1990s
Kieron Tyler
The critic Simon Reynolds characterised Butterfly Child’s debut album Onomatopoeia as the sound of “vitrified everglades in J.G. Ballard’s The Illuminated Man, where some kind of entropy has slowed down time, so that living creatures are literally petrified, encrusted and crystal.”Such circumlocution was unsurprising as Onomatopoeia was originally issued by Rough Trade in August 1993 during a between-time moment for independently minded pop. Britpop hadn’t yet taken off, grunge was a clichéd bandwagon and the first flush of shoegazing had run its course. It hit shops around the same Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Liam Gallagher is a great rock star. However, he often comes across as not a likeable person. He’s called himself “a cunt” on more than one occasion. But he bleeds inarticulate insouciance and arrogant rage. He doesn’t raise even half a smile throughout this whole gig. He carries himself with a chin-jutting, I-dare-you posture that adds up to charisma. And he can sneer-sing the hell out of a song. All that stuff used to be what we wanted from our singers before the post-Travis era of fleece-wearing, kindly, average-guy-next-door rockers.He comes on, parka zipped to the top, just like his Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Marilyn Manson, the man and the band, have maintained impressive global success for over two decades. Their albums – this is the band’s 10th - continue to shift by the bucket-load, and they can still sell out a worldwide stadium tour. Partly, their appeal is tribal. In the age of the beige hoodie and jeans, they don’t kowtow but continue to offer a studded, debauched black-splatter of Hollywoodised punk-goth kitsch. In recent years they’ve also undergone something of a musical renaissance. This continues on Heaven Upside Down.As with 2015’s The Pale Emperor, film composer Tyler Bates is co- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sweet isn’t the right word; in Mike Leigh’s 1990 film, life is unfair, frustrating and confusing by turns. Though, despite the darkness, Life Is Sweet exudes positivity and remains one of Leigh’s funniest, most quotable features.Many of the best lines are mumbled by Timothy Spall’s grotesque would-be restauranteur Aubrey, especially when he’s talking us through the menu for his Edith Piath-themed restaurant. Anyone for prune quiche? Saveloy on a bed of lychees? Or liver in lager? Spall here is a brilliant physical comedian, whether he’s capsizing a caravan or tumbling off an expensive Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Liam Scarlett must be worked off his feet. Just at the Royal Ballet, he made a full-length work, Frankenstein, last year and is currently working on a new Swan Lake; and now last night he has premiered a new abstract work, Symphonic Dances at the Royal Opera House. A one-acter, but at 45 minutes a substantial one, set to the work of the same name by Rachmaninov, this premiere was an important moment for Scarlett, whose last two new works for the company, Frankenstein and Age of Anxiety, received at best mixed reviews. Symphonic Dances is not a masterpiece, but it's the best Scarlett I've seen Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A strong candidate for reissue of the year, World Spirituality Classics, Volume 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda is a rarity amongst archive collections as it does what is always hoped for but seldom accomplished. A new story is told, the music is unfamiliar but wonderful, and it has been put together conscientiously.The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda collects tracks – eight on the CD edition, 10 on the vinyl set – recorded between 1987 and 1995 which initially had limited circulation. The original releases drawn from were issued by the Avatar Read more ...
Katie Colombus
My ears are doing the time warp. If I close my eyes, I'm in high-heeled jelly shoes, wearing silver lipstick, and with my hair in Bjork buns – back when a satin slip dress over a T-shirt was cool as opposed to vintage. The first track of Sheryl Crow's new album Be Myself has propelled me backwards into the Nineties, when Tuesday Night Music Club battled with Alanis Morrisette's Jagged Little Pill to etch permanent marks on my young heart.There's a sensible reason for my nostalgia. For the first time in a long while, Crow has re-connected with her original 1990s productiom team of Jeff Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Albums are not meant to be heard this way. Collecting a band's output in one package inevitably obscures that what’s being heard might have been recorded and released over years. The listening time may be five or six hours, but eighteen months could have separated albums when they were originally released. Messing with time messes with reality.For Kitchens of Distinction, the new, six-disc box set Watch Our Planet Circle includes their four albums for the One Little Indian label across each of discs one to four. Disc five rounds up B-sides and other non-album material (a contemporaneous EP is Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Pulling together a music documentary strikes me as a simple enough concept. Gather your talking heads in front of a nice enough backdrop, splice with archive footage in some semblance of a narrative order and there you go. There’s no need to, say, hire a minibus and attempt to recreate a near-mythological gig from 20 years ago. Especially if that gig happened in France.While taking his protagonists on the physical journey from Scotland to Mauron in the north west of France, director Niall McCann takes them on an emotional journey, too: from the close-knit friendships and fertile new music Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Does a review of a 25-year-old film need a spoiler alert? Much of the success of The Crying Game – its 1992 release earned both six Oscar nominations and huge box office returns (although not enough to save its producers from bankruptcy) – is due to its mid-narrative revelation that one of its central characters is not quite as they first appeared.The story centres on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, with Miranda Richardson as an icy IRA operative. She seduces a British soldier, Jody (Forest Whitaker, superb despite struggling with a British accent), who is then held prisoner at a run- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Right Said Fred, in the wave of global fame that followed their 1991 mega-smash “I’m Too Sexy”, were unlikely celebrities. The two shaven-headed Fairbrass brothers seemed to have accidently wandered into pop and were laconic, likeable stars. There was something parochially British about them, even as Madonna claimed she wanted to shag them. Success of that calibre disappeared after a series of jolly hits, and the last this writer heard of them was when some thug drew blood attacking Richard Fairbrass at a gay rights rally in Russia a decade ago. Which only made them more likeable.Apart from Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Charles Burnett is one of the neglected pioneers of African-American film-making. He first won attention back in 1978 with his poetic, powerful debut film, Killer of Sheep. Acclaimed by critics and respected by his fellow directors, Burnett has always struggled to get his scripts on screen, focusing as they do on the reality of black American lives.The Glass Shield, made in 1994, was his best-funded movie and doubtless the film’s producers thought their investment would pay off if they highlighted rapper Ice Cube’s name (he’s a minor character) and sold it as a racy cop drama off the back of Read more ...