CDs/DVDs
Lisa-Marie Ferla
To consider the third album from experimental composer Holly Herndon solely as a piece of music is to miss the point. PROTO is part artwork, part research project, on which Herndon teams up with collaborators both human and inhuman to discover whether artificial intelligence can be trained to produce art. The results aren’t always beautiful but that, perhaps, is what makes them human.As track listings go, PROTO’s is perhaps a little too on-the-nose. The 13-track album opens with “Birth”; a minute-long, alien-sounding composition whose jarring sounds and guttural, inhuman vocals seem to pass Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Farrow’s inexplicably neglected 1948 thriller The Big Clock is a difficult work to pigeonhole, combining traces of noir, screwball comedy and suspense. Farrow’s source material was a novel by poet and pulp fiction writer Kenneth Fearing, here adapted by crime author and screenwriter Jonathan Latimer. Visually it’s spectacular, the first establishing shot moving from a dark New York skyline to the interior of the art deco Janoth Building in (almost) one single take, showing us Ray Milland’s George Stroud taking refuge inside the titular timepiece. It’s a flashback, and there’s a first- Read more ...
Asya Draganova
Singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding originally released 12 Little Spells last year as a dozen separate tracks, each with its own video. This new expanded edition is available on physical formats and download, with four new tracks as bonus extras.The Grammy-winning artist wrote the first batch of material while on a writing retreat at a castle in Italy, and the music is an embodiment of harmony and the healing powers of art. Both grown-up and youthful, smooth yet fun, it's an ultimate feelgood experience for those who enjoy a beautifully-crafted fusion of jazz, soul, and R’n’B.Spalding is no Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Before we get to the music, there’s the title of Clinic’s first album in seven years to deal with. It comes from the title of a 1970s Granada TV series, The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, a northern entertainment revue presented by, among others, Bernard Manning. The surviving episodes of the show, with the blue dialed down for a wider audience, offer a veneered view of working men’s clubs that gently steers anything too unsavoury into the wings. As a symbol of Britain’s relationship with its past, it’s damn near perfect. Musically, the post-punk troupe’s return has a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Restitute, from its music down to its title, is much about its own back story. Three years ago Eliza Carthy, a key figure in British folk music, made a well-liked album called Big Machine with her group, The Wayward Band. They lost their funding halfway through and were then rescued by 80 year old folk institution Topic Records. The album fared OK but, due to machinations no fault of the label, no-one was paid. Restitution was originally conceived by Carthy, then, to raise funds for those who lost out.Eliza Carthy, the child of a folk dynasty (her father is Martin Carthy and her mother Norma Read more ...
graham.rickson
The packaging suggests that Radu Jude’s Everybody In Our Family (Toată lumea din familia noastră) is a dark romp, one source describing it as a “chaotic yet endearing comedy chamber piece”. And no one would dispute the sheer craft on display, Jude’s hand-held camera capturing in real time a seismic family breakdown. The performances are magnificent, the direction brilliant, but watching this 2012 film is a gruelling experience. It was the third feature from the Romanian director, whose most recent work, I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), brought him considerable Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For Brits below a certain age Leo Sayer is the curly haired middle-aged chap who swearily walked out of the Celebrity Big Brother house in 2007 and disappeared. However, for those around in the 1970s his diminutive dancing form, ever-ready grin and wild coiffure were a constant presence as he had pop hit after pop hit, notably the contagious, disco-friendly “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing”. He’s taken a couple of shots at returning this century, notably on the chart-topping club remix of his own “Thunder in my Heart”, but Selfie has a particularly personal sense of engagement.This is because Read more ...
Owen Richards
Three albums in, and Vampire Weekend were due a shake-up. Enter Father of the Bride, by far their most ambitious record to date. It’s an 18-track behemoth featuring 14 musicians and six different producers, spanning from folk to jazz. It may be a bit kitchen sink, but it’s also their most exciting release since their eponymous debut.Lead single “Harmony Hall” has already been flooding the airwaves, with a Primal Scream-esque chorus that threatens to follow you to the grave. It’s addictive straight pop that continues on tracks “This Life” and “Bambina”, Ezra Koenig’s vocals finding those Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The title of Khrustalyov, My Car! comes, infamously, from the words uttered by NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria as he departed the scene of Stalin’s death in March 1953, and Alexei German’s film comes as close as cinema can to dissecting the surreal terror of those times, indeed of the Soviet era itself. It's the work of an extreme auteur at the height of his unpredictable powers, shot over the course of some five years in the mid-1990s, the official interference that had dogged German's Soviet-era films a thing of the past. Its hallucinatory power looks as striking as ever in this Arrow Academy Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Editors’ last album, the electronic-infused Violence, was hailed as a big departure for the indie rock band on its release a little over a year ago. It wasn’t really, it was simply the latest stage of a transformation that can be traced back to guitarist Chris Urbanowicz’s 2012 departure, and first came to light on 2015’s In Dream. For their 2018 release, the band handed over complete control of the production process to Blanck Mass, otherwise known as Ben Power of electronic drone duo Fuck Buttons. It was a fairly ballsy move by the band to offer their songs as a Blanck canvas – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Many groups have based their career focusing almost completely on one thing and evermore honing it. Bands ranging from The Ramones to the Cocteau Twins to the Black Keys to even the Foo Fighters could arguably be said to follow this remit. Swedish metallers Amon Amarth certainly do. Since 1992 they have been creating Viking-themed metal and for their eleventh album, they are not about to change things.Amon Amarth began at a time when Scandinavian death metal was mired in real darkness and controversy, but, although born of that scene, their sound blossomed into something much more crowd- Read more ...
graham.rickson
This Blu-ray reissue brings sci-fi masterpiece Ikarie XB 1 back to its original visual glory, with the 1963 film presented here in the 4K restoration first shown at the Cannes festival in 2016 (distributor Second Run had previously released an earlier restoration on DVD in 2013). Just how good the film looks in its latest incarnation can be observed when it's compared to the title and closing sequences recut for the film’s English language dub that are included as bonus features. Both are distinctly dim and scratchy, though worth watching to see what happens at the very close, Czech Read more ...