CDs/DVDs
Graham Fuller
British cinema has done so badly by Christmas that the revival of a film that parses the nature of the festival while mining its potential for sparking family strife is cause for celebration. Long neglected, The Holly and the Ivy (1952) has been handsomely restored by StudioCanal and deserves to become a seasonal staple alongside Scrooge (1951), Comfort and Joy (1984), and the BBC adaptation of Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings (1986), which is currently available on YouTube only. The Holly and the Ivy was adapted by Anatole de Grunwald from Wynyard Brown’s West End hit. Set on Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In a season awash with limp carols, dodgy glam-rock and schmaltzy jazz, all credit to Los Lobos for coming up with something different. LLegó Navidad (Christmas is Here) contains 12 festive folk songs, mostly hailing from Latin America. There's not a sprig of tinsel or ho ho ho in sight. Instead, we get a series of simple, homespun textures warmed by the Southern Californian sun. It's all a lot softer than the Los Lobos of "La Bamba" (1987). This is much more like their acoustic Mexican album La Pistola y La Corazon. The East LA quintet researched over 150 lesser- Read more ...
Guy Oddy
If there’s one man who has got the chutzpah to sing songs about the Baby Jesus while flashing the Devil’s horns, it’s Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford. In fact, on the CD cover to his latest solo album, this is exactly what he’s doing – for Celestial is Rob Halford’s Christmas album. It is also a record which shows serious brass neck by taking a handful of original tunes and a truckload of traditional Christmas carols and applying a total New Wave of British Heavy Metal make-over throughout.“Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” keeps all of the original lyrics but accompanies them with monster Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Liam Payne is a Simon Cowell-manufactured pop star worth tens of millions off the back of music that’ll be regarded in a few years’ time much as the Bay City Rollers or Curiosity Killed The Cat are regarded now. Aesthetically an easy target, then, so there’s a temptation to take a counterintuitive approach and explore only what’s great about his debut album – and it does have its moments – but the short of it is that a wide range of mostly female 15-25 year olds are going to like this, and most others won’t.Where Harry Styles’ solo output has been courting an audience outside chart–pop, Liam Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Before the days of stardom on Jay-Z and Kanye’s scale, before Brooklyn became a millionaire’s playground, Gang Starr were deeply influential in hip hop and became pioneers of jazz rap. However, Guru disassociated himself from long-term partner DJ Premier as far back as 2006 and yet here we are, nine years after his death and 16 years after their last album together listening to the duo in stereo. A long legal battle resulted in some of Guru’s old tapes featuring around 30 unreleased rhymes being given to his family, allowing DJ Premier the opportunity to "retrofit" melodies and samples around Read more ...
Tim Cumming
From the off, with a bellicose Daltrey declaring “I don’t care, I know you’re going to hate this song,” on the opener “This Music Must Fade” to the ferocious vocal hitched up to a careering chariot of a riff that drives “Ball and Chain”, and the look-back-in-anger ravings of “I Don’t Wanna Get Wise”, WHO sets its stall as The Who thriving on the kind of energy that fuelled this band in the Sixties and Seventies, while dwelling in that wordy introspective philosophical space Townshend has occupied for decades, in interview and in song. The sound and fury of this bracing set of openers harks Read more ...
graham.rickson
Moonrise Kingdom is stuffed with director Wes Anderson’s familiar tropes. Elaborate sets, artfully designed props and Bill Murray all feature, the usual eccentricities tempered by genuine affection for the film’s young heroes. Anderson’s eighth feature film, released in 2012, is about many things: youthful love, isolated rural life and family dysfunction among them. Bob Balaban’s twinkly Narrator, sporting typically Andersonian attire, sets the scene: we’re on the New England island of New Penzance in 1965, three days before a devastating storm is due to hit.Twelve-year-old Sam Shakusky (a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Despite their name, U-Bahn are from Melbourne. Instead of looking to Germany for their musical inspiration, their minds are on a vintage band from Ohio. “Beta Boyz”, the first track on their eponymous debut album, reassembles the key elements of Devo’s version of “(I Can’t Get no) Satisfaction”. The chicka-chicka tick-tock guitar is present. So too are the throat-swallowing Mark Mothersbaugh vocals, the rotating tin-can drums and primitive synth.Next up, “Turbulent Love” does a similar job by hybridising Devo’s “Mongoloid” and “Whip it”. “War of Currents” borrows from the de-evolutionist's “ Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s seven years since Portugal’s muscular psychedelicists, 10.000 Russos got together and five since they released their barnstorming, self-titled EP. In that time, they’ve put out numerous other EPs, singles, appearances on compilation discs and three albums, including a collaboration with Dutch industrialists, RMFTM. However, their latest long-player, Kompromat could just end up being their defining piece of work. Comprising just five tracks, only one of which comes to an end in less than seven minutes, it is a glorious mix of thumping, trancey grooves, reverb, distortion and half-heard Read more ...
joe.muggs
There couldn't be much that's more techno than for a musician to have had a quarter-century career, only just be releasing his second solo album, and making it a quadruple. David Sumner aka Function is a true scene trouper: starting out in New York in the mid-90s, moving – inevitably – to Berlin in the 2000s, releasing dozens of 12”s, collaborating successfully with other key names like Dominick “Vatican Shadow” Fernow and, for quite some time, with Karl “Regis” O'Connor, and DJing for more nights than the imagination can comfortably encompass in various dark caverns and catacombs.These 17 Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ever since rock’n’roll began, the orchestral cover version has played a contentious role in popular music. It has sometimes signified a revision of raw musical styles for those who prefer being spoon-fed; it has sometimes represented aspirations to high culture and the concert halls of yore; in more recent years, it’s often been a gambit to persuade those growing older to re-listen to a defanged version of their youth. And it’s almost always a cash-in.The rave generation is now ageing and, just as inevitably, bland orchestral versions of their prime have started appearing. Whole nights have Read more ...
graham.rickson
I was hooked after perusing Thought Porridge’s track listing; who wouldn’t want to hear songs with titles like “The British Cactus & Succulent Society” or “Mournful Colouring Book”? The latter is laugh-out-loud funny, its downbeat list of subjects including “a graph showing a downward trend in life expectancy/A tonsillectomy”, jauntily intoned by lead vocalist Dean Murray against a parping brass backdrop. “A dropped ice cream, a forgotten dream,” goes another line. Murray’s crisp delivery recalls Vivian Stanshall’s late Sixties stint with the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, and like the Read more ...