CDs/DVDs
Matthew Wright
Being on everyone’s list of top jazz singers isn’t always helpful. Elling’s eleventh album, a kind of musical travelogue inspired by his onerous touring schedule, is a compendium of international repertoire extending from traditional pieces such as the “Loch Tay Boat Song”, to new arrangements like “Bonito Cuba”, Elling’s adaptation of Arturo Sandoval’s melody.The pieces are played with exquisite precision by an enviably world-class procession of instrumentalists, including Cuban trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, French accordionist Richard Galliano and the WDR Big Band. Elling himself is in Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s way too much proficiency in music these days. There’s way too much interest in high production values. Also, half the people involved in popular music seem more interested in the business side, the branding and the online imprint. It is very, very boring. They are very, very boring. The Parrots will not change this, but I doubt they care and that’s a good thing. I’m not even sure they’d call this an album. Maybe they’d term it an EP. Who cares, it has six songs on it so we’ll say mini-album. Mika was supposed to be today's review but it never arrived. Probably for the best. That dude Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The LaFontaines are one of Scotland’s biggest new bands but have yet to make the same impact south of the border. There is, however, nothing about their debut album that’s parochial. To make a crude comparison, they sound, at first, like a grime-flavoured Biffy Clyro. What makes them stand out is the rapping of frontman Kerr Okan, whose lyrics occasionally land a punch. What’s less appealing is an over-reliance on predictable air-punching choruses, tiresomely tailored for giant venues. These make them sound ordinary.The five-piece from Motherwell have gone the traditional route of endless Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Every 75 years or so, Halley’s Comet comes round to say, "Hi". When it does, there’s genuine excitement, not because there’s any kind of stock trade in fond reminiscence when it comes to glowing lumps of rock, but because it’s a genuinely captivating event. The Orb’s latest offering is similarly hurtling through space once more, and reminding us of their conceptual debut that slapped us around our collective face back in 1991. It feels like a similar event.The first thing to say is that this is, without doubt, the most coherent offering from the Orb (currently comprised of Alex Paterson and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford camped it up superbly as 1950s Western matriarchs in Rancho Notorious and Johnny Guitar respectively. Yet they were outflanked by the steelier Barbara Stanwyck, an actress passionate about the genre. She carved a niche for herself as a fierce, cynical frontierswoman of property in The Furies, Cattle Queen of Montana, The Maverick Queen, and Forty Guns, though love or justice typically compromised the feminist slant of these films, which led Stanwyck eventually to her 1965-69 Western series The Big Valley.Forty Guns wasn’t as thematically rich as Run of the Read more ...
ellin.stein
The clue is in the name: Selma, after the Alabama city that was the site of three crucial confrontations in the 1960s struggle for African-American civil rights, not King, after the eloquent spokesman and de facto leader of that struggle. Because director Ava DuVernay is more interested in saluting the power of a grassroots movement than in lionizing a Great Man of History, this inspiring, profoundly moving film avoids the pussyfooting and over-reverence that has afflicted biopics of other secular saints like Gandhi, Lincoln, and Mandela.The moral courage of David Oyelowo’s Martin Luther King Read more ...
joe.muggs
The story of singer-songwriter-cellist-composer Arthur Russell is tragic and life-affirming in equal measure. A Zelig-like figure, from his corn-belt beginnings he glided through underground scenes in the 1970s and '80s, collaborating with everyone from Alan Ginsberg to Talking Heads to Philip Glass. Though he died aged just 40 in 1992, he directly inspired everyone from the early pioneers of house music to current luminaries like Sufjan Stevens and Hot Chip.When I interviewed his biographer Tim Lawrence for theartsdesk in 2009 it was clear that interest in Russell's work was continuing to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lesley Gore: California NightsThe reissue of 1967’s California Nights is a timely tribute to both Lesley Gore, who died in February this year, and Bob Crewe, the producer of most of the album’s tracks, who died in September last year. Gore first charted in 1963 with “It’s my Party”, which was followed by a string of hits including the feminist-slanted “You Don’t Own me”. Crewe was prodigious: he was a songwriter, manager, producer and singer. With Bob Gaudio, he steered The Four Seasons to success and wrote or co-wrote classics like "Big Girls Don't Cry" and "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine ( Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Trying to pigeonhole Apocalypse, girl, Norwegian artist Jenny Hval’s third album under her own name, is like trying to grab onto a snake that is in the process of shedding its skin. It’s a simile that you can’t help thinking Hval would enjoy: “Kingsize”, the spoken word performance poem that opens the album, employs what might be an extended metaphor about bananas rotting in her lap – although it could just be about bananas.The word “album” itself barely seems to fit Hval’s work. It has nominal track divisions, but repeated themes and lyrical snippets cause the lines to blur. Sexual imagery, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Heimat was already one of cinema’s most extraordinary, majestic achievements. Edgar Reitz’s three series of films for German TV spent 53 hours exploring the humanity of the inhabitants of Schabbach, a Rhineland village much like Reitz's own roots, throughout Germany’s cataclysmic 20th century. It was a chronicle built from often fond, sometimes horrifying memories, mesmerically deep, leisurely detail, and a gorgeous cinematic eye. Reitz was 79 when he added nearly four further hours, revisiting Schabbach in 2012. This could have been hubris. Instead it’s a wonderful (presumably) last visit to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Giorgio Moroder has long been adopted by the cognoscenti. He’s the studio wizard who gave us key Seventies disco hits, iconic in the development of electronic music and club culture. The culmination of this archiving tendency was the tribute song on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, indeed, the whole album seemed sprinkled with shiny Moroder synth polish. It was undoubtedly this that resulted in Sony hauling him from retirement to work with a who’s who of contemporary chart-pop. The result is appalling, a catastrophic mire of Costa del Dumb Euro-cheese, pitched in some teeth-jarring Read more ...
peter.quinn
With slowly chiming piano chords, an impossibly high sustained note on the accordion, and a melody of the utmost loveliness on alto clarinet, the achingly beautiful “Walking by Flashpoint”, the opening track of The Thompson Fields, welcomes you into a sound-world of rare eloquence.Presenting eight new pieces written by the composer, arranger and bandleader Maria Schneider for her renowned 18-piece jazz orchestra, the ensemble's first outing since the superb Sky Blue (2007), the album celebrates its composer's love of her childhood home in southwest Minnesota. Entirely Read more ...