CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
The extent to which Gargoyle counts as a Mark Lanegan or Mark Lanegan Band album is debateable. The entire musical backings for six of its ten tracks were created in Tunbridge Wells by former Lanegan support band member Rob Marshall and made their way across the Atlantic via the internet. In Los Angeles, Lanegan then wrote lyrics and melody lines, and sang to what he had received. The other four tracks were recorded in California in a more traditional way with PJ Harvey/Queens of the Stone Age/Them Crooked Vultures associate Alain Johannes.Nonetheless, despite its curious birthing process, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It's easy to presume that the early ‘00s indie boom just fizzled away. Not so. Many of those bands have had successful albums reasonably recently. The Fratellis? Check. The Wombats? Check. The Kooks? Check. Maximo Park’s last album, 2014’s Too Much Information was a Top 10 hit. In truth, though, Maximo Park were never landfill indie. For one thing, their first three albums arrived with the blessing of electronic maverick label Warp. For another, their 2005 single “Apply Some Pressure” remains a deathless, dynamic pop-rock belter. And their sixth album, put together in Chicago with Norah Jones Read more ...
Katie Colombus
My ears are doing the time warp. If I close my eyes, I'm in high-heeled jelly shoes, wearing silver lipstick, and with my hair in Bjork buns – back when a satin slip dress over a T-shirt was cool as opposed to vintage. The first track of Sheryl Crow's new album Be Myself has propelled me backwards into the Nineties, when Tuesday Night Music Club battled with Alanis Morrisette's Jagged Little Pill to etch permanent marks on my young heart.There's a sensible reason for my nostalgia. For the first time in a long while, Crow has re-connected with her original 1990s productiom team of Jeff Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After watching the grim Crimson, it’s impossible not to feel grubby and perplexed. Grubby, as this is a catering-size example of squalid exploitation cinema. Perplexed, as its plot is senseless, the charisma-free acting so inept that the cast may as well be talking in a bus queue, and the technical aspects of the film-making thoroughly lacking: continuity errors abound and microphones are in shot. It also lacks any sense of drama and pace, and is over-talky. Yet, as it rolls towards its ludicrous conclusion, Crimson exerts a horrid fascination. “Could it get worse?” And yes, it does.Crimson Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Sharon Shannon’s not yet 50 – and she’s been performing for more than 40 years, joining a band at home in County Clare when she was eight and touring the US with them at 14. Since then she’s worked with an impressive array of artists, from the Waterboys through Steve Earle to Nigel Kennedy. Arguably, it was The Woman’s Heart project (1992), showcasing Irish folk musicians which included Mary Black and Maura O’Connell, that propelled Shannon to international success.Sacred Earth, her first studio album in three years, encompasses what Leonard Bernstein called “the infinite variety of music”. Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Barry Adamson has forged an impressive solo career since the soundtrack-without-a-film of Moss Side Story in 1988. His epic cinematic noir sounds have absorbed blues, jazz, rock and a myriad of other musical designs along the way and Love Sick Dick happily doesn’t stray too far from that tradition. Much like his debut, Love Sick Dick is a song cycle that follows an implied narrative and features a lonely and paranoid bloke adrift in the big bad city as he crashes ever downwards. In fact, despite outward appearances, Love Sick Dick is really a blues record.Things start with a zap and a pop, as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I never saw anything like it,” declares Billy Pilgrim in wonderment. “It’s the Land of Oz.” He has just seen Dresden’s splendour from the train carriage into which he and other American prisoners of war are crammed en route to the city. They’ve been told it will be easier there than the prison camp they’ve left: they will experience less hardship at their new quarters. Dresden is not the Land of Oz, though. The new camp is named Slaughterhouse-Five and fire from above is about to slaughter the city’s residents. Soon, Billy and his fellow prisoners are stacking corpses.February 1945's bombing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Frankie Goes to Hollywood of “Two Tribes”. Talk Talk. Stadium-era Depeche Mode. Laibach. a-ha’s aural dramas “Stay on These Roads” and “Manhattan Skyline”. “New Year’s Day” by U2. These are the musical building blocks of Ulver’s The Assassination of Julius Caesar.The death of Princess Diana. The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. The Greek goddess Artemis (Diana, in the Roman myths) and story of Actaeon the hunter who saw her naked body so was killed by dogs. The Bernini statue The Rape of Proserpina, used as the album's cover image. The death of Read more ...
peter.quinn
While this is a big beast of a record, it’s one that’s surprisingly light on its feet. Consisting of Danish bassist Jasper Høiby, British pianist Ivo Neame and Swedish drummer Anton Eger, anyone who’s familiar with Phronesis knows that metric shifts, whiplash-inducing changes of gear and tricky ostinatos are meat and drink to these musicians.Commissioned for their 10th anniversary, the album sees the trio’s back catalogue cast in dazzling, widescreen big band arrangements courtesy of sax player, bandleader, arranger and conductor Julian Argüelles, together with the acclaimed Frankfurt Radio Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The Far Field is the fifth album from Baltimore synth-poppers Future Islands, and the first since that performance on Letterman. In case you aren't familiar, a quick recap: the band were performing their single, "Seasons (Waiting on You)" when something mesmerising started to happen. Thumping his chest and screwing up his eyes, singer Samuel T. Herring suddenly became totally at one with the song. The performance soon went viral. It didn't just breathe new life into the band, though; it also put them under a new level of scrutiny.All credit, then, that the boys haven't buckled under pressure Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“But when did you become an object of pity?” Nick Cave asks himself. Brighton’s streets have become an obstacle course of concerned strangers and acquaintances, in the arms of whom he may find himself collapsed, crying. Such indignity was his grief’s smallest cost, after his 15-year-old son Arthur fatally fell from a cliff in 2015.One More Time with Feeling was released in cinemas last year, in a complex 3D process. Watched at Cave’s favourite cinema in his adopted hometown Brighton on its muggy opening night, it felt oppressively intense and increasingly raw, with the 3D adding hallucinatory Read more ...
David Nice
No-one has ever matched costume drama to psychological depth quite like Luchino Visconti. Much of it has to do with what Henry James termed a "divided consciousness": as a nobleman who became a communist in World War Two and was relatively open about his homosexuality, Visconti was able to depict the warped opulence surrounding Ludwig II of Bavaria with a meticulous eye for detail and composition, while analysing the causes of his dramatic decline as a despised outsider (and no, Ludwig was not mad; Visconti was among the first to say so).There's little of the hysteria and excessive Read more ...