CDs/DVDs
Graham Fuller
Woodfall was the independent film production company responsible more than any other for launching and realising the British New Wave of the early 1960s. The outfit was formed in 1958 by theatre and film director Tony Richardson, playwright John Osborne, and American producer Harry Saltzman to make the film version of Osborne’s Royal Court succès de scandale Look Back in Anger. Directed by Richardson in 1959, the movie – with Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, and Mary Ure – successfully opened up the play but trimmed its Suez Crisis polemic.Woodfall followed up in the next five years with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Who in their right minds has the time of day for Rick Astley? As a cynical 1980s experiment by ruthlessly commercial production house Stock, Aitken & Waterman his Eighties output was vapid grinning plastic bilge. He was annoying too, really annoying, a neutered avatar representing suburban English everyboy blandness incarnate. One of the trickiest things as a music writer is facing up to long-held and enjoyed prejudices but, on hearing the title single from Astley’s latest album, I had to admit – through gritted teeth – that it’s a thoroughly enjoyable slice of Chic-like pop. But what of Read more ...
Owen Richards
Lamp Lit Prose is the ninth Dirty Projectors album since 2003, an incredibly prolific output for any artist. All the more impressive when you consider it’s the project of producer/songwriter David Longstreth, who also finds time to collaborate with artists such as Rihanna, Kanye, Paul McCartney and Solange. Such a notable CV befits an act as innovative as Dirty Projectors, and their latest release further demonstrates the talent on show.“Change is the only constant law” sings Longstreth, an appropriate lyric as Lamp Lit Prose is a journey of shifting influences. Tracks range from folk and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At its most impactful, Époques is an aural analogue to the occasions in Tarkovsky’s Stalker when the explorers of “The Zone” find their perceptions of what might be reality warped, and when there’s a growing realisation that this may be a place with a consciousness. Rather than being blurred, boundaries have become meaningless. With the album’s “The Only Water”, creaking, sawing strings and whooshing sounds give way to a structured composition where forward steps are impeded by a heavy yet impalpable object. The even-more brooding “Ultramarine” meshes rasping cello with ominous booming and Read more ...
joe.muggs
So the ambient revival continues apace, getting deeper and wider with each passing year. From the interstices between the classical concert hall, abstract art installations, the backroom of more insalubrious little raves and festivals, the small hours on oddball online radio stations, and the spaces into which people get lost as they defocus and absorb themselves into their headphone soundtracks on commutes seems to seep more and more sound that is textural above all.Some of it is formulaic analgesia – see the simple piano pieces that get millions upon millions of plays on the streaming Read more ...
Owen Richards
The world was captivated by the Arab Spring – thousands of citizens rising up in unity against longstanding dictatorships, filling squares and refusing to bow. But for many of us, it was a world away; the crowds were a single organism, thinking and acting as one. What The Nile Hilton Incident does incredibly well is create the feeling of being an individual on those streets: placing you in that simmering cauldron, a city on the edge.On paper, The Nile Hilton Incident is a classic noir: police commander Noredin Mostafa (Fares Fares, main picture) is placed on the murder of Lalena, a famous Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The Bass Defence League campaigns for mental health. As with everything Big Narstie does, there are serious points in this release wedged next to the broadest comedy, and it’s no coincidence, as we learn from the vivid parody of “BDL Protest” intro skit, that BDL is only a letter away from EDL. An influential presence in grime for over a decade, it’s a surprise to note that this is his first full album. Then again, Narstie is so busy being YouTube agony star Uncle Pain, or chewing the fat with Andrew Neil and Piers Morgan, it’s amazing he’s a musician at all.Narstie makes the most of his Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s three years since Years & Years’ debut album Communion, with its monster singles “King” and “Shine”, put them on the map as major pop stars. Their music was smartly (albeit faintly) flavoured with sounds ranging from LA alt-hip hop to Hot Chip, and in cute live wire Olly Alexander they had a characterful and proudly gay frontman. Their new album has, then, been much anticipated. Of the two songs already released from it, happily it has most in common with the stripped, tribalistic “Sanctify” than the grinning, trop-house cheese of “If You’re Over Me”.The unfortunate truth, of course Read more ...
graham.rickson
Wes Anderson’s fourth feature followed on from The Royal Tenenbaums, still a near-perfect blend of whimsy, pathos and poetry. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is almost as ungainly as its title, the mismatched crew of Bill Murray’s ship acting as a surrogate dysfunctional family. Murray’s oceanographer Zissou is an affectionate parody of Jacques Cousteau: accused by his detractors of being washed up, he resolves to turn matters around: “We haven’t made a hit documentary in nine years. I’m going to set sail to find the shark that ate my friend.”Enter a perfectly cast Owen Wilson as a Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Not many bands have a reputation for passion quite like The Alarm. Right from the early Eighties, tracks like "68 Guns" attracted fans who wanted music to believe in – something with a message and a conscience. That ethos came from the band's driving force, singer Mike Peters. After 10 fruitful years, Peters disbanded The Alarm (in 1991) to pursue other projects. A decade later he resurrected the group with a new line up. Equals is their first album for eight years.Curiously, though, the LP starts off not with a bang, but a slight whimper. "Two Rivers" has one of the most lightweight Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The heartland of America burns a special candle for two genres in particular: country music and heavy metal. What’s curious, then, is that there’s not been more cross-breeding between the styles. On a cartoon level, this can be attributed to one being God’s music and the other, Satan’s, but you’d have thought that would only encourage determined, disenfranchised teenagers in Lexington, Kentucky, or wherever. It is left, then, to Californian band DevilDriver to join the dots.Mega-tattooed frontman Dez Fafara made his name with Nineties nu-metallers Coal Chamber but the last decade-and-a-half Read more ...
Guy Oddy
If Florence + the Machine’s last album, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful marked a break from the exuberant, anthemic pop of her first two albums, her latest disc takes things even further with a more mature and stripped-down sound that often feels one step away from dispensing with instrumentation altogether. This is especially true of “No Choir”, which features little more than sparse piano chords, and the confessional lament of “Grace”. Elsewhere, “June” comes on like a torch song before finally exploding into overblown orchestration but it never gets its groove on and lets loose. “Sky Full Read more ...