CDs/DVDs
Adam Sweeting
Jake Gyllenhaal and Canadian director Denis Villeneuve shot Enemy before their collaboration on Prisoners (released in 2013), but already the combination was working stunningly well. In outline, Enemy doesn't sound hugely original – university lecturer Adam (Gyllenhaal) becomes fixated with his own double, an actor called Anthony Claire (also Gyllenhaal), who he happens to spot while watching a movie on DVD, and their lives become progressively entangled after Adam feels compelled to track down his doppelganger. But thanks to the star's subtle and fastidious playing of the two characters, and Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The Unthank sisters may be best known for hauntingly bleak songs about dead babies and bald women but, it turns out, they’re not just about misery. Nor are they afraid to experiment. Their latest studio album, Mount The Air, is a floating, swirling, blend of folk, indie-rock, and jazz. For some, this will seem like a stylistic departure. But, for those who’ve kept up with their recent Diversions projects (which feature, inter alia, songs from Anthony and the Johnsons and Robert Wyatt) things may not appear so odd. Adrian McNally's piano motifs, in particular, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Martin Hannett & Steve Hopkins: The Invisible GirlsWhile acclaimed for his glacial productions for Joy Division and New Order, Martin Hannett was also a musician in his own right. With bass guitar in hand and alongside composer-keyboard player Steve Hopkins, the duo recorded as The Invisible Girls. Under that name, they provided music for albums by John Cooper-Clarke, ex-Penetration singer Pauline Murray and provided a sonic bed for Nico. They also contributed to Hannett-produced records by Durutti Column and Jilted John.The Invisible Girls celebrates a more under-the-radar Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fifteen seconds into I Love You, Honeybear, it’s clear this an album concerned with sonic grandeur. Strings swell while a mournful pedal steel evokes the dejection of Gene Clark’s White Light, the 1971 album by the ex-Byrds member which has come to define the nexus of the grand musical gesture and the intimate missive. As the title song album-opener progresses, Joshua Tillman sings “I’ve got my mother’s depression.”I Love You, Honeybear is the second album from Tillman in his Father John Misty guise and follows his 2012 departure from Fleet Foxes – he was their drummer. Overall, it’s his Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Woman to Woman, the second solo album from Denver songwriter and former Paper Bird front woman Esmé Patterson, has an origin story almost as interesting as the music. Teaching herself to play Townes Van Zandt’s “Loretta” during some down time on tour, Patterson found herself getting frustrated at the song’s depiction of a passive bar-room girl so in awe of the great songwriter that she drops everything any time he passes through and “don’t cry” when he’s gone. She put down her guitar, picked up her pen and the result was “Tumbleweed”: a funny and furious riposte in which Patterson, playing Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The quotation from which this film’s title is taken runs thus: “Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall.” It’s drawn from the voiceover of a documentary called German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey that was made by Sidney Bernstein as World War II drew to a close. It was a gathering of massed concentration camp footage and detailed explanations that he hoped would be shown worldwide but, especially, to the German people, so that they might consider their complicity. André Singer, previously best known as a producer, notably of The Act of Killing and Into Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s now more than 10 years since The Subways came roaring out of Hertfordshire in late 2004 with their adrenaline-charged debut single, “At 1 am”. Since then they’ve released three albums which have all threatened, but failed, to deliver the widespread commercial success which the band certainly deserves. Their self-titled fourth album sees the Subways on familiar territory with plenty of catchy tunes and sing-along choruses and has the potential to finally move their career up a gear.Last year’s single, “My heart is pumping to a brand new beat” opens things up with a classy, Blondie-esque Read more ...
mark.kidel
Bob Dylan closed his recent concerts with a heart-rending version of “Stay with Me”, a melancholy lament made famous by Frank Sinatra. It's worth remembering that, born in 1941, Bob Dylan didn’t grow up on a diet of folk and blues. Sinatra was the biggest hit-maker of his early youth, a dominant presence on the airwaves he was exposed to as a child.This is no tribute album, neither is it a piece of opportunism, as Dylan has never traded on received ideas or well-tried music business tricks. Even his Christmas album was shot through with irony as well as joy. With Time out of Mind, which now Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When a film is all about unreliable narrators, it’s difficult to talk about it without ruining things for others. But it’s also a problem for filmmakers. When Gillian Flynn’s bestselling Gone Girl (1.2 million in UK paperback) was recalibrated by the author for the cinema, it was possible for the marketing material to refer to no more than the first 54 minutes of the movie. So explains director David Fincher in the commentary which is this release’s only extra. If they gave the game away, he adds, it wouldn’t be worth making the film.For Gone Girl first timers, there’s plenty to feast on in a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Russian saxophonist Zhenya Strigalev, whose band of stars Smiling Organizm has now released its second album, cuts a rather romantic figure in jazz, hopping from continent to continent, his saxophone as calling card. Along the way, he has accumulated an outstanding band of mainly American players, including trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Eric Harland, though there’s still a quirky, rootless individualism about much of this album that sounds like a band whose origins cross oceans. Where Strigalev’s compositions really stand out is in the blending of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s not obvious, listening to her work, just how funny Tanya Tagaq is. Her modified version of Inuit throat-singing-for-one, introduced to a wider audience on Bjork’s Medulla, has been called many things: intense, powerful, primal. But just when you’re ready to put her work in a box condescendingly labelled “world music”, to be trotted out at middle-class dinner parties as a way of showing off just how capital-A Alternative you are, you might figure out that the pulsing, all-encompassing opening track to her Polaris prize-winning third album Animism, is in fact a cover of Pixies’ “Caribou”. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Motorpsycho: Demon BoxAfter a burst of guitar feedback, heavy, snail’s-pace drums pound. A massive, churning riff kicks in. The agitated singer tells of bad dreams and blisters on his skin. It’s heavy, lumbering and could define the most challenging end of grunge. Then, suddenly, barrelhouse piano enters the mix along with a Hammond organ. The whole dissolves into a freakout recalling Deep Purple as much the fried psychedelia of jazzy Krautrockers Brainticket. At just over 11 minutes, it’s quite a trip.The song is “Mountain”, a fantastic track from the 1993 Demon Box album by Norway’s Read more ...