CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Calling Grumbling Fur a supergroup would be pretty over the top, but the name does corral five distinctive musicians that usually follow their own paths. There’s a pair of Finns from the legendary drone outfit Circle and the challenging metallers Panic DHH. The three Brits include two members of the jazz-inclined experimentalists Guapo and the wyrd folk artist Alexander Tucker. The individual tracks on Furrier, this one-off collective’s album, were culled from a day-long improv jam held in south London. Jams are usually flabby excuses to show some chops, but Furrier is spartan and focused. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s something elemental in Elizabeth Mitchell and Brek Taylor’s Island – a small-scale British independent film that scores highly on performances and more than relishes the visuals of its setting.The landscapes, shot mainly on the Isle of Mull, are glorious, and speak for the mood of the film’s heroine Nikki (Natalie Press): the emotional undercurrents of the script seem as tempestuous as local nature, especially the surrounding sea. The directors don’t hurry to bring a trace of explanation to their story (based on the novel by Jane Rogers), but it gradually becomes apparent that this Read more ...
joe.muggs
This series of supernatural dramas from the early 1980s is the sort of thing that could very easily be parodied – has been parodied, in fact, by everyone from Victoria Wood and French and Saunders to The League of Gentlemen and Garth Merenghi's Darkplace. Every shonky visual effect, every discordant stab of strings as the camera's point of view creeps up behind a character, every window that blows open extinguishing a candle: these are meat and potatoes to sketch writers, and this makes it hard to watch these episodes with a straight face... at first.Sit down and watch the episodes in full, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bruce Springsteen and Krautrock might not seem obvious kin, but the second album from Philadelphia’s The War on Drugs brings them together. It’s not clear what’s coming as Slave Ambient opens, but this is a dizzying, audacious and supremely confident journey that marries the seemingly disparate.There is a precedent though. Finland’s intense and stellar post-Spacemen 3 trio Joensuu 1685 made Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” their own, turning it into a slab of Neu/La Dusseldorf white-light intensity. The War on Drugs's main man Adam Granduciel is probably unaware of these Suomi shamen, and it’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Spare, slow and beautiful, Kelly Reichardt’s revisionist Western is an effective allegory about bad leadership in America, but it’s as a minimalist tribute to women pioneers that it excels.Inspired by the worst disaster to take place on the Oregon Trail, it hardly shows the extent of that tragedy. In reality, 150-300 wagons set out from Boise City in August 1845 and were led astray by the scout Stephen Meek (1807-86), whose cluelessness caused 24 deaths; maybe another 20 perished after the journey. Reichardt had three wagons at her disposal - each contains a pioneer couple, and one a young Read more ...
howard.male
The title in part refers to the container ships that as well as bringing food stuffs etc, to many of the world’s ports, also bring people and their music. But this album is far from just another melting-pot fusion of all the usual styles - Balkan, reggae, ska, funk – all the usual suspects. The focus is just on the taranta (the other half of the title) - a collective term for a number of up-tempo Italian folk dances originating from the heel of Italy.Proceedings open with just the rippling muscular sound of an accordion and a lone acoustic guitar, suggesting tasteful restraint. But then after Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having arrived in the Golden State via Detroit and Amarillo, Texas, John David Souther became one of the architects of the Californian soft-rock sound. It didn't hurt that he shared an apartment with future Eagle Glenn Frey and lived upstairs from Jackson Browne. Souther never became a superstar in his own right, but thanks to his high-profile collaborations with assorted luminaries, his songwriting royalty cheques must have been artefacts of many-zeroed beauty.Natural History is a collection of songs from the Souther catalogue, tastefully recorded with a skilful chamber-rock ensemble using Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sixties-style garage rock can really hit the spot. Snotty vocals, amped-up guitars and an attack that draws from The Kinks, Pretty Things and so on can be just the tonic when a sea of tougher-to-process stuff is drowning everything else out. But unless you’ve been at it a million years – cf Billy Childish – or have some spiffy new spin, it’s hard to stand out. Europe is littered with besuited combos with the right haircut. The tack that Les Bof! take is to do it in French. Les Bof! are actually Edinburgh based. Only singer Laurent Mombel is French, a Marseilles transplant. Guitarist Read more ...
graham.rickson
There's a Gallic flavour to this week's new releases, with two unusual recordings of orchestral music played on period instruments. And there's a set of seminal 20th-century ballet scores, played by a wonderful French orchestra under their much-missed Russian principal conductor.Poulenc: Concerto for Two Pianos, Concert champêtre, Suite Française, Anima Eterna Brugge/Jos van Immerseel (Zig Zag territoires)
Jos van Immerseel’s period-instrument band have already recorded exciting versions of Beethoven and Berlioz symphonies, and they’re also one of the few groups willing to tackle 20th-century Read more ...
David Nice
“I wanna blow you all… a kiss” are our hapless heroine’s first and last words in this opera dealing with Anna Nicole Smith's real-life rise and fall in strip-cartoon, morality-ballad style. But it’s not by any means the shallow, voyeuristic tack-fest you might have expected from, among others, the creator of Jerry Springer: The Opera.That’s Richard Thomas, whose words have their fair share of cheap thrills. But here he’s in harness with a composer, Mark-Anthony Turnage, as well as a director (the ever-amazing Richard Jones) and a conductor (Royal Opera helmsman Antonio Pappano) who know how Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Seventies “Kosmische” music of Germany – the more spaced-out and synthesister-led counterpart to Krautrock that had its commercial apogee in Tangerine Dream – seems to be a gift that keeps on giving. Perhaps because the releases were for so many years mainly obscure and had to be hunted down by passionate and/or deranged followers, it has built a global network of followers who extend its principles into new music. From Gorillaz' Damon Albarn to techno legends like Carl Craig, its rippling synth patterns and sidereal twinkles can be heard woven into the fabric of popular culture. And Read more ...
david.cheal
This is pretty weird stuff. Or at least, that’s the way it seems at first. If all you know, as I did to begin with, is that DJ Diamond is a 24-year-old DJ from the West Side of Chicago whose real name is Karlis Griffin, and that Flight Muzik is his debut album, then this will seem like music from another planet – one where notions such as melody, structure and listenability have little meaning; it’s music, but not as most of us know it.The rhythms are complex and multilayered – often there’s more than one going on at the same time: a hummingbird-fast heartbeat as the backdrop, with Read more ...