CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
Casual fans of New Model Army may be surprised at how doggedly the band has plied its trade – aside from a couple of brief breaks, the boys haven't stopped for over 35 years. Nor have they ever let up on their revolutionary spirit. Even when there have been slight shifts of style, their musical essence – a visceral mix of punk, folk, and sheer bloody-mindedness – has remained. This year, however, main man Justin Sullivan turned 60. Surely, by now, he's beginning to mellow?Not a bit. Winter feels as passionate as the band's last "proper" offering, Between Wolf and Dog, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Much like Margaret Thatcher’s tearful tumble from Downing Street, the haggard, hoarse Tony Blair who materialised after Chilcot must have given even his enemies pause. The glib, youthful Nineties spin-master now recalled Scrooge’s reproachful future ghost, a man mutely begging to be shriven. The last person he’d choose for such confession, though, would surely be George Galloway, whose presence as presenter may handicap this film’s reception. If any politician is even more toxic than Blair, it’s Gorgeous George. Still, this crowd-funded documentary is a lively, well-researched investigation Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Bitch ‘n’ Monk is a duo of London singer and guitarist Heidi Heidelberg and Colombian flautist Mauricio Velasierra. They make work of uncompromising novelty - dense but exhilarating collages of soaring vocals, restless guitar and intricate, percussive flute, spiced with loops and effects. It sounds as though there are at last four of them, and although the pair’s commitment to their own sound is palpable, their idealism lives happily alongside much passion, humour and melody, which makes the listening experience more charm than offensive.Their first LP, Fulafalonga, was widely admired two Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“I don’t really care about reviews because if someone slags it off, they’ve missed the joke. How can they slag off a fictional character? It’s win-win. It’s pain-free. It’s bulletproof – commercially and critically.”Ricky Gervais there, talking about the album tie-in with his new film David Brent: Life on the Road. In many ways, he’s right: the songs, written in the guise of Gervais’ best comic creation, are meant to be bad, but entertainingly so, like, say, Spinal Tap. It's a comparison that Gervais doesn't shy away from: “Once you know the context, you can enjoy the songs without jokes, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving (1962), draughtsman Vic (Alan Bates), still reeling from a drunken binge and a fight with his typist wife Ingrid (June Ritchie) and her mother (Thora Hird), staggers into the railway station of their grim Northern English town. To leave or not to leave? That is the question that also tests the mettle of another young Northerner (Tom Courtenay) in another Schlesinger film written by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall.Whereas getting on a train with sometime girlfriend Liz (Julie Christie) would prove the manhood of the hero of Billy Liar (1963), for Vic it Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Water has featured prominently in Lisa Hannigan’s work since striking out solo on 2008’s Mercury-nominated Sea Sew: water that caresses and relaxes; water that turns deadly and drowns. The water in At Swim is the water that the singer finds herself adrift in; the water that she had to cross between her home in Dublin and a new love in London as she pulled her third album together; and - yes, let’s go there - the water, murky and all-consuming, that typifies Aaron Dessner of The National’s production, and makes him Hannigan’s perfect foil.Like her previous work, the songs on At Swim perfectly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Heartworn Highways was a unique document of a collection of country singer-songwriters who had rejected the Nashville establishment in favour of following their own paths, hardly anyone saw the film after its completion. Initially titled New Country, it was first seen at a Los Angeles film festival in 1977. Renamed Outlaw County, it was then screened in Muncie, Indiana and Flint, Michigan. In May 1981, as Heartworn Highways, it was shown over a week at a Greenwich Village cinema. Critic Pauline Kael devoted three pages of The New Yorker to it. From this point, the reputation of the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If you’re still searching for a summer soundtrack, look no further. Blossoms will make you want to immediately take a road trip around Devon, cruising at sunset, musing over easygoing lyrics and having a bit of a hum while appreciating a good strum.The synth-heavy "Charlemagne" drags you immediately into a beautiful journey, with a cruising rhythm and gratifying melody. It’s cheerful indie, with none of the tormented whinging we experienced the first time round in the 90s (and with some of the more recent "nu-retro" stuff). "At Most a Kiss" keeps the pace, driving and persistent before " Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“I may not be pure, but I’m as simple as they come,” says Dolly in the press release, by way of explanation for this latest collection. In fact, she’s neither, which is just as well – a certain pretence is a crucial part of her act. What makes these songs work (and they don’t always) is the deliciously self-conscious tension between the two seemingly contrasting sides of her character: the dedicated wife and granddaughter of a preacher, versus the irresistibly sensual lover and artist. She’s authentically, simultaneously both things, and her art emerges from the fragrantly forbidden fruit, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There will surely be no end to the debate as to how any work of art can approach treating the Holocaust, and its depiction in cinema, with the great immediacy of that form, has always been especially problematic. Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’s 1965 film The Shop on the High Street (Obchod na korze) certainly stands in the very first rank of such attempts, its depiction of how a civilian population becomes complicit in treatment of outsiders remaining as insightful and necessary today as ever.Kadár and Klos’s film achieves that rarest thing, the convincing introduction of elements of comedy into a Read more ...
joe.muggs
The duo of Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi – aka 21- and 23-year-old Tupelo Mississippi brothers Khalif and Aaquil Brown – are the epitome of everything that is baffling to ageing hip hop fans. Whisked from obscurity as teenagers by superstar producer Mike Will Made It, they became the breakthrough rap success of 2014, with what appeared to be little more than leaping around shirtless barking a bunch of half-nonsensical slogans and in-jokes about how much weed, money and sex they are surrounded by. There's nothing overtly conscious or “woke” about them, no reverence for hip hop's history, just Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Peter Hall’s 1974 film depicts English village life when its roots still ran deep, with generations sunk often unwillingly into the same soil. Based on Ronald Blythe’s 1969 bestseller Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, Blythe and Hall – both “Suffolk men who have been reconditioned into intellectuals”, as Hall wrote in his diary – collaborated closely on location. Their amateur cast were drawn from the villages Blythe had canvassed for his non-fiction book. Their East Anglian burrs are almost impenetrable, a land-locked language spoken under big Suffolk skies.Garrow Shand plays sullen Read more ...