CDs/DVDs
Liz Thomson
In a career that began just six years ago, Rumer has tipped her musical hat to such songwriting greats as Jimmy Webb and Hall and Oates while also finding her own voice as a writer. Now, with her fourth album, she pays homage to one of the great pop catalogues, that of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, in a collaboration with Rob Shirakbari, her musical and life partner, who worked as Bacharach's musical director. There are many who would disparage it as “elevator music”. Critic Nik Cohn described it as “tasteful, attractive, a bit gutless” and thought that between them Bacharach and Dionne Read more ...
joe.muggs
It would be easy to create a neat dichotomy between Solange Knowles and her sister Beyoncé. Solange is alternative while Beyoncé is pop, Solange deals in intimacy while Beyoncé is about grand gestures, Solange – on this album more than ever – is about elegant musicianship while Beyoncé is about the weaponised possibilities of the modern studio. And all of these things are true, more or less. Solange does operate free of the constraints of being pop culture royalty, she has tended to be associated with quirky and cool musicians rather than megastars, and very certainly on this record she Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Little Mix, like Girls Aloud before them, have developed fast from TV talent newbies into impressively sparkly industry professionals. They won The X Factor in 2011 and released a flabby cover of Damien Rice’s moany fist-pumper, “Cannonball”, but they’ve since honed their act to laser precision. No longer ingénues (if they ever were), they’re a polished showbiz machine with songs to match. They first reached such a status with last year’s Get Weird album and its ubiquitous chart-topper, “Black Magic”. Their fourth long-player sees them snappily consolidate.Glory Days already has a No.1 hit Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Penélope Cruz has rarely been better, though her director Julio Medem has seldom been worse. As Magda, she’s an earthy everywoman, whether dealing with an errant husband, protecting her son Dani, or treating breast cancer with wry stoicism. It perhaps helps that her doctor, Julian (Asier Etxeandia), is dishy, sensitive and, like football scout Arturo (Luis Tosar) – a chance acquaintance undergoing his own tragedies who becomes her lover – enraptured by her. Magda becomes a centrifugal force around which these men spin, even as the lurking cancer’s blows become more grievous, and fright and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Rachael Yamagata likes to take her time. Tightrope Walker comes a full five years after the American songwriter’s last release, and it’s an album that demands to be listened to with as much care as clearly went into its creation. Like the French daredevil Philippe Petit, for whom her latest album was apparently named, slow and steady wins the race for Yamagata: it’s there in its staid, rhythmic opener and title track; and it’s there in the atmospheric, but no less deliberate, “Money Fame Thunder”, which closes proceedings with another nod to its central character.Best known for the sort of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
After four years, Martha Wainwright is back with her fourth solo album. While she’s been away she’s turned 40 and now says that on this outing she’s “a songwriter, but also just a singer and interpreter. This is perhaps the essence of who I truly am.”Wainwright is, of course, folk royalty: the daughter of Kate McGarrigle (whose loss understandably dominated Come Home to Mama in 2012) and Loudon Wainwright, sister of Rufus. All have washed the family laundry in full public view. Her aunt is Anna McGarrigle, one of an eclectic range of writers who share the album’s credits: novelists Merrill Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Even now, Sting's reputation as one of rock's most earnest men looms large. His last two projects consisted of a Broadway musical about Newcastle's ship industry and a "symphonic" retrospective of his greatest hits. Before that it was saving bees and Elizabethan madrigals with a Bosnian lutenist. Now, however, the singer promises something lighter. 57th and 9th has been heralded as the return of "Sting the rock star". Could it really be the tantric one is returning to the sound he created in the early Eighties? The first signs of familiarity come Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In case one thought that turning hit TV shows into movies was a 21st century phenomenon, here comes a restoration of The Small World of Sammy Lee to prove that film-makers were at it back in 1963.Writer-director Ken Hughes's noir drama started off as Sammy, a tense, one-hour, one-location television play made in 1958. Its small screen success allowed Hughes to hire the incomparable documentary photographer Wolf Suschitzky as his DP and cast musical star Anthony Newley for the feature film version. Newley plays Sammy, a small-time hustler in Soho, dodging the bookies' heavies who are chasing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Only a film which is very sure of itself would set one of its climactic scenes against a backdrop of wallpaper dominated by swastikas. Such audaciousness is typical of Nicolas Winding Refn who, with the startling Neon Demon, confirms he is now mainstream cinema’s most adroit director of films rooted in shock traditions stretching back to the Sixties. There are no laboured, knowing winks or clunky, long-winded exercises in genre recreation. Instead, Winding Refn hurtles pell-mell into his tale with nary a look back over his shoulder.The Neon Demon is as fantastic as its predecessor Only God Read more ...
Katie Colombus
When the world seems to be so politically off-kilter, fracturing before our eyes into a typhoon of misogyny and racism, Alicia Keys is singing out with a defiant voice, with positive songs about society and, in particular, women.Keys’ music is interspersed with powerful spoken word poetry that demands a connection with her audience: “I'm the dramatic static before the song begins, I'm the erratic energy that gets in your skin, And if you don't let me in, I'm the shot in the air when the party ends.” It’s inspiring and compelling, and leads you in to be “here”, in her moment.There is strength Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This tragicomic romp is loosely based on a bizarre footnote in Spanish history. The Italian Duke Amadeo was offered the throne after the previous occupant’s violent overthrow. But when the kingmaker who invited him was assassinated just before his 1870 coronation, the new monarch went from guest of honour to gatecrasher at a convoluted constitutional party, where the last thing anyone wanted him to do was rule.As Amadeo, Alex Brendemühl is quietly dignified, looks smoulderingly good in uniform, and yearns to bring enlightened reform to a sclerotic, corrupt nation. Humiliations are heaped on Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
To anybody who was able to resist the girl gang siren call that was Honeyblood’s 2014 debut album, the Glasgow duo is upping their offer. Babes Never Die is both a motto and a call to arms, the words – apparently – tattooed on the ribcage of singer/guitarist Stina Tweeddale and echoing, mantra-like, through the hypnotic chug of the album’s 45-second “Intro” track.Sure, tacking a mostly instrumental fade onto either end of an album is the calling card of the self-important prog rocker, but, as with most things Honeyblood, it’s done with a knowing smirk and a tongue firmly in cheek (never more Read more ...