CDs/DVDs
Graham Fuller
Her glory years as the muse of Josef von Sternberg long gone, Marlene Dietrich had been labelled “box-office poison” and was sulking on the French Riviera when the producer Joe Pasternak summoned her back to Hollywood to star opposite James Stewart in George Marshall's Destry Rides Again (1939). The tragicomic Western would prove the best of the films Dietrich made at Universal. Of the four comprising this BFI Blu-ray set, Seven Sinners (1940) is tropical nonsense, The Flame of New Orleans (1941) is a frou-frou delight, The Spoilers (1942) is a well-paced Western, and Pittsburgh ( Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The debut album by Australian-Ghanaian artist Genesis Owusu is so musically restless it’s exhilarating. What’s clear is this guy doesn’t want to be placed in a box, marked hip hop or anything else. Over a wild variety of music, he adopts multiple vocal styles, reminding of beatbox genius Reggie Watts (most especially his recent Wajatta project with John Tejada). The album cover encapsulates the cinematic, occasionally garish persona that comes across during the 15 tracks. What’s clear is that Genesis Owusu is no wall flower.Running through Smiling With No Teeth is the theme of a “black dog”. Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Best known for winning Sweden's version of Got Talent, at the tender age of 10, Zara Larsson is a shining example of a prodigious young female talent being groomed by the music industry into the perfect pop icon.Her third album Poster Girl is exactly what it says on the tin. Here is a place of dance floor beats and snappy sass for your average teenage girls’ bedroom karaoke session. Perhaps, it’s what the title alludes to, although I was expecting more irony on that front.For the most part, the album is very generic pop. The “touch me the way you do’s” of “Love Me Land”, “Make your jaw drop, Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Over the course of seven albums and nearly two decades, Kings of Leon have gone from spiky, short bursts of adrenaline-fuelled garage rock to swollen stadium pomp, full of big builds and grandiose gestures. Following on from 2016’s WALLS (We Are All Like Love Songs) the band’s eighth collection, When You See Yourself, doesn’t suggest a complete volte face in this regard, but there are definitely more elements jostling for attention.Like analogue synthesisers for instance. While the Followill family aren’t swapping guitar picks for patch cables in the way that Kevin Parker’s Tame Impala have, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Shortly after Arab Strap split up in 2006, Malcolm Middleton was quoted saying “I don’t think we should ever get back together”. That’s the sort of fighting talk that’s just begging to be cast up by tired old hack music writers tasked with reviewing the inevitable comeback – but the trick, in this case, was that the comeback was never inevitable. The Falkirk duo built a reputation on electro-acoustic songs about drink, drugs and shagging. Who wouldn’t want to hear how that all turned out?The album opens with a challenge to the nostalgia-hungry listener, Aidan Moffat disclaiming past Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jindřich Polák ’s 1963 film Ikarie XB-1 (also available from distributor Second Run) still seems fresh, a cerebral, visually arresting sci-fi which clearly influenced 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s surprising to read that Polák was actually a comedy specialist, and that the broader, farcical stylings of 1977’s Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (Zítra vstanu a opařím se čajem) are more typical of the director’s output. Yes, it’s still sci-fi, but more Carry On than Kubrick. The setup is a good one, with elderly Nazis plotting to travel back in time from the 1990s with a stolen Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“How it went with the women,” Martin Amis’s phrase for what most straight men are likely to contemplate in the evenings of their lives, would have made an ideal alternative subtitle for the 50-minute documentary T S Eliot: The Search for Happiness.Until 1949, when Eliot met Valerie Fletcher, the secretary to whom he would be happily married from 1957 until his death in 1965, love went badly for the Nobel poet. He regarded his miserable 18-year marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, who was probably bipolar, as “a hideous farce", while his fraught long-distance relationship with the American speech Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Flock ends with “Solarised”, a glorious five-plus minutes excursion into retro-futurist pop with the artistic smarts of Saint Etienne and Stereolab. Snappy, toe-tapping drums and bubbly, funky bass guitar move it along. “Stages of Phases” is another winner. Built around a stomping glam-rock chassis, it's sense of otherness is shared by “Solarised”.Jane Weaver’s sixth album proper (there are also collaborations, soundtracks and live/remix sets) and the follow-up to 2017’s Modern Kosmology isn’t a full-on lunge towards conventionality, but it’s her first brush with dance-pop – albeit on the art Read more ...
mark.kidel
John Benjamin Power (formerly half of Fuck Buttons) opens his new opus with glittering synth arpeggios – reminiscent of the Seventies electronica of Tangerine Dream, Manuel Gottsching or Steve Hillage: cosmic dance floor bliss that just keeps coming. The peals of heart-warming sound are gradually taken over by an invasion of menacing and slightly robotic voices, buried deep in the mix, and inarticulate.Power is a master of cliff-edge dramatics, and after a celebratory avalanche of sound, the narrative gives way to something radically different, a gentle and beguiling mélange of sounds, dreamy Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A decade ago, Alice Cooper reconnected with his roots. He created a sequel to his 1975 album Welcome to my Nightmare with Bob Ezrin, the producer whose vision crystallized Alice Cooper, the band, and shot them to stardom in the early-Seventies. The survivors of that original outfit also played on the album, their first recordings with the singer in 38 years. After a couple of decades firing out increasingly stale metal, Cooper suddenly sounded refreshed and full of mischief. That same team partly reconvened for 2017’s Paranormal. Now they’re at it again. Alice Cooper has had more comebacks Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Frànçois Marry’s sixth album as Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains evokes warm days spent lounging in fields of clover reflecting on friendship, places visited and journeys which could be undertaken. Banane Bleue’s 10 tracks are unhurried and delivered as if Marry had just woken up. Relatively, the chugging “Holly Go Lightly” is uptempo – but it’s still reserved.Musically, Banane Bleue is more Eighties sounding than previous Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains albums and comes across as a family friend of Belgium’s Antena, the early Elli Medeiros and él Records mainstay Louis Philippe. Marry’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a striking interview among the extras for this Criterion edition of Russian director Larisa Shepitko’s fourth and final feature. The director was talking in 1978 to Bavarian Television at the Berlin Film Festival, where The Ascent had won the top award, the Golden Bear, the previous year. She had only just turned 40 yet speaks about her World War II film with the absolute authority – not least about moral and spiritual subjects – of a figure far more established on the world cinema scene (her achievements to date were remarkable anyway for the hurdles she had overcome as a woman Read more ...