CDs/DVDs
Jasper Rees
John Prine was once touted, along with every other gravelly young huckster with a guitar, as the new Dylan. If this latest release is any indication, he’s more like the new George Jones. For Better, Or Worse is an anthology of classic country duets by the likes of Jones and other deities of the Grand Ole Opry. Prine has revisited them accompanied by a sorority of Nashville’s rootsiest songbirds to parry and spar in break-up songs and make-up songs.Prine did something similar with In Spite of Ourselves in 1999. This follow-up is another almanack of historical pleasures. They include George Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In 1983, on the raucous punk-a-billy number “A13, Trunk Road to the Sea”, Billy Bragg affectionately sent up the parochial nature of Britain as compared to the USA (“If you ever have to go to Shoeburyness/Take the A-road, the okay road, that’s the best”). He’s always had a thing for the wide open spaces of America that inspired the blues, country and, eventually rock’n’roll. Now, in an almost documentary fashion, his latest pays tribute to the way trains once brought a nation together, albeit very far from “Pitsea, Thundersley, Hadleigh, Leigh-on-Sea”.Shine a Light, subtitled Field Recordings Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“FW Murnau’s work is, at first glance, the most varied, even inconsistent, of the great German cineastes.” Those are the opening words of film critic David Cairns's What Will You Be Tomorrow? an extra conceived for Early Murnau: Five Films, 1921-1925, a new three-disc Blu-ray box set of the director’s early films. After watching them, it’s clear that what might seem a contentious statement is spot on.There is no expressionist horror like 1922’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens nor intense romantic drama akin to Murnau’s first American film, 1927’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Instead, Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes it seems there's nothing less progressive in life than progressive rock. That was certainly once true of Marillion; during the Eighties critics were quick to pounce on their ponderous 20-minute songs, and Fish's painful sixth-form poetry. But after Steve Hogarth's arrival the band underwent an epiphany. Their music became increasingly focussed and succinct. And soon there was only one word for it – tasteful.As such, the format of FEAR (aka Fuck Everyone and Run) may, initially, seem a backwards move. It certainly looks a lot more proggy than most of the recent material, with the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Chicago’s Chess Records first made waves in the Fifties with a raft of records which included future classics integral to defining the urban slant on blues music. Early in the decade, the label issued singles by John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. They also issued Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88”, one of the building blocks of rock ‘n’ roll and brought Bo Diddley to a wide audience. The pioneering label issued different styles of music, but blues defined its early days. It moved with the times though and embraced soul in the Sixties.Little Richard is also easily Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The career of Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, better known to us as Vangelis, has been as wide-ranging as it has influential. From his beginnings as one-third of the almighty Aphrodite’s Child, veering from light, classy psychedelic pop to triumphant, thundering progressive rock, to his later incarnation as a synth soundtrack wizard capable of being both visionary (Blade Runner) and unashamedly populist (Chariots of Fire).He has nothing left to prove, there is no need for him to grandstand, and so it comes as no surprise that his latest project, a composition written for and commissioned Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a lot of neurosis these days about retro-ism and lack of innovation in music, as if the shock of the new is all that gives things value. Of course, this is something worth keeping in mind: we certainly don't want to end up in a Keep Calm And Carry On world of faux nostalgia for golden ages that never existed, ingested as an analgesic as the present crumbles around us. But taken as dogma, it becomes a very one-dimensional way of looking at things, and can stop us appreciating how much newness there is in our ever-complexifying relationships to the past.Many musicians mining the past – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
You couldn’t make Yello up. They’re a couple of wry Swiss synth-pop ironists fronted by a suave, moustachioed, septuagenarian multi-millionaire poker-player, golfer and industrialist. Everyone and their uncle makes electronic music now, but when Yello began at the end of the Seventies, they were members of an elite club – Kraftwerk, Human League, Gary Numan, OMD, Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the rest of that relatively small crew of innovators.Yello’s use of sampling was ahead of its time, and singles such as “Bostich” and “I Love You” (and, a few years later, “The Race”) bridged the avant- Read more ...
mark.kidel
Madeleine Peyroux made her name channeling Billie Holiday. White stars have never ceased to model themselves on African-American genius – Mick Jagger on Don Covay, Rod Stewart on Sam Cooke and Joe Cocker on Ray Charles. The resemblance is often uncanny, and yet there is always something missing - call it authenticity, roughness or soul. Peyroux has grown away from Lady Day, and found her own voice, but the jazz and blues that characterize most of the covers she sings with great skill and feeling, don’t quite have the edge of the originals.And yet, black vocalists have been as attracted to the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Stéphane Brizé’s film is about the grubby tyranny and humiliation of working life. Middle-aged Thierry (Vincent Lindon, Best Actor at Cannes and the Césars) has a hangdog face which fails to mask his anger after being unjustly laid off. He seems traumatised, tense. And every time he attempts to work, more self-respect is chiselled from him. At the job centre, or in an unexpected interview by Skype, his manner, posture and age are picked over as if he’s raw material or a coat on a rack, not a human being. Thierry lacks, he is told, “amiability”. He can’t quite bring himself, in other words, to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A couple of months ago the release of “Smile More”, the first song from Deap Vally’s new album, made it clear the female Los Angeles duo hadn’t mellowed. Almost all women hate it when blokes – especially blokes they don’t know – say, “Smile, love, it might never happen.” The song is a snarling response to such inanity. “I don’t want to be your reflection,” runs the chorus, “I don’t need your direction”. And if those clunky chancers didn’t get the point: “Everybody trying to tell me what to do/It makes me want to break some shit and sniff some glue.” The song boded well.Deap Vally’s debut, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1969, the Australian band Tamam Shud improvised as a film was projected onto the wall of a recording studio. The results were heard on the Evolution album. Playing original music live to accompany a film screening isn’t commonplace these days but eyebrows are no longer raised when it happens. Pere Ubu have played along with Carnival of Souls and It Came From Outer Space. Mogwai have done the same for the documentary Atomic. Of course, this was no surprise in the silent era and in the early Eighties Bill Nelson echoed the past by playing his soundtrack for Das Kabinett as the film Read more ...