CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
The musical identity of Midlands town Stourbridge is largely defined by Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Pop Will Eat Itself and The Wonder Stuff, a trio that charted with varying degrees of wackiness in the late Eighties to mid-Nineties. The Voluntary Butler Scheme, the recording identity of fellow Stourbridgian Rob Jones, shares their leaning towards wackiness, but it’s more surreal, less surface. He’s also way more interesting musically. Second album The Grandad Galaxy is a musical rummage through a jumble-sale mind.Jones is closer to Davyhulme absurdist Jim Noir than any of his local predecessors. Read more ...
howard.male
How refreshing it is to learn of an album the recording of which was fuelled by black tea rather than, say, marijuana. Although having said that – given the heady, languorous music that Brooklyn’s Roberto Carlos Lange (aka Helado Negro) has come up with - I’d like to think that at least a smidgen of the world’s most popular illicit substance was also involved. But perhaps it was just the natural high brought on by a decampment to rural Connecticut - where he apparently sat in the forest “centring himself” – which contributed to the otherworldly ambience.The press release describes the music Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This is the one DVD of all the recent issues of dance on film that will show you simply and honestly the rigour and the beguilement of how people are drawn to dance, and what dance draws out of them. A straight documentary about the dance-theatre of Pina Bausch, it's really about teenagers and their extraordinary ability to soak up opportunities, innocently perform complex things and wipe them clean of old associations - and make all us feel more human and restored.The kids are one of the two amateur casts in the staging of Bausch’s dancework, Kontakthof - a portrait of goings-on in a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mention of Southend-on-Sea calls to mind tawdry seafront attractions and Dr Feelgood, and certainly wouldn't prime you to expect The Horrors. Prepare to be flabbergasted, however, because with their third album, this quietly purposeful quintet have taken a giant leap forward into their own phantasmagorical hyperspace.Their last effort, 2009's Primary Colours, dropped enough hints about the band's burgeoning abilities to nab a Mercury Prize nomination, but think of that one as Andy Murray to this year's Djokovic. To create Skying, they dispensed with outside production help (Portishead's Geoff Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
French interpreters Nouvelle Vague have a seemingly unsustainable path. Reinterpreting Anglo songs of the post-punk and new wave eras in unlikely semi-easy-listening settings (bossa nova, reggae, country and bluegrass) would appear to bring diminishing returns. But on their last album, 2009’s 3, they went gently Gallic, covering “Ça plane pour moi”, originally by Belgium’s Plastic Bertrand. Fourth time out, it’s all Francophone.Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux’s first three Nouvelle Vague albums mainly featured lesser-known female Franco singers (notably Camille and Mélanie Pain – some original Read more ...
joe.muggs
Abstract music will always be at a disadvantage compared to abstract art because of one thing: duration. It requires commitment and immersion, you can't sum it up at a glance, and when it stops it's gone until you go back to the start. Yet a record like this Finnish collaboration can have all the fascination, all the exploration of chaos and control and deep archetypal patterns of a Kandinsky painting or Hepworth bronze.
Jan Anderzén aka Tomutonttu is part of the hypermodern pyschedelic band Kemialliset Ystävät, while Sami Sänpäkkilä aka Es is the boss of Fonal Records and a respected film- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Blondie took 17 years off between 1982 and 1999, and bounced back with the chart-topping single "Maria". Now, refreshed after an eight-year power nap following 2003's The Curse of Blondie, they've returned with their ninth studio album.This would have been a splendid record in 1980, a year which its snappy synth-pop flashbacks seem to want to evoke. In 2011 it's still not bad, though there's a sense that the tracks are compensating with artful studio technology for shortcomings in the writing, and perhaps in Deborah Harry's brittle vocals. Nonetheless, the disc comes roaring out of the blocks Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This was all set to be released in UK cinemas around about now, but at the last minute it has gone straight to DVD. Perhaps the distributors got nervous. You can imagine why. Kim Cattrall is a totem for all sophisticated, sexually expressive women of a certain age. She’s ultimately the reason Sex and the City was what it was. You can put gratuitous violence, killing, maiming and all manner of cheap moronic sleaze up on a big screen and rake in the moolah. But some things are just too much. Samantha as a former Eighties porn starlet, washed up, penniless and living in a trailer? That Read more ...
David Nice
Your Macbeth opens in the round, tailored to a small studio theatre. In entrusting it to television, do you engage someone experienced in the medium to render faithfully the spaces and the talking heads, as Trevor Nunn did for the deservedly legendary McKellen-Dench double act? Or do you cry your own havoc and let slip the dogs of all your favourite film directors, as happens in Rupert Goold’s ambitious TV transfer?Either could work. But the only proof is in the end result. And while the 1970s film still chills my blood, I can’t help feeling that here so much tension and imagination flails Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gothenburg electro-moodists Little Dragon aren’t short of high-profile cheerleaders. All four members appeared on a couple of tracks on Gorillaz' Plastic Beach, and the band supported Damon Albarn's gang on the subsequent tour. TV on the Radio’s David Sitek borrowed their singer Yukimi Nagano for his solo album, also from last year. Ritual Union, their third album, escapes from the shadows cast by the collaborations to reassert that this is a band, rather than a box of sticking plasters for other people’s careers.The collaborations – Big Boi has also co-opted them and Nagano appears on Rafael Read more ...
howard.male
Most of the arrangements on this collection of covers of Eighties and early-Nineties UK soul tunes actually have more of a mid-Seventies live band feel to them. This proves to be an excellent way of rescuing the material from the often stultifying effect of programmed drums and cheesy keyboards which has rendered so much music from this period unlistenable to. Largely the approach works very well, although on one or two tracks the end result doesn’t quite measure up to its template.For example, “Apparently Nothing” by the Young Disciples still sounds cooler and more edgily contemporary in its Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There are many ways to get to the truth. One of the best ways is to ignore the truth. That seems to be the mantra of Ken Russell's colourfully mendacious portrait of the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers, receiving its long-awaited DVD release. The script (by a young Melvyn Bragg) is breathless and ludicrous and yields too swiftly and too often to the hysterical - to carpet-clawing madness, glass-smashing fury and shirt-tearing lust - as it follows an improbably manic and louche Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) and his struggles to juggle the obsessive love of the women and Read more ...