous, tinny, Eighties, New York club chick; some want the sexadelic, Shep Pettibone-produced art-nudie; some want the gently euphoric Ray of Light trance angel; some want the house-tinted fashionista “Vogue” queen, and so on, and so on – but what does Madonna want?I’d hazard a guess she stopped knowing shortly after her last great single, the ABBA-sampling Stuart Price-produced floor-slayer “Hung Up”. Since then she’s been flailing about more than usual, and misfired into R&B with 2008’s Hard Candy album. Finding new producers is Read more ...
graham.rickson
Renée Fleming: Poèmes - Music by Ravel, Messiaen, Dutilleux (Decca)The veteran French composer Henri Dutilleux is known for his select, refined output; this is a musician who only speaks when he’s sure he has something worth saying, usually expressed in music of intense elegance and poise. American soprano Renée Fleming, known to the composer, was chosen to give the first performances of his recent song cycle Le temps l’horloge in 2009, and it’s a live recording from 2009 that we get here. Four contrasting poems are set alongside a brief orchestral interlude, and the results are compelling. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
John Bunting is currently serving 11 life sentences. He was Australia’s serial killer. A murderous manipulator masquerading as a vigilante, he brought young people, their family members and a disenfranchised suburban community into his madness. Snowtown dramatises these deeply distressing events.Produced by Warp Films - also behind the challenging Tyrannosaur - Snowtown slots into a lineage with the fictive Funny Games and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and the fact-based Bundy. Like Ted Bundy, Bunting was a charmer. He wheedled his way into a fractured household on the edges of Adelaide Read more ...