CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
What should a band called Les Panties sound like? Melodic, Ramones-like pop-punk? Dirty garage rock a la early White Stripes? From the name, either surmise seems reasonable. In the event, what reverberates through this incongruously named Brussels band is a love of cold wave, the Gallic take on post-punk. In the early Eighties, Les Panties would have been at home on Les Disques du Crépuscule, the Factory Records-related Belgian label which issued records by Antena, Josef K and Section 25. Fittingly, Cold Science is released by the reanimated Crépuscule.Over 40 minutes, Cold Science collects Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Regina Spector’s eclectic seventh album Remember Us To Life shows the Russian-born singer-songwriter’s brilliant knack for storytelling. Her style is stream of consciousness, melodic musings in poetic form which avoid extreme emotion in favour of intelligent observations and personal-political musings.The series of songs are partly character stories and partly existential reveries. "Bleeding Heart" is a nostalgic pop track about teen awkwardness with a synthy sound that descends into rock at the flick of a switch; "Older And Taller" simply a ditty about someone returning from the past (until Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Slaves’ 2015 debut album, Are You Satisfied? was a breath of fresh air in a music industry which seemingly had very little to say about the state of the country, as it kicked back at Austerity Britain with quite some relish. Take Control may see Isaac Holman and Laurie Vincent on similar ground but, as with the UK as a whole, there does seem to be a bit less zest and exuberance about the pair of them than there was 12 months ago.Sixteen hardcore punk songs belted out in less than three-quarters of an hour keep things motoring along with a hefty sonic dose of direct and muscular hardcore punk Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“For a husband to stray he is merely responding to his biology. But for a woman to behave in a similar way is ridiculous, unimaginable. Just the idea is funny.” This unwitting strapline issues from the boobyish Sir James Martin towards the end of Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman’s delightful riff on Jane Austen which, in the person of Lady Susan Vernon, proves quite the opposite is true.Lady Susan is played by Kate Beckinsale with grace, wit and much unmelted butter in her mouth. She was Emma Woodhouse once, Austen’s better-known minx, before shoving off to Hollywood barely ever to return Read more ...
Bernadette McNulty
Justin Vernon hasn’t put an album out under the name Bon Iver for five years but you wouldn’t necessarily have noticed. Falsetto-strained, bearded, lumber-jack shirted folk introspection seems to have spread through music like Japanese knotweed, its aesthetic lingering over everyone from Mumford and Sons to the neo-soul school of Frank Ocean and even Drake. Plus, Vernon has hardly disappeared from sight, keeping up a steady work rate producing the Watford sister-act The Staves’ last album, and co-writing tracks on recent records with Ocean, James Blake and most infamously Kanye West, the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Craig David’s comeback has been astonishing. Partly this is due to the reason his career stalled in the first place. Lampooning him was, famously, the core element of Channel 4 comedy show Bo’ Selecta!. That programme and his career wound down around the same time. Little did anyone realise that the affectionate memories of a generation who quoted Bo’ Selecta! in the school playground would eventually combine - in a very 21st century entanglement of irony and real enjoyment - with interest from longer-in-the-tooth millennial garage fans. Together, they were champing at the bit to welcome him Read more ...
Nick Hasted
There’s a doctor on Lampedusa who has nightmares about the corpses the sea brings to his island: the women who give birth on sinking boats with umbilical cords left uncut, the diesel-poisoned skins, and those left to dehydrate and rot in holds. Perhaps 400,000 refugees have arrived at this Italian outpost nearer to Libya than Sicily, perhaps 15,000 dying. Gianfranco Rosi’s Berlin Golden Bear-winning documentary closely observes both Lampedusa’s enduring seafaring culture, and the death and disaster crashing into it from neighbouring cataclysms.Rosi wrong-foots expectations by intercutting the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Super Furry Animals front man Gruff Rhys is a quietly prolific talent. Every few years or so, there’ll be another album, complete with the kind of thought-through concept that gives lift to his literate and expressive story songs and colours them with context.“Literate” is word very much at the centre of his latest project, a soundtrack to the 2014 film Set Fire to the Stars, which details Dylan Thomas’s time in New York in the 1950s. Recorded around the same time as Rhys’s wonderfully expansive ode to another Welsh traveler to the Americas, the explorer John Evans, American Interior, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1985, John Foxx released In Mysterious Ways: his fourth solo album since leaving Ultravox in 1979. In 1980, he had charted with “Underpass”, his first solo single. Subsequently, he charted a path where frosty, anomie-filled electropop gave way to the warmth of “Europe After the Rain” and the Beatles-inspired psychedelia of “Endlessly”. The 1983 album The Golden Section was his most straightforwardly poppy to date. Then, the patchy In Mysterious Ways and musical silence.In 1997, he re-emerged with two albums, Cathedral Oceans and Shifting City (made with Louis Gordon). From this point, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“In time, you’ll be mine,” sings Van Morrison in the opening song to his first new collection in four years. That line sets the tone for a warm bath of an album, a genial, reflective, though always finely honed stroll through the themes and styles of the last four decades. All but one of these are new songs, and the four years they have taken to write have been well spent, though we are, both musically and lyrically, looking backwards. Stylistically, it’s a kind of tribute to the genres he’s mined over the years. There’s bluesy harmonica and piano on “Going Down to Bangor”, while Read more ...
Guy Oddy
For a few years after their 2004 reformation, it looked like Pixies were going to be more than happy as a heritage act, churning out the highlights of their Eighties magnificence to enthusiastic audiences around the world. In truth, when they finally did get it together to put out their 2014 comeback album, Indie Cindy, what we got was a compilation of three EPs that was solid but not really what many had hoped for. So, it is with a great relief that their first album with new bassist Paz Leachantine, Head Carrier, sees the band finally get back in their stride and inject some serious heart Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In popular accounts of Hollywood history, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the insolent real-life first couple of Warner Bros film noirs, have traditionally overshadowed Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Paramount's fallen angels were quieter onscreen than Bogart and Bacall, but their visual harmony as slender, diminutive blond(e)s
– he hard and unsentimental, she silky and insouciant
– made for noir's coollest romantic partnership.Arrow Academy has now rereleased The Glass Key (1942) and The Blue Dahia (1946), the middle pair of the four thrillers that teamed Ladd and Read more ...