CDs/DVDs
Kieron Tyler
The full credit is actually Soundwalk Collective and Jesse Paris Smith featuring Patti Smith but as her “resonating acoustic instruments” make no identifiably audible contribution to Killer Road, omitting Patti’s daughter Jesse Paris from the header to aid clarity is not the sin it initially appears. Soundwalk Collective was founded by Stephan Crasneanscki and also features Simone Merli and Kamran Sadeghi – plus whoever else Crasneanscki decides is on board. It’s his ship.It’s one which has roamed freely to create in-situ soundtracks for exhibitions and installations, performed live and Read more ...
David Nice
Luchino Visconti's penultimate film, made entirely in a studio recreation of a two-floor Roman apartment for the benefit of the semi-invalid director, is an atmospheric drama split down the middle.The better half of it is very definitely Burt Lancaster's restrained characterisation of the alter-ego Professor, withdrawn from the world and devoted now to collecting family-group portraits; his world is an amazing recreation of a patrician's rooms, looking good in this 2K restoration. The other aspect has dated horribly. This is the portrayal of a group of brash and sometimes violent "people of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
While there will, if there is any justice, be plenty written about King Creosote’s Astronaut Meets Appleman, few will probably state what to me is obvious: this is a really, really sexy record. Now, being Scottish, I’m perhaps predisposed to believe that about anything that features what I can only describe as techno bagpipes - but I defy you to listen, really listen, to the sprawling seven-minute album opener “You Just Want” and not feel at least a little shiver. There’s a creak, a craving, to Kenny Anderson’s always expressive vocals, “can I be him?” almost the only variation on a droning Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1969, a tranche of American musicians looked back to the country’s past for inspiration. Bob Dylan followed John Wesley Harding with Nashville Skyline. The Band’s eponymous second album hit the shops. The Flying Burrito Brothers debuted with The Gilded Palace of Sin. The rootsy was a default. But choosing to draw on country and Appalachian traditions did not have to mean playing it straight. On the amazing Farewell Aldebaren, Judy Henske and Jerry Yester used banjo and hammered dulcimer. They also employed the Chamberlain, a Mellotron-like instrument where the keyboard triggers tape Read more ...
Katie Colombus
On first listen, Queen Britney's new album is nothing more than a glorious booty call. I'm no prude, but listening to her sensual requests in musical form feels like earwigging on the soundtrack to a sex tape.In "Invitation", she asks "Put your love all over me". "Slumber Party" has the lyrics "We use our bodies to make our own videos, put on our music it makes us go fucking crazy, oh!". In "Private Show" she purrs "Pull my curtains until they close" and in "Hard To Forget Ya" she quips, “Since I tasted you I got a craving, Shaking in the heat of the night, Oh, yeah, baby you got me Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Women in Love was Ken Russell’s first cinema film to directly reflect his work in television. He had directed The Billion Dollar Brain (1967), but that was an adaptation of a Len Deighton book. French Dressing (1964) was a few steps removed from a Carry On film. As an adaptation of the DH Lawrence novel, Women in Love (1969) tapped into the ethos of his work for the BBC and featured Oliver Reed, with whom he had worked in television. While Reed’s naked wrestling scene with Alan Bates was a sure-fire attention grabber the film, nonetheless, didn’t have quite the free-spirited spark of Russell' Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of popular music’s mightiest talents, Leonard Cohen, at the age of 82, has a new album out in the Autumn, the fabulously titled You Want It Darker. If it’s anywhere near as good as his last one, this is great news. Those, however, who can’t wait until its arrival, may wish to check out the debut solo effort from Maarten Devoldere of the Belgian group Balthazar. It also has a great title, lifted directly from the pages of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and it boasts a deliciously Cohen-esque sensibility.Other reference points might be Johnny Cash, especially on the cantering chug of “The Good Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1966, David Warner assumed the title role in Karel Reisz’s satire Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment. The film’s Morgan Delt was a fantasist with a communist family background married to the posh Leonie, played by Vanessa Redgrave. When she seeks a divorce, he campaigns to win her back but ends up in an asylum where she reveals she is pregnant with his child. As a depiction of class clashes, thwarted aspirations and unmediated behaviour, it was a very Sixties confection.Phase Zero is the second album by a California native who has assumed the name Morgan Delt. Fittingly, it is shot- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As this year has been designated the 40th anniversary of punk rock hitting the UK, there’s no surprise that Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy is up for another home cinema release. It’s been on DVD at least three times previously. This new version, though, also comes on Blu-ray, its first outing in the format. The other selling point is a sparkling image restoration that's removed what now seems to have been a layer of murk from the earlier versions.Sid & Nancy was released to cinemas in 1986 so is, itself, enjoying its 30th anniversary. Seen now, it comes across as hyperventilating cartoon of a Read more ...
joe.muggs
De La Soul are the posterboys for creative longevity in hip hop. While some contemporaries have maintained a presence by relying on “heritage” status while going in ever-decreasing circles musically (hello, Public Enemy), the trio – still in their original line-up almost 30 years on – have never stood still. They've maintained strong relationships with the hip hop world, both underground and mainstream, while reaching out to interesting alternative collaborators (Yo La Tengo, Gorillaz etc) who've put them in front of new audiences. Though they've not made a “proper” album since 2004, they've Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Despite their different paths in the Seventies, the final years of the Sixties saw parallels between Betty Davis and Jeanette Jones. Both soul singers had significant backing from music business insiders. Late in the decade, each had a discography limited to one unsuccessful single. They worked as models.Davis is acclaimed for the trio of albums she released over 1973 to 1975 which captured a self-penned, sexually up-front feminist funk that was hard for a male-dominated industry to market. A fourth album was recorded in 1976 but shelved and first issued in 2009. The North Carolina-born Davis Read more ...
Matthew Wright
With ten albums over a quarter-century, Neil Hannon and Divine Comedy don’t have too many surprises left. Most fans will presumably be glad to know that this release, like many of the others, is a slightly uneasy mixture of joyful musical inventiveness and contrived lyrics. No one expects Hannon’s work to be much of a hit in the garage studios of Croydon, but his dandy persona is so over-egged he makes quaintness a weapon of war.The worst offender here is “Catherine The Great”, about “love and the power of the state”. No doubt there’s plenty of material in the story of Russia’s far-sighted Read more ...