CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
Hug of Thunder makes its case with “Victim Lover”, its ninth track. For the first time on Broken Social Scene’s follow-up to 2010’s Forgiveness Rock Record, the album takes a breath to focus on the song rather than its architecture. “Victim Lover” is a drifting, lovely reflection with a hazy atmosphere balancing a yearning vocal line against a soulful, gospel-esque chorus.Up to this point, immediacy has been the emphasis. After a brief instrumental scene setter, Hug of Thunder kicks off with “Halfway Home”, a less-bludgeoning foil to fellow Canadians' Arcade Fire’s revved-up bluster. Before “ Read more ...
Saskia Baron
All the accolades heaped onto this documentary in the near 50 years since it was made are wholly deserved. Over 251 minutes, Marcel Ophuls weaves together an extraordinary collection of interviews and archive to tell the story of France during the German occupation from 1940-1944. The resulting film calmly eviscerated the legend that the French had resisted the Nazi regime and presents a far more complex history of collaboration, compromise and collusion.Initially conceived for French television, the documentary was withheld from broadcast in France in 1969 and caused a storm when it opened Read more ...
joe.muggs
Imagine that The Ramones were not only still playing into the mid 2000s, but were still writing new songs as good as “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” and still sending young audiences completely delirious to boot. That might seem fanciful, but it's a pretty accurate analogy for where Lorenzo D’Angelo – Lory D – is now. From 1991, Rome-born and bred Lory D has been making techno that boils all of the European and black American history of the genre down to its most perfectly minimalist but completely wild core elements, and delivering it to crowds who want nothing more than that. One of the most Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Those coming to Lifetime of Love expecting something – anything – approaching Moses Archuleta’s day job in Deerhunter will find those expectations confounded. With his Moon Diagrams solo project, Archuleta has presented us with a sonic sketchbook of ideas that range from ambient, hymnlike refrains to hypnotic house grooves and epic experimentalism.Where Lifetime of Love does share ground with Deerhunter is in its deeply personal feel and its genesis in personal strife. Written over a 10-year period that saw the breakdown of Archuleta’s marriage and a self-imposed exile from friends and family Read more ...
peter.quinn
Denys Baptiste's deep dive into the mid-1960s work of jazz icon, sax player and composer John Coltrane also serves to mark 50 years since Coltrane's shockingly early death at the age of 40. The saxist's core quartet features two long-standing collaborators, double bassist Gary Crosby and drummer Rod Youngs, plus Jazz FM Instrumentalist of the Year, pianist Nikki Yeoh.One of Coltrane's most captivating melodies, Youngs opens up a suitably vast canvas on "Living Space" with temple bell and cymbal strokes (and what sounds like a wind machine), before Baptiste’s incantatory Read more ...
graham.rickson
F Percy Smith was a maverick film-maker whose most important work was created in a house in suburban Southgate, North London. Born in Islington in 1880, he joined the Quekett Microscopical Club as a teenager, all the better to pursue a healthy interest in “those members of the animal kingdom which have been for one reason or another neglected.” Initially, Smith used his microscope to create exquisite glass slides, moving into film making at the behest of Charles Urban, the influential producer of 1903’s still terrifying Cheese Mites short.Several of Smith’s early films feature on this BFI Read more ...
joe.muggs
Gossip – the trio fronted by Beth Ditto from 1999 until last year – always felt a bit overshadowed by their 2006 breakthrough hit “Standing in the Way of Control”. It's understandable: it still stands up now as a bona fide banger, in original form or the Soulwax remix that soundtracked a million Skins trailers and captured a dayglo period when indie rock and rave culture were “having a bit of a moment” together, and it absolutely deserved its ubiquity. But it's also unfair, as Gossip were a force of nature live, made plenty of excellent records, and were generally way more than one-hit- Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Sgt. Pepper is a popular choice for a tribute but also a dangerous one. How to say anything meaningful about a work widely agreed to be the most influential in rock history? How to approach a work that is already a multi-layered pastiche, in places nostalgic and sentimental, in others subversively mind-expanding? With decades of innovative, madcap music-making, including as a leading light in Loose Tubes, Django Bates is undoubtedly the man to try. Bates has transcribed the album afresh, but retained the original structures and keys, and with the musical foundations unchanged, there’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A well-known internet sales site currently offers seven previous home cinema editions of The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Some are DVD or Blu-ray only, others are on both formats – increasing the amount of packages on offer. Only a brave company would enter such a crowded market with another version of the film to take the total to eight. Yet, here we are with a new dual format DVD/ Blu-ray edition.Despite the spiffy packaging – including a limited-run configuration with a 60-page booklet, a poster and postcards – and fresh extras – including a new interview with director Dario Argento, a Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“So you wanna be an outlaw, better take it from me/ Living on the highway, ain't everything it's supposed to be” sings Steve Earle on the opening track of his latest album, with a little help from Willie Nelson. Recorded in Texas, where Earle did most of his growing up and where he began to play music, So You Wannabe An Outlaw is an acknowledgment of his roots and influences and an “unapologetic” channelling of Waylon Jennings, a fellow Texan with a career as multi-faceted as Earle’s own.The album’s frame of musical reference is wide: the bluesy “If Mama Could Seen Me”, commissioned by T-Bone Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“So you wanna be an outlaw, better take it from me/ Living on the highway, ain't everything it's supposed to be” sings Steve Earle, a man with no shortage of outlawish credentials, on the opening track of his latest album, with a little help from Willie Nelson. Recorded in Texas, where Virginia-born Earle did most of his growing up and where he began to play music, So You Wannabe An Outlaw is an acknowledgment of his roots and influences and an “unapologetic” channelling of Waylon Jennings, a fellow Texan with a career as multi-faceted as Earle’s own.The album’s frame of musical reference is Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The follow-up to Lorde's multi-platinum, Grammy-nominated album Pure Heroine has been a long time coming after the 16-year-old singer/songwriter withdrew from the limelight and beat a hasty retreat back to her home country of New Zealand.Four years later, Lorde (real name Ella Yelich-O'Connor) took to New York to collaborate with high-end producers who've worked with Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Beyonce, Madonna and Justin Bieber. While the upswing from independent to made shows in the polished and slickly produced sounds of pop, electro, indie, ballad and a touch of a reggae beat, there Read more ...