CDs/DVDs
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Coming to Foals without the baggage – without knowing, for example, that they’re a British guitar band of mid-Noughties vintage – is a disconcerting experience, not least where fourth album What Went Down is concerned. Opening with a huge, heavy title track that – at least by its mid-section – appears to owe a heavy, screaming debt to the band’s recent association with Metallica, by its end the album checks off anthemic indie rock, beats-driven electronic experimentation and the sort of widescreen, cinematic sound beloved of contemporaries from the other side of the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It’s nearly 40 years since bassist Steve Harris formed Iron Maiden and much has changed since then. Singer Bruce Dickinson has learned to fence, fly and kick cancer in the cock, and the band have continued to release albums – albums which, though rarely hitting the high points of their Eighties heyday, have often been pretty decent and admirably ambitious in scope.Speaking of ambition, Book of Souls, their latest, is comprised of 11 tracks and clocks in at an impressive 92 minutes. Now that’s a long album, but consider that, within those 11 tracks, there are three that go over 10 minutes and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Randolph Scott had ridden long in the saddle before Budd Boetticher directed him as a driven loner with a painful past in the six harsh “Ranown Cycle” Westerns (1956-60). His apprenticeship began with ten 1930s Zane Grey oaters, mostly made by Henry Hathaway, and concluded with the B-Westerns he starred in for Edwin L. Marin and André de Toth after World War II. Marin’s rousing Abilene Town (1946), newly released on Blu-ray, augured Scott’s becoming a genre icon.Though it lacks the melancholy poetry of John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (also 1946), Marin’s Western similarly evokes postwar Read more ...
Guy Oddy
As someone who has always been completely indifferent to the retro New Wave stylings of The Libertines, I can’t say that I greeted the news of their reformation with anything more than a shrug of the shoulders. Sure, they had released a few toe-tappers around the turn of the century, but to view Pete Doherty and Carl Barât’s mob as culturally significant for their music seemed absurd. So I was somewhat surprised to experience all my prior prejudices go up in smoke on hearing Anthems For Doomed Youth, the band’s third album and first in over a decade.Whereas 2002’s Up The Bracket and their Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
According to the press release for Contrepoint, “AIR have not split up.” Nicolas Godin, one half of the French duo, goes on to say: “We weren’t surprising ourselves anymore… I’d made a statement with AIR and I wanted to go back to the classical world, to grow up musically; to renew myself.” What that actually reveals about his attitude towards the supposedly still-extant AIR is moot, but the result is Contrepoint, his first solo album. It is based around the music of Bach.It’s best to ignore the silly opening cut, “Orca”, a synth-and-metal hybrid reminiscent of a speed-induced Rush and begin Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Danish director Thomas Vinterberg specialises in claustrophobic, asphyxiating atmospheres, from his breakthrough family abuse tale Festen to the more recent study of small-town paranoia, The Hunt. Moving from domestic close-up to the Wessex wide shots and cosmic panoramas of Thomas Hardy, there’s a grinding of gears, and choosing Far From The Madding Crowd as his Hardy debut, when John Schlesinger’s 1967 adaptation is so revered, seems provocative.The Wessex countryside comes across as postcard-pretty rather than awesome and bleakVinterberg has cast well, and Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Bands that stand out live often disappoint on record: it can be difficult to capture the energy, the ferociousness, the vitality that makes a group of musicians special when you freeze it in time. Experimental pop trio Micachu & the Shapes - who have the dubious distinction of being one of the best live acts I’ve ever seen yet one whose music I’ve never been able to enjoy at home - have probably come as close to doing so as is possible on Good Sad Happy Bad. The album began life as an extended jam session, sneakily recorded by drummer Marc Pell.The result is an album that sounds Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Isley Brothers: The RCA Victor & T-Neck Album Masters (1958–1983)Head straight for Track 14, Disc 10’s quadrophonic mix – which plays fine on a normal stereo – of The Isley Brothers’ version of Seals & Crofts’ “Summer Breeze”. It’s an instant head-turner as it highlights melody lines in the vocal which were not apparent on the familiar single. The jazzy piano is also more to the fore. Then nip to Track 11, Disc 13’s instrumental version of “Harvest for the World” which, shorn of its vocals, reveals the complex arrangement and intricate, lush production of this seemingly Read more ...
Graham Fuller
John Lydon’s group went 20 years without cutting a studio album before issuing This Is PiL. A mere three years on, the singer and his bandmates Lu Edmonds (guitar), Scott Firth (bass) and Bruce Smith (drums) have produced an album as robust and playful as its predecessor. If only Lydon had had such a settled combo and the means to be prolific in the Nineties and Noughties.The bracing avant-garde experimentalism of Metal Box and The Flowers of Romance now a distant memory, PiL has arrived at a choleric post-punk groove seared by Edmonds’ bravura riffs. It’s as suited to Lydon’s fast, hectoring Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Once upon a time, there was a label called Whatever We Want. As well as releasing vital, uncompromising records by Gareth “Godsy” Goddard and French prog-rock sampling delights from Quiet Village, in 2008 a 12” called The Rose saw the light of day. It was by The Laughing Light of Plenty and it was a nothing short of a revelation.The perfect marriage of live feel and dance sensibility, it was pretty much the record that everyone wished the Stone Roses had released after their hiatus, instead of descending into heavy riffing cock rock. An album followed, but seemingly only in Japan or for the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any film about a series of real-life unsolved murders is ready to be tagged as exploitation. With The Town That Dreaded Sundown, the waters are muddied as it draws on a 1976 proto-slasher film of the same name which luridly retold the true story of killings which took place in the Arkansas-Texas border-straddling town of Texarkana in 1946. It features a murderer recreating the Seventies film in the present day while also revisiting the 1940's crimes.A meta-take on exploitation, The Town That Dreaded Sundown is not only a sequel but also includes sequences from its inspiration and seeks to Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Nyanza is the province of western Kenya where this intriguing Anglo-Kenyan, inter-generational five-piece recorded their third album, exploring the region in which the Luo people created their music. The Kenyan contingent, nyatiti (a plucked lyre) master Joseph Nyamungu and Luo percussionist Charles Owoko are both from that tribe, with Londoners Tom Skinner (drums), Jesse Hackett (vox/keys) and Louis Hackett (bass) making up the remainder. There’s a narrative arc of sorts, as the music traces the band’s journey from opening track “Nairobi (Too Hot)” into Nyanza, with a centerpiece, “Nyanza Read more ...