CDs/DVDs
matilda.battersby
It has been eight years since Gillian Welch last released an album and her loyal fans – not to mention critics - have been waiting with bated breath. Will she have spent the years honing the delicious Americana and Appalachian-influenced folk that once set her and musical partner David Rawlings apart? Or will she have kept the hit-and-miss drums, the electric guitar and the chirpier outlook of her last album Soul Journey? Thankfully, the answer is the former: The Harrow and the Harvest might well be her best record yet.Welch and Rawlings have pared down their sound to produce a purity of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Well, there's a nice surprise. Jill Scott was feared lost to music industry machinations, more likely to succeed in her acting career than make a fourth album (she's probably best known now to mainstream British audiences as Mma Ramotswe in The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency TV series). But it seems a four-year musical hiatus and change of label has done her the power of good, as this is the Philadelphia singer and spoken-word artist's best album since her debut Who is Jill Scott?It kicks off in fairly straightforward “nu soul” fashion, with “Blessed”, featuring the kind of I'm-a-strong-woman- Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Beyoncé took a break to recharge her funk batteries after the lacklustre I Am... Sasha Fierce, and there is much riding on this new album. The Amazonian soulstress had 72 songs to choose from, so it is no surprise that 4 is eclectic. What is surprising is that it starts with two pedestrian power ballads. "1 + 1" and "I Care" find Mrs Jay-Z in R'n'B classicist mode, all dull I-will-survive lyrics and dynamic lungs. Next up "I Miss You" is a little better, with its blips and bleeps flying the flag for electronica.Then things get more interesting, thanks to a colourful range of influences and Read more ...
fisun.guner
Is Don’t Look Now really the best British film of all time? That’s how a panel of 150 industry experts voted earlier this year in a poll compiled by Time Out. But then, out of a list of 100 top British movies, Distant Voices, Still Lives came third, ahead of Brief Encounter (12) or anything by Hitchcock.Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 supernatural chiller no longer shocks with its infamous scene of explicit sex; and the scenes featuring the two spooky sisters remind us that Roeg’s interest in cinematography and clever editing seems often to outweigh his interest in getting the best out of his actors. But Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Mehdi Zannad isn’t a familiar name, but he’s issued a raft of albums as Fugu and has been championed by Stereolab. His profile in Japan is good, and he’s composed soundtracks in his native France. Fugue, the first album released under his own name, is co-produced by Tahiti 80’s Xavier Boyer. "Fugue" translates as "break away" – which he has from the Fugu guise. He’s also broken away from English. Fugue is Zannad's first French-language album. Language, though, is no barrier to basking in this summery pop.Zannad was inspired to sing in French after working on the film La France in 2007. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's been a decade since Stevie Nicks's last album of new songs, Trouble in Shangri-La, but In Your Dreams proves that there's creative life in the old girl yet. Fans of the wispy tunestrel will be pleased to hear that she hasn't strayed far from her familiar stomping grounds of melodious folk-rockism and tales of love and yearning, the focus (in fine Seventies style) fixing on the singer's emotional trials and torments. The voice that sang "Rhiannon" remains suitably ghostly, and even with an overlay of mild croakiness, it sounds pretty good for a 63-year-old.The disc is crammed with a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s an accepted flouting of reality that in films “based on a true story”, the first betrayal of the truth is in the casting. The reveal over the closing credits of The Fighter tells you just how well its two main characters have done out of Hollywood. For the preceding two hours these rough-edged veterans of the boxing ring have morphed into Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale. Whatever else is a riff on reality in this thrilling addition to the canon of fight movies is mostly a matter for the extras. But to recreate the bruising lives of a struggling boxer and his smack-addicted half- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When I put together my book Rock Shrines, about places music fans go to pay tribute to their dead heroes, I was particularly struck by the story of Ben Cauley. He was trumpet player in Otis Redding's band, The Bar Kays, and the only person to be pulled alive from the freezing waters of Lake Monona, Wisconsin, after the light aircraft crash that killed Redding and the rest of the band in December 1967.I wanted to know what happened to him and my research eventually located him at Da Blues Restaurant in Memphis International Airport where Cauley was in-house entertainment. To my mind there was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Duane Eddy will forever be identified with his deeply twangy late-Fifties/early-Sixties instrumental hits like “Rebel Rouser”, “Ramrod” and “Peter Gunn”, he’s never gone out of style. His 1958 debut album was titled Have “Twangy Guitar” – Will Travel. And he has – through time and space. He scored a British hit with “Play Me Like You Play Your Guitar” in 1975. It didn’t chart in the US. His 1986 re-recording of “Peter Gunn”, made with The Art of Noise, was Top 10 in Britain. Now, here he is again with a new album, recorded in Sheffield with big-time fan Richard Hawley. His homeland Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It's fair to say that The Bookhouse Boys are not one of those bands who spotted a successful trend and thought, I know what, let's adapt our sound to that. The London nine-piece are often compared to Ennio Morricone but there are really only hints of that emotive Italian film composer. Their brass flourishes and general mood of Mariachi melodrama recall the classic spaghetti westerns but particularly on this, their second album, the mood is tethered to dark, punching walls of guitar and they don't really sound like anybody else.The band are named after the masonic secret society in Read more ...
graham.rickson
The first part of Patrick Keiller’s trilogy, an attempt to address the "problem of London", begins just before the 1992 re-election of John Major. It’s a pseudo documentary ostensibly narrated by an acquaintance of one Robinson, a part-time art lecturer at the University of Barking. Nearly 20 years on, not much has changed – we’re in a place of bombings and bomb threats, with chaotic, privatised public transport. It’s a once civil society stretched to breaking point.
Paul Scofield’s arch commentary is so mellifluous that you’re willing to believe everything he says. Is there really a tunnel Read more ...
peter.quinn
One of the great strengths of Manfred Eicher's ECM label is the way in which it has encouraged and documented many unlikely yet fruitful musical collaborations throughout its thousand-plus discography. First assembled for her season as artist-in-residence at Norway's Molde Jazz Festival in 2008, percussionist Marilyn Mazur's Celestial Circle quartet brings together stylists as individual as pianist John Taylor, bassist Anders Jormin and vocalist Josefine Cronholm (who makes her ECM debut here).Born in New York and raised in Denmark, Mazur, whose well-stuffed CV includes work with Miles Davis Read more ...