CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
The biggest surprise with Someone to Watch Over Me might be that SuBo has actually made it to three albums. Last year’s release brought relief that the Simon Cowell machine hadn’t broken her. But with this new one Boyle actually seems to be forging a career of sorts. So, now that she no longer has the novelty value of being a current "reality TV" phenomenon, and three LPs in, how does her music stand up?Considering Boyle’s act was the stuff of a prime-time talent show, it's hardly a revelation that this record offers a few saccharine moments with a general feeling that, because of its release Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Risks are everywhere. Crossing the road, cycling, not handling food properly, leaving a car boot unlocked, grain pits, night-time darkness – they all bring risks. Thankfully, government agency The Central Office of Information helped make us aware of the hazards. This two-DVD set – the sixth in the BFI’s collection of COI films – is mind-boggling company. Dealing with the multifarious risks seen here would leave no time to get into danger. You’d have to live in a bubble.The most familiar shorts feature Dave "Darth Vader" Prowse as the Green Cross Code Man, helping kids cross roads safely. He’ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Molly had a red shirt/ Susie, she ripped her shirt off completely/ Danny poured the beer all over Sally/ We all ran around the back yard/ It was crazy clown time/ It was real fun”. The voice is strangled, high. A treated guitar phases in and out, puncturing moaning sounds. A simple beat thuds. David Lynch’s fun might not be yours or mine, but his new album packs a punch. Crazy Clown Time is nightmarish. Seductive, too.It oughtn’t to be a surprise that Lynch has made another album. More surprising is how long it’s taken him to do it. Music has always been integral to his art. His first full- Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There are two fundamentally opposing schools of thought on Florence Welch and her mysterious machine. For the believers, her music belongs to the tradition of questing, modernist pop with a pagan trim of the kind Kate Bush made before she started writing 14-minute songs about having sex with snowmen. To the naysayers, on the other hand, she’s both shallow and contrived, a paint-stripping belter desperate to lend her sub-Siouxsie Sioux shtick gravitas by grafting on a skin of borrowed poses and studied weirdness.Neither view quite nails it. In reality, Welch makes occasionally stirring but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This might not have been a bad album if Lou Reed wasn't on it, but its 95 minutes would still have been 50 per cent too long. Not being privy to the inner workings of the Metallica universe, I have no idea why the speaker-bursting veterans thought that working with Reed might be to their advantage, unless they'd fallen for Lou's own propaganda about Metal Machine Music being a masterpiece. In the end, the band gathered in the studio to whip up a batch of piledriver riffs and broody instrumental backdrops, over which Reed has been permitted to intone lyrics (said to be inspired by Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Some pretentiousness was inevitable. Any film that sets out to tell the story of the universe (we get the whole caboodle - big bang to eternal blackout - with cameos for dinosaurs, microbes, DNA and even Sean Penn) is I'd say bound, perhaps even required, to sink into the mud of philosophical grandiloquence. But to focus on this, or the film's frequent slips into the coffee-table visual language of Anselm Adams (electro-static trees, smoky waterfalls) or the moralising family lectures through which this story of the universe is mediated, would be unfair. For, however familiar Read more ...
joe.muggs
Joker, aka 22 year old Bristolian Liam McLean, is one of the most individual talents of the dubstep/grime generation. His long run of dancefloor-directed single releases, some originally recorded when he was in his early teens, showed natural gifts for finding the funk in the sparsest rhythms and for frazzlingly catchy melodic synth riffs which meant his productions leapt out of DJ sets wherever and whenever they were played. Now, following a quiet 18 months, his debut album shows that he's not content to rest on his laurels.The Vision is a high-gloss affair. McLean has always been a Read more ...
peter.quinn
Spoiler alert: this CD contains grooves that will bring out your inner air guitarist. From the album's lead-off song, “Tenderly”, whose sumptuous voicings lesser artists can only fantasise about, to its towering sign-off, “Fingerlero”, George Benson's 24-carat gift for free-flowing improv remains a thing of wonder. “Fingerlero” also features one of the most recognisable and heart-stirring sounds in jazz: Benson scatting in perfect unison with his deftly picked guitar lines. He makes you wait, but it's so worth it.Heard in both combo and solo settings, the 12-track set includes nods to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s no doubt that In the Realm of the Senses shocked and still shocks, but after watching this first-ever uncut UK release, it’s hard to figure out what shocks most: the sex, the equation of sex, obsession and death, that all this takes place in a sealed environment ruled by ritual, or whether it’s the revelation that Japanese society could produce a film so opposite to its perceived or received persona. It could also be the fact that it's based on a true story.Neither 1976's In the Realm of the Senses or Ôshima’s follow up, 1978’s Empire of Passion (although based on a Namura novel, Read more ...
howard.male
How thrilling to hear you again, gentleman. Can it really have been 30 years? Yet within half a song, the emotional and cerebral connections are re-established in my brain as post-punk’s least punky band present their shiny new songs for our amusement and amazement. However, my job is to resist the inexorable pull of nostalgia: some objectivity is required if this review is to be of any worth to anyone under 45. In other words; do Devoto and co still cut the mustard in the 21st century?There’s nothing here as John Barry bombastic as “Shot by Both Sides” or as icily disconnected as “Permafrost Read more ...
joe.muggs
Is there any point criticising Coldplay? You might as well take issue with your own digestive system, or the word “the”, or the colour brown. They're there, they're part of the fabric of things, they're not going away. Indeed, so etched are they into our culture, with not just ambitious indie bands but every rapper from Jay Z on down adding a mopey none-less-funky chant-along chorus into their tracks in the hope of getting some of those Chris Martin dollars, that getting riled by their sound is, frankly, a short cut to insanity.And anyway, they're not awful as such. For every mimsy-whimsy Read more ...
david.cheal
These days Tom Waits lives in the boondocks of California with his wife and co-writer Kathleen Brennan and their three children. A settled life sometimes makes for dull art. Not in his case. At 61 he has just made one of the albums of his life. Seven years have passed since its predecessor, Real Gone, and he seems to have got over his bathroom-beatbox phase (it was thrilling but at times almost unlistenable) and emerged at a place where he still connects with the urge to be a loner, to be a lover, to flee, to join in, to whimper, to rage and to roar, but in a musical idiom that doesn’t sound Read more ...