CDs/DVDs
Joe Muggs
This sounds like Slowdive. That, in a sense, is all you need to know: the Reading-formed band’s first album in 22 years has all the elements that made them musical misfits during their brief career, but over the years an ever-bigger cult. The guitar chimes inherited from the Cocteau Twins, the male-female vocals of childhood friends Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell sometimes blurring into androgyny, and the fizzy, druggy textures which they absorbed from a love of techno and in turn fed back into a new generation of electronic producers… They’re all here as if nothing had happened since 1995. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is an impeccably restored presentation of the 1945 feature-length documentary that was intended to be shown in German cinemas in order to counter any remaining support for Nazism. Backed by the British Ministry of Information, it was overseen by Sidney Bernstein and involved commissioning or gathering footage from army cameraman (American, British and Soviet) present at the liberation of the concentration camps, as well as from newsreel cameramen.The assembled film, shot in over 14 locations including Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, did not spare viewers’ sensitivities. Forty-three cameramen Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Earth mainman Dylan Carlson was originally due to appear as a guest on The Bug’s last album, Angels & Devils. Instead, their collaboration was released as the stand-alone Boa/Cold EP in 2014 and a handful of epic live shows followed. That’s where most long-term watchers of Kevin Martin and Dylan Carlson expected their collaboration to end. However, after a sojourn at Daddy Kev’s legendary LA studio their bleak odyssey has born more fruit with Concrete Desert, an album with a cinematic ambience for a distinctly dystopian setting.Concrete Desert is a wholly instrumental piece that feels Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Letter to Brezhnev, released in 1985, was a delightful curio with sharp edges. A trans-cultural riff on Romeo and Juliet, it told of the sudden romance that erupts between a Kirkby girl and a visiting Soviet sailor one night on the tiles in Liverpool. I have a strong memory from 32 years ago of feeling overwhelmed by the film’s iconic image, of the lovers' last kiss through a chain-link fence before his ship sails back to the USSR.Peter Firth, who played Peter the sailor, was the closest the cast came to a star. As is explained in the abundant supply of extras of this re-release, like many Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Instead of resting on the laurels of the great music they made some 40 years ago, Blondie - still led by original members Debbie Harry and Chris Stein - are back with an album that tries to channel their past chart-toppers while also keeping in touch with modern pop, as filtered via collaborations with Sia, Charlie XCX and The Strokes’ Nick Valensi. Unfortunately for them, Pollinator reminds more of the Sonic Heroes videogame soundtrack than Parallel Lines.The singles “Fun” and “Long Time” are overflowing with squawking keyboards, uplifting vocal lines, and overly metronomic (as in, dull) Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Mary J Blige has a voice that was built to age gracefully. Gutsy, churchy, sometimes rough, it was miles away from the over-trained melismatics of the Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston imitators of the Nineties, or the velvet-toned ingenues that Aaliyah ushered in – and 25 years on from her debut album it certainly stands apart from the mannered Rihanna imitators of the current young generation. There was always a sense in which she was a throwback to an older soul tradition, and as such her singing style has a timelessness that some of her contemporaries might struggle to achieve.And her Read more ...
Tim Cumming
He’s in his ninth decade, but with no signs of slowing down on stage or in studio, and the good news is that, while God's Problem Child may be no essential release, it remains hugely enjoyable – and that’s mainly down to the lucky seven new songs from Willie, cowboy koans co-written with producer Buddy Cannon.Less compelling are the half dozen written by others, some of which tend towards the cliched and over-egged. Willie sings them well enough – he could do that in his REM sleep – but they are not a patch on what he brings to the party himself. The likes of “Lady Luck”, “Still Not Dead Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The 23rd studio album from the artist formerly known as John Cougar was originally destined to be a religious album, but the songs he and Carlene Carter wrote turned out to be not quite so God-fearing as all that, though there’s certainly a discernible ol’ timey vibe, what with the pedal steel and fiddle and all. There’s a joyous setting of Woody Guthrie’s “My Soul’s Got Wings”, one of many previously unsung lyrics now archived in Tulsa, in which Guthrie dreams of a heaven “full of joy”. Angels abound, but the devil rears his head among the Sad Clowns & Hillbilllies.Recorded in Indiana, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
For decades, but especially since the turn of the millennium, the arts have fretted over how to appeal to a younger audience. For ballet, this has meant playing down the notion of “men in tights” in favour of “dancers train harder than footballers”. And now what happens? A young ballet star scores a viral hit on YouTube with a solo he commissioned to mark the end – yes, at age 25 – of his meteoric career. And he’s wearing tights. Only tights.At the time of the film’s release in February, the clip had scored 15 million hits. It’s now pushing 20 million. That standalone ballet segment, set to Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Best Troubadour is Bonnie Prince Billy's musical tribute to his "forever hero", country singer Merle Haggard. Haggard was best known for his song "Okie from Muskogee", a wry homage to small-town Southern values. Students of country music, however, remember a different Merle – the armed robber turned musician and iconoclast. In his own bohemian way Bonnie Prince Billy, aka Will Oldham, is another sort of radical. And on Best Troubadour he interprets Haggard's artistic vision through 16 of his lesser-known songs.The album opens with "The Fugitive", whose Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More was Ellen Burstyn’s baby. Determined to use her clout after The Exorcist to make a film from a woman’s viewpoint, she offered Robert Getchell’s script to a director who confessed he knew nothing about women. “But,” Martin Scorsese told her, “I’d like to know.”Alice is the odd one out between Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976): Scorsese’s game attempt at both a studio film and a “women’s picture”. But its first five minutes couldn’t be anyone else then: a prologue in a Technicolor-red, Wizard of Oz dream of childhood, where eight-year-old Alice scuffs Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For some of us Blur were an irritant during the 1990s rather than one of the decade’s premier bands. However, once Gorillaz arrived it was impossible to ignore Damon Albarn’s outrageous talent any longer. His golden touch ensured his cartoon group with artist Jamie Hewlett straddled not only multi-million-selling global success, but awed critical kudos. 2010’s The Fall album did not fare so well, but seemed to be a different kind of project, more experimental, cobbled together by Albarn on tour in the States, then fired out without extra polish. Their fifth album, though, seven years later, Read more ...