CDs/DVDs
Jasper Rees
The album of the sitcom. You don’t get a lot of those, and technically – beyond the title song – you don’t get one here either. “Cradle to the Grave” is the theme tune for Danny Baker’s autobiographical comedy currently on BBC Two, based on his memoir of growing up in south London in the same vicinity as Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook. In fact, the song came first. Squeeze’s 14th studio album, their first since 1998, has been several years in the brewing: they resumed touring in 2007 and pondered writing new material four years ago. The result is that rock’n’roll collectors’ item, an album Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This is Yppah’s fouth album. It’s being reviewed here today because Janet Jackson won’t let us listen to her album yet. theartsdesk heard yesterday that it’s still under wraps, fearful of piracy. This is a regular occurrence, especially with big US stars. It is also fortuitous because Yppah makes the sort of delicious off-radar music that deserves wider exposure. In the Autumn, when so many big names are releasing music, he and multitudes boasting a similarly low profile are shunted aside so you can read about the usual deluge of glossy everyday normalcy.Yppah, on the other hand, a guy called Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s easy to forget about the Slovak side of the Czechoslovak “New Wave”: works coming out of Bratislava often seem to receive less attention, even on their home territory, than those from Prague, where the now legendary FAMU film school that gave birth to the film movement was based.And that’s despite Štefan Uher’s Slovak film of 1962, The Sun in a Net, being generally acclaimed as the one that set the New Wave rolling. It makes for a situation, as Eastern Europe film scholar Peter Hames notes in a filmed extra on this Second Run DVD release, in which Slovak film of the period hasn’t so much Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title of Don Henley's fifth solo album refers to the rural area of East Texas where he grew up, listening to country music stations like Shreveport's fabled Louisiana Hayride and absorbing the building blocks of the country-rock sound he forged with the Eagles. The Eagles went through many changes, but country remains close to Henley's heart, and Cass County sounds like the country albums that used to come out of the old Nashville in the 1950s and Sixties. Try his version of the Louvin Brothers' 1955 hit "When I Stop Dreaming", remade here as a scintillating duet with Dolly Parton.Despite Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Lana Del Rey’s breakthrough single “Video Games” and its parent album, Born To Die gave the impression of a modern day Nancy Sinatra with added hip hop production, while its follow-up Ultraviolence added a bluesy twist to her sound. Honeymoon, however, brings a sophisticated world-weariness to the party and may come to be regarded as her signature album in years to come.Whereas Del Rey previously gave the impression of being a hip young thing that did the odd daft thing, now she seems to be channelling Dorothy Vallens, from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, with tales of melancholy and regret that Read more ...
mark.kidel
Antonioni’s celebrated trio of films, L’Aventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse, established the Italian director as a major and influential force in world cinema. All three of the works deal with the failure that resides at the heart of human relationship, offering a Mediterranean mirror to the Nordic angst associated with Bergman’s films of the same era.The women in Antonioni’s films – often played by Monica Vitti, his wife and muse – invariably upstage the men. Vittoria, in L’Eclisse, leaves her rather limp boyfriend Riccardo (Francesco Rabal) and drifts away from the wreckage of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
New Order's first album of new material since 2005's Waiting for the Siren's Call reveals a band sounding rejuvenated and fighting fit, despite the fact that they're halfway through their fourth decade. The current lineup is original members Bernard Sumner, Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris, now augmented by guitarist Phil Cunningham and bassist Tom Chapman, the latter filling the giant boots of the departed Peter Hook. But there's no doubt the new chemistry works, and the songs here run the gamut of dance, rock, electronica and even disco with a kind of manic glee.There's nothing resembling Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Faces: You Can Make Me Dance, Sing or Anything… 1970–1975Faces were always about more than just the music. From the moment they were formed by ex-members of The Jeff Beck Group and Small Faces in June 1969, tension was integral. Their front man and singer Rod Stewart ran a parallel solo career throughout the band’s life and the public image as boozy, cheeky lads was useful for papering over any cracks. The story is worth telling, but it is not one told by this collection of their studio albums and singles – more on that in a few paragraphs.Sometimes, the tension surfaced. Talking to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
As the year in which Jenny Hval has already declared war on “soft dick rock”, 2015 seems perfect for the return of Peaches: the electroclash shock-rock pioneer’s bass-heavy, provocative music is the diametric opposite. Rub, her first album in six years, comes as an audio and visual package: each track is accompanied by an artist-directed video featuring everything from Peaches and comedian Margaret Cho sharing a day of zany adventures while dressed in matching hand-knit body suits (complete with comically oversized, flapping penises) to performance artist Empress Stah shooting lasers from a Read more ...
joe.muggs
Natasha Khan has taken a fascinating trajectory through the music world. As Bat For Lashes she first came to public attention as part of an early-2000s wave of psychedelia, allied in particular to the furry starchild Devendra Banhart. But her high drama electropop-tinged sound was as far from Banhart's all-organic “freak folk” as it was from the fiddlier laptop-driven sound of folktronica, and she ended up occupying a space all her own. Only the similarly theatrical Marina & The Diamonds came close to her approach, although the ghastly Florence would ride an altogether crasser and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The repercussions of the revelations about intelligence gathering by American and other surveillance services made by US whistleblower Edward Snowden have proved huge. Laura Poitras’s documentary CitizenFour is no less revelatory about the process of their appearance, about just how Snowden came to be in that Hong Kong hotel room with reporter Glenn Greenwald, and what happened there.To call their encounter, the centrepiece of the film “eight days that shook the world” might be an overstatement, but not by much, so acute did the revelations make the question of the relation between Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Fetty Wap is the biggest new name in hip hop. His song “Trap Queen” has been on the UK charts for nearly six months and sold two-and-a-half million downloads in the US alone. The singles released since have established him as an artist capable of commercially holding his own with the very biggest, as stars such as Kanye West and Jay-Z have keenly acknowledged. Born William Maxwell II 24 years ago, he hails from Paterson, New Jersey, an area he refers to in songs as “the Zoo” (he has the nickname “Zoovier” tattooed on his face). He lost an eye to glaucoma as a child, giving him an appearance Read more ...