CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Although both are Swedish, this particular Majken has nothing to do with the pop-reggae-ska band Majken Tajken which has issued a couple of albums. The singular Majken – Anna Majken to her family – is from Malmö and Young Believer is her debut album. Instead of setting up a shuffling groove like the band, she’s a singer-songwriter whose downbeat songs are infused with her harp playing and a careworn, cracked voice suggesting she’s older than Father Time. Titles like “This War Belongs to You”, “Oak Bench Birch Grave” and “Oh Mighty Discomfort” telegraph Young Believer’s concerns with life’s Read more ...
Jo Southerd
Take a deep breath and surround yourself with some comfortable furnishings before hitting play on this one. Yawn, recorded by Bill at his West Kirby studio of the same name, is just beautiful: a word that’s overused, but feels totally apt in this case. The album hums with emotion, fragility rippling throughout. Classically informed motifs punctuate sad, grizzly guitar, his barely-there voice a close whisper.Subjects are poignant, universal, finding the intensity in the everyday, and many songs clock in at five minutes or more, giving each idea plenty of breathing room. Uninhibited outros are Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The director of this deeply charming debut feature is the Korean-American film critic who writes under the pseudonym Kogonada; one of his principle interests over the years has been the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, and there’s something of the same considered emotional restraint of feeling in Columbus, which takes its title from the Indiana location where its slight action is set.The small Midwestern town turns out to boast – or rather not, since it seems to remain rather little known – a remarkable selection of contemporary architecture, buildings commissioned over the years by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If a new soundtrack for L'Année dernière à Marienbad was needed, Pressing Clouds Passing Crowds is it. Thematically, the collaboration between Norwegian guitarist Kim Myhr, French-Norwegian poet Caroline Bergvall, the Québécois string quartet Quatour Bozzini and Norwegian percussionist Ingar Zach hits the film’s pressure points: the slippages between experience and perception of space and time. Lyrically and musically, the six tracks connect with the images conjured for the screen by the Alains Resnais and Robbe-Grillet as everything about the album is fluid.While Myhr’s glistening acoustic Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Recent years have seen a boom in music documentaries. They are, after all, relatively cheap to make and have a readymade audience. Their narratives are usually similar, and so it is with The Man From Mo’Wax: fame and glory, followed by a fall from grace, followed by self-reflection, absolution and a glimmer of fresh success. What many of them also offer is a sense of wild passion, of the raw, unfettered power of music. This film has little of that. It’s a tale of too-cool-for-school hipsters (at least, that’s how we’d term them now), with the too-cool-for-school-est of them all, Mo’Wax boss Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Dead Can Dance were one of the signature sounds of the ethereal, alternative Eighties, 4AD stablemates with Cocteau Twins and art-Goth contemporaries like Daniella Dax, reaching their commercial peak in the Nineties before disbanding in 1998. In 2012, Mayan end-date or no, they reunited in the studio for the well-received Anastasis (‘Resurrection’) on PIAS Recordings, exploring a wide world of indigenous sounds combined with electronics, and the Australian-British duo’s signature baritone and mezzo-soprano voices. Brendan Perry’s is a deep, sonorous instrument carrying all before it, Read more ...
Barney Harsent
In 1974, a saggy old cloth cat and his rag-tag bunch of friends managed, in just 13 episodes, to influence a generation. Ask pretty much anyone who watched Bagpuss what their first experience of traditional folk music was and the answer is unlikely to be Fairport Convention or Steeleye Span. The music of Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner, multi-instrumentalists with links to Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and the London Critics Group, earwormed its way into a nation’s consciousness via a cloth cat, a rag doll, a carved wooden bookend in the shape of a woodpecker and colony of mice who were more Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Was anyone prepared for the fact that Ed Harcourt's new album would be fully instrumental? He's known as a songwriter – hailed for his Mercury Prize-nominated debut album, Here Be Monsters in 2001, then swapping solo work for song-writing, working with Paloma Faith, Sophie Ellis Bextor, James Bay and Lana Del Ray, among others. So it comes as a surprise to hear Ed’s eighth studio album, Beyond The End, is a very personal journey of heartfelt, melodic piano pieces accompanied by his wife Gita Langley’s violin and Amy Langley’s cello.He offers the album up as an antidote to the noise and demand Read more ...
graham.rickson
Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction (Vynález zkázy) was, for many years, his best-known film in the West, dubbed into English three years after its 1958 premiere as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne by an enterprising Hollywood producer. Both versions are included on Second Run’s release, and it’s striking that the English version retains most of the original’s charms. Zeman’s Baron Munchausen is a colourful romp, but the monochrome Invention for Destruction is a better work, its eye-popping visuals here serving a semblance of plot.Zeman based his plot on Verne’s novel Facing the Flag, a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Faithful Fairy Harmony is in the tradition of The Beatles’ White Album, Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, a True Star and The Clash’s London Calling, all double albums because an outpouring of songs couldn’t be stemmed. Also like these, Josephine Foster’s 18-track double-set plays with listener expectations. Though she doesn’t tackle musique concrète like The Beatles, soul like Rundgren or jazz like The Clash, Foster disrupts notions of how she is perceived: in her case as a country-folk stylist. The pedal-steel-driven country flow of “Force Divine” is subverted by twangy surf guitar and some string Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Cliff Richard has been the butt of many jokes down the years, but he’s always looked the other way, true to himself. But he couldn’t look the other way when BBC TV conspired to air live coverage of a police raid on his home. Vindicated in court (through all he wanted was an apology), Sir Cliff has now emerged from that dark period with his first album of new material in 14 years.It’s an appropriate way to mark the sixtieth anniversary of “Move It”, which established the bequiffed Richard as Britain’s Elvis. And how extraordinary is it to think that his own career has been three times as long Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s fair to assume that the current state of American politics has US underground punker Justin Pearson and hip-hop producer Luke Henshaw somewhat riled. Planet B’s debut album is a 35-minute rant in the form of a relentless anti-love letter to Donald J Trump. So, while it is a set that doesn’t rely on lazy sloganeering, its subject matter is bound to turn some listeners off straight away. For the rest of us, however, Planet B picks up the sonic torch from 90s politico-industrial hip-hoppers Consolidated and high-octane punks The Death Set and rocks and grooves while skewering President Tiny Read more ...