CDs/DVDs
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 ...
Liz Thomson
As Imelda May releases her fifth CD, it can’t but help that Bob Dylan has come out as a fan – it was, she wrote, "like being kissed by Apollo himself". No doubt his buddy T Bone Burnett passed him a copy of the album, for he produced it in Los Angeles, where it was recorded over seven days, with guest appearances from guitarist Jeff Beck and pianist and band leader Jools Holland, on whose TV shows May has guested several times.Life. Love. Flesh. Blood is the fifth studio outing for the girl from Dublin’s Liberties, and it's full of emotion, polished and stylised. May has performed with Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Fujiya & Miyagi are greater than the sum of their parts. Singer David Best recently explaned that he "sees it as an album rather than a compilation", but Fujiya & Miyagi’s sixth album is, essentially, a collection of three EPs, combining 2016’s EP1 and EP2 with three sparkling new tracks.Despite all the songs being written, recorded and released at different points over the last year, the album is pleasingly coherent. As with all Fujiya & Miyagi’s work, bleeps, pulses, and closed hi-hats provide the building blocks for the music, yet Best has ventured that this album is “more Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Revolution - New Art for a New World film starts well: the opening shot (main picture) is of young women painting white letters onto a red banner. “We all knew what to paint,” says the voice-over. “Bread, Work, Vote, but the message was ‘Women of the World Unite!’” These were the words of Liubov Popova, one of Russia’s many brilliant women artists; her enthusiasm came from the conviction that after the revolution women would have greater opportunities. “Everyone was going to have equal rights, and that included artists,” she predicted, since they were “building a new life and a Read more ...
howard.male
Because so many African albums that get an international release feature tastefully neutered acoustic guitar, pretty scatterings of kora notes, and lyrics centred on some imagined ideal Africa, it is a blessed relief to hear something as punchy, confrontational and insistent as this explosion of beats and hollering from Ghana’s King Ayisoba. What’s also incredibly canny about this record is how the producer Arnold de Boer (of the excellent Dutch post punk outfit the EX) manages to throw in electronica atmospherics and hip hop bottom-end without it for one moment sounding forced or Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Emperor of Sand is Mastodon’s eighth album and showcases a band that exhibits absolutely no sign of letting up on the epic riffing and thunderous beat or of edging towards the mainstream. Make no mistake, Mastodon remain resolutely heavy in both their sound and their lyrics.A concept album which tells the tale of a man sentenced to death in a never-ending desert, Emperor of Sand also doubles as an allegory for human mortality and the passing of the sands of time. If this sounds all a bit too heavy on the Game of Thrones-type sword and sorcery imagery, Mastodon have certainly earned the right Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Of all the major sports, boxing has much the most distinguished filmography. Of course that’s to the Homeric nature of the contest. With the honourable exception of Raging Bull, the best fight films are at least semi-fictionalised, from Rocky to The Fighter. The dramatised lives of Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali, and Jack Dempsey were less of a knockout, which is why there shouldn’t have been high expectations about Bleed For This, a biopic which tells the story of Vinny Pazienza, a world champ whose career was cut short by a car crash in which he broke his neck.Mystifyingly, the story is much Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The baby-boomers, we are told, postpone thoughts of mortality, workaholically keeping the image of the grim reaper at bay. The rock’n’rollers among them keep the teen spirit flowing, rebellious to the last, even though they are now the elders of the tribe, often stuck in old postures of revolt.Bob Dylan still rocks when playing live, but, no longer angry at the world, his heart is fixed on oldies’ music, as he meanders melancholically through the great American songbook: he is now on his fourth album (if you count the seasonal outing Christmas in the Heart from 2009) dedicated to songs made Read more ...