CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
The last song on The Killers' new record is called "Have All the Songs Been Written?". The words refer to Brandon Flowers' writers' block during the album's recording. Apparently, he tried everything to get out of the slump, including asking Bono for advice. The U2 singer had no answers but their meeting started a process that gradually led to Flowers realising what he really needed to do: to write about his own life.This self-reflective approach has resulted in a record which starts out full of ambitions but ultimately ends up sounding low-key compared to their earlier work. The Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Oh dear. I thought that this was going to be one of those exciting fantasy films that livened up TV on weekend afternoons in my childhood, and that there would be kitschy special effects and ludicrous dialogue. But no, it's not 20,00 Leagues under the Sea, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad or even Dr Doolittle. It's a turgid plough through a Jules Verne yarn which doesn't even introduce a freaky creature until almost 50 minutes into the storyline, and then it's just some poor old lizards matted into a drab seaside set. Journey to the Centre of the Earth frankly doesn't deserve the full Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
The Horrors have always had a penchant for churning out pop-tinged gems, and on V, with help from Adele/Coldplay/Florence and the Machine producer Paul Epworth, they’ve applied their same winning formula to darker music. The album cover, a mishmash of faces, sums up V perfectly – it nods to a huge range of influences, creating something that feels larger and more engaging than all of them on their own.“Hologram” oozes in with monolithic drums and hazy synths, storming its way to the four-minute mark before offbeat eight-bit sparkles create a solo that’s as bemusing as it is enjoyable. We Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A decade after his masterpiece, The Tree of Wooden Clogs, won the 1978 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Italian director Ermanno Olmi took Venice’s 1988 Golden Lion for The Legend of the Holy Drinker (La leggenda del santo bevitore). Festival victories aside, at first sight the two films could hardly seem more different.In the second film Olmi moved into distinctly new territory for him: Legend was an adaptation (of the 1939 novella by the Austrian writer Joseph Roth), featured professional actors (Rutger Hauer in the lead role), was made in English, and counts as a fable, very different in style from Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Luciferian Towers, the third album since Canadian oddballs Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s 2011 reunion, is an instrumental psychedelic masterpiece that reflects our times without resorting to political bluster. Indeed, with two of its four tracks almost touching a quarter of an hour long, it’s also an album to sink into and absorb rather than a likely source of any radio hits.Godspeed You! Black Emperor are true sonic explorers, albeit with relatively traditional instruments, and in Luciferian Towers they take jazz, classical and electronica influences and wrap them in a post-rock blanket Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Recorded in Rhinebeck, upstate New York, the ninth album in Josh Ritter’s 18-year career strikes many moods, from the manic to the contemplative. It is, he has said, a record of storms, internal and external; of the darkness before a summer storm, “the smell of gathering electricity in the atmosphere” – literally and metaphorically. The cover artwork – he is an accomplished painter – is suitably evocative.Ritter has talked of his wish to escape “the shadow of my earlier self, my earlier work”, and of the discovery of “an exciting sense of dissatisfaction” – a curious phrase, perhaps, but one Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the UK, the best-known version of “Shadows and Reflections” is by mod band The Action, who issued it as a single in June 1967. At that point, the north London outfit had merged their predisposition towards soul with a taste for American harmony pop and psychedelia. Covers of Byrds songs featured in their live set. The American song wasn’t originally theirs: it was co-written by Tandyn Almer, whose compositions were recorded by The Association, and had been issued in the States by Eddie Hodges and an obscure band called The Lownly Crowed. In The Action’s hands, and with George Martin’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Foo Fighters are a global superstar act. And why not, as the late film critic Barry Norman used to say. After seeing them at Glastonbury, they strike me as an irresistible proposition; their Sonic Highways TV documentaries, about music in American cities, are superb; and Dave Grohl, even after decades in the spotlight, still seems like a top fellow. Someone said to me recently they didn’t like him because he was “too nice”. That’s stupid, isn’t it? Who wouldn’t want to share a beer over a barbecue with him?Concrete and Gold involved a lot of barbecuing. Recorded at a studio complex on Sunset Read more ...
graham.rickson
Describe the plot of My Life as a Courgette to someone who’s not been lucky enough to see it and they'll find it hard to understand how a film with such a bleak premise can be so funny and emotionally involving. Swiss director Claude Barras’s magical little animation is an extraordinary thing, and a miracle of concise, clear storytelling.Based on a French children's novel, it tells the story of nine-year old Icare. Nicknamed "Courgette", he’s living in a children's home after inadvertently causing the death of his alcoholic mother. The brutal details of why he's sent there aren't dodged by Read more ...
joe.muggs
One of the more interesting developments of this decade is a blurring around the edges of modern soul music: almost a complete dissolution, in fact, of the boundaries of R&B. From the hyper-mainstream – Drake, The Weeknd, Future – via Solange, Frank Ocean, Blood Orange and Sampha, to fringe experimentalists like Atlanta's Awful Records, international Afro-diasporic collective NON and UK one-off Dean Blunt, R&B is being remade as dark, unpredictable and unsettling.It's into the weirder, gloomier end of this territory that Bristol trio Jabu fit with discomfiting comfort. They come out Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Nina Simone once famously declared all artists to have a duty to reflect the times in which they live. This a philosophy that has saturated the careers of all the members of Prophets of Rage during their times in such iconic bands as Public Enemy, Cypress Hill and Rage Against the Machine. So, it should be no surprise that the Prophets of Rage debut album is a muscular sonic push back against the so-called alt-right and the entrenched injustices of the American Way.“Living on the 110”, “Strength in Numbers” and “Fired a Shot” all rail against western capitalism and they’re quite a heady brew Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Hot on the heels of his furiously original sci-fi noir, Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich cranked out this film adaptation of Clifford Odets’s tortured play about tortured artists in venal Hollywood. The Big Knife doesn’t wholly escape its stage origins – most of the action takes place in one Bel Air living room – but Aldrich makes the most of his camera angles and wrings considerable dynamic energy from his cast.Jack Palance plays Charlie Castle, a charismatic movie star living a life of luxury. We meet him boxing in the back yard of his palatial Read more ...