CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
The pendulum of Róisín Murphy’s creativity has long swung wildly between massively pop and trickily artsy, right back to her hit-making millennial days in Moloko. She followed these with a wilful dive into the abstract, working with found sound techno maverick Matthew Herbert on her debut solo album. It was an intriguing proposition but one that never proved contagious. She followed it, however, with Overpowered, whose eponymous lead single should have been a massive hit but wasn’t. On that album, she allowed her inner Lady Gaga out for a frolic. The results were contagious, colourful fun. Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Remember how in the Eighties, lead-singer solo albums would consist of a few songs left over from the day job played on synthesisers? That’s how Killers’ Brandon Flowers' second solo effort feels. At first. The big difference is, back in the day, extra-curricular efforts by the likes of Freddie Mercury or Mick Jagger would exude a thrown-together air. Flowers’ record, on the other hand, has been polished like a Las Vegas hub cap.The net result, though, is much the same: The Desired Effect sounds like Flowers' main band but with (a fraction) less punch. The blue-collar vignettes are, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any album with a guest appearance from Eric Cantona is going to attract attention. The eighth track of Sophie Hunger’s Supermoon, “La Chanson d’Hélène”, is a sumptuous, string-infused reflection on identity with Serge Gainsbourg-style spoken interjections by Cantona. But it’s not the whole story of this by turns direct and subtle album.Head straight to what follows “La Chanson d’Hélène”. “We are the Living’s” jazzy swing and sparse arrangement suggests a liking for Jimi Hendrix’s pensive side. Elsewhere, on “Superman Woman,” Australian musical autobiographer Courtney Barnett is namechecked. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bobby Womack: The PreacherCover versions of standards like “Fly me to the Moon” and “I Left my Heart in San Francisco” were hardly going to make a mark with a hip – or, for that matter, any – audience in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Nor was reinterpreting The Beatles’ “And I Love her" and “Something”. Chuck in the adaptations of The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’”, Jonathan King’s “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon”, Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” and Ray Stevens’s trite bubblegum-gospel hit “Everything is Beautiful” which pepper the first five solo albums from Bobby Womack, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Whether you view him with reverence as the Modfather or rather more sneeringly as the King of Dad Rock, there is no doubt that Paul Weller is a bone fide musical icon. Thirty-eight years after the Jam’s debut, In the City, there is still a sense of anticipation for many each time he releases a new album and Saturns Pattern is certainly no disappointment.“White Sky”, a collaboration with Manchester space-cases Amorphous Androgynous kicks things off, and initially comes on in a wash of swirling ambient spaceyness. It soon explodes into a howling blues rock stomper though, with Paul barking “ Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Hot Chip are a band who have, over the years, brought a different personality to the hedonistic house party – one that often seems caught halfway between the kitchen and the designated dancefloor. This, their sixth album, sees them trying to edge their way towards the latter while questioning their place – and relevance – in the wider musical firmament.Things kick off well enough with “Huarache Lights”, a song strong enough even to bear the weight of a hamfisted First Choice sample and hackneyed Daft Punk-esque vocoder and still cross the finishing line smiling. Similarly, the fidgity bounce Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As he died in 2010, we can never know what John du Pont was like in person, but if Steve Carell’s rendering of the maniacal American multi-millionaire with a wrestling fixation is even close to the real thing, the experience must have been disturbing. Foxcatcher, the story of du Pont’s immersion in wrestling, is disquieting but Carell stands out. Creepiness defines every moment he is on screen.Foxcatcher draws from the real-life story of du Pont, the heir to his family’s fortune. He wrote books on ornithology, donated money to good causes and was also increasingly consumed by an interest in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A heretical thought. Films released on the big screen are designed to be devoured in one swallow. But if ever a three-hour epic was made for consumption in bite-sized chunks, it is National Gallery, Frederick Wiseman’s discreet profile of the much- loved institution and all who sail in her. An episodic tour through the galleries and the backrooms the public never see, it greatly lends itself to DVD. Indeed, much as one goes back to a gallery to look at just one painting, its 15 chapters can be visited and revisited on an individual and selective basis.Wiseman is as interested in people as Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell first put out a joint album only a couple of years ago but their association goes way back, before either’s mainstream US fame. Crowell was working closely with Harris as long ago as the mid-Seventies, still within immediate memory of the latter’s folk origins and groundbreaking partnership with Gram Parsons. He later found major success Stateside but has never been renowned in Europe like Harris. Perhaps it’s their steadfast friendship that makes The Traveling Kind such easy-going and pleasing listening.Harris can always write and deliver a decent song but Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Almost two decades into a distinguished career, nobody would have judged Thea Gilmore for indulging herself with a greatest hits collection – indeed, it’s something that record labels have been bugging her about for years. Album number 15 Ghosts and Graffiti is perhaps intended as a compromise – part new songs and part old favourites, featuring an all-star cast of collaborators and reinterpreted with the same affection and irreverence the singer-songwriter recently brought to Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and the lost lyrics of Sandy Denny.Two of the songs from Don’t Stop Singing Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Todd Rundgren is not known for sitting on his laurels and churning out the same old stuff year after year. Since Runt, his debut solo album from 1970, he has tried out a vast array of genres from heavy metal to prog rock, EDM and power pop, as well as having a prominent role in Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell. Runddans, his second album of 2015, sees him venture further into pastures new by teaming up with Scandinavian electronica boffins Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Emil Nikolaisen for a one-track ambient beast – albeit one with a hefty injection of prog sounds.Runddans came about after Rundgren Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Fall has always delivered great album titles, and Sub-Lingual Tablet is right up there with the best – Witch Trials, Hex, Caustic, Are You Are Missing Winner… The song titles, too, have a medicated, sub-lingual ring that no other artist could pull off – “Junger Cloth”, anyone? – guaranteed to wipe away all psychiatric waste...Several songs take on the soft-focus Stasi surveillance of mobile social media – the rage and fury of “Facebook Troll” – Smith’s multi-layered vocal stylings, whiplash shrieks and raw blizzard of gleeful hatred are breathtakingly purgative, the song's Read more ...