CDs/DVDs
Matthew Wright
Little-known Brazilian arranger José Prates created the music recorded on Tam...Tam...Tam...! in the early 1950s to accompany a touring dance show. When the show toured Europe in 1958, the tracks were released as an album. So obscure is Prates today that Gilles Peterson made a TV appeal for a good copy of the LP, which he couldn’t source. Yet Prates’ blend of complex, loose-limbed, recognisably African rhythm, with sultry, melodic vocal lines was genuinely an epochal moment in the birth of bossa nova and the modern Brazilian sound. The crucial word here, of course, is “reimagined”. The Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Honestly, you wait years for a lengthy project to come to fruition, then two turn up at once. However, while The Avalanches had to contend with people tapping their watches and sighing wearily, The Earlies’ John Mark Lapham had only his own clock to watch. The measured pace and unhurried approach are reflected in the languorous song spectres he presents here.Starting out life as an idea for his short-lived 4AD outfit, the Late Cord, the project soon outgrew its shell and ended up a huge collaborative effort which sees turns from, among a Hollywood-sized cast, Sara Lowe (the Earlies), Swans’ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The home-cinema release of Absolute Beginners is a rarity, as it’s one where watching the bonus before the main feature is a must. In Absolute Ambition, those involved with the film are brutally frank about this most hyped piece. It’s also an eloquent, fascinating potted history of the pop-cultural milieu that led to it being made in the then still-resonating aftermath of punk. Despite being set in the 1958 of its source book, Colin MacInnes’S Absolute Beginners, director Julian Temple avers that the film was more about when it was made than when it was set.That wasn’t clear on its release, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Purple’s 2014 debut album, (409), was a burst of party punk straight out of Texas that deftly avoided crass clichés while letting the good times roll. Sophomore effort Bodacious won’t disappoint those who were bitten by the Purple bug the first time around and might even entice new listeners along the way. In particular, a hefty dose of the funk has been added to their exuberant groove, with Joe Cannariato giving his bass a good seeing to where previously he might have sat back. While this means that things may have slowed down in places, this is still music with a beaming smile and a beer in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Since achieving international success in the final years of the 1980s, the late Cesária Évora has dominated much of globe’s perception of music from the Cape Verde (officially Cabo Verde). This fascinating pair of releases reveal other aspects which may not have caused similar world-wide waves. Crucially, they're hugely enjoyable.Space Echo collects 15 tracks by 14 different performers. It’s subtitled “The Mystery Behind the Cosmic Sound of Cabo Verde Finally Revealed”. The Legend of Funaná is a reissue of a 1997 album by accordion player Bitori, born Victor Taveres. It’s also subtitled: “The Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It was somewhere around the third posthumous Jeff Buckley compilation that I realised that my love for an artist, and my completist nature, would never quite compensate for the general ickiness I felt about the nonconsensual release of their works in progress. It may not be the fairest of comparisons to draw – this collection of nine Viola Beach songs, released just five months after the deaths of the four bandmates and their manager in a car crash in Sweden, comes with the backing of their families and on the back of this weekend’s charity festival in their home town of Warrington. But there Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s comforting to reflect that some of the anonymous children seen in Around China With a Movie Camera – a DVD culled from films spanning 1900-48 held in the BFI National Archive – must live on today. If only the means existed to identify those former kids so they could see those moments from their pasts when they were photographed with their parents and companions.The world of their infancy has largely vanished. This haunting assemblage of surviving fragments of commercial travelogues, missionary films, and home movies (one made by British honeymooners in 1928 Beijing) captures Read more ...
Nick Hasted
New England in the 17th century is the primordial soup of American horror: where Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hettie Prynne received her Scarlet Letter, the vampire nest in Stephen King’s Jerusalem’s Lot was seeded, and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible tested original, hysterical sins. There is a small, parallel English strand including some of its cinema’s most affecting horrors, too – Matthew Hopkins’ Civil War rampage in Witchfinder General, A Field in England, and The Blood On Satan’s Claw’s slightly later, sexually raw tale of a possessed village. The Witch, Robert Eggers’ debut as writer-director Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ben Chatwin's music speaks loudly of solitude. He lives and records on the coast of the Firth of Forth, just outside Edinburgh – not exactly the most isolated of spots, but it's not hard to hear in his waves of texture and simple repeated motifs the endless grey presence of the North Sea rolling out into the distance.This is Chatwin's second album under his own name, but his ninth if you include the albums he made as Talvihorros on a number of labels, and it is much the same that he's always done: bowed strings that shimmer and pizzicato ones that echo, grainy guitar textures rising up in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Devonian singer and accordionist Jim Causley released Cyprus Well, settings of his relative Charles Causley's poems, in 2013. What may be his finest album to date, Forgotten Kingdom, came early this year, and now he has released a second album of poems, this time by the great 20th century Cornish poet Jack Clemo. It's part of a commission from the Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival, set to music in collaboration with Cornish writer and Clemo specialist Luke Thompson, and with a band including fiddler Richard Tretheway, dulcimer player Kerensa Wright and a legend of traditional Cornish music, Neil Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The midlife crisis, the one-night stand in another city, the younger woman and the honeyed words that turn to dust – they happen all the time, in life and therefore in stories. In Anomalisa they are seen miraculously afresh thanks to Charlie Kaufman, that tireless cinematic frontiersman, and his co-director, animator Duke Johnson.The novelty of Anomalisa is that stop-motion figurines play out the life of Michael Stone, an inspirational self-help guru who can inspire everyone but himself. As he lands in Cincinnati to give a talk, his marriage has turned to dust, he is tempted by the siren lure Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Dance music has, for millions of people, become synonymous with the very worst that the human race has to offer. Preening, vain, beach-body bumholes dancing like everyone’s watching, while keeping half an eye on their camera, making sure than the framing is right, no matter that they’ve got everything else wrong.Yep, wrong. Because dance music – at its core and at its best – is about losing oneself, about transcendence. Always has been. From Bach to basement clubs, there’s power in the pulse. It's the trigger to a communion that goes way beyond hearing and can transport and transform the Read more ...