CDs/DVDs
Barney Harsent
Some have suggested that the title of Panda Bear’s fifth studio album means this could be the last we hear of Noah Lennox’s musical alter ego. If he is going, he’s certainly not doing it quietly, as this follow up to 2011’s Tomboy takes the intense sophistication of that album, hits delete and replaces it with day-glo drumbreaks and crayon-coloured consonance that dazzle and amaze like a disco ball shooting rainbows.On top of that, the album is peppered with vocal flourishes that are straight from rock ‘n’ roll’s diner heyday. This is most noticeable on the irresistible “Butcher Baker Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Musically speaking the mid-1980s stank. The electro-pop blitz and general post-punk aftershock had faded, but the first hints of the rave revolution were years away. 1984 to 1987, whatever retro-fetishists might say to the contrary, consisted of Phil Collins; of Jermaine Jackson telling us we didn’t have to take our clothes off to have a good time; of David Bowie recording noodle with Pat Metheny; of Phil Collins; of Michael Jackson’s massively overrated Bad album (truly, have you listened to it lately?), and of endless stuff like DeBarge, Mr Mister, Steve Winwood, Five Star, Pete Cetera, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Radio Birdman: Radio BirdmanLike Magma, last week’s stars of theartsdesk’s reissues weekly, Australia’s similarly black-clad Radio Birdman favoured a uniform look. And also in common with the idiosyncratic French combo, they had a logo – an ominous, diamond-shaped, red and black symbol chosen for the cover of this box set over an image of the band. Instead of wearing their logo as pendants like Magma, Radio Birdman sported it on arm bands.There’s no musical similarity between Magma and Radio Birdman, but both sought to portray themselves as united, as if by a cause, and apart from Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In interviews, Sleater-Kinney have been at pains to point out that their first album in nigh-on a decade is not a “reunion”. It’s certainly not a word I’d reach for to describe No Cities to Love: it’s too cosy a word – one that conjures buried grudges and a comfortable rediscovery of the things that made a band great in its youth. But there were no grudges behind Sleater-Kinney’s “indefinite hiatus” in 2006, and the music across their seven-album discography was never comfortable. There was little chance of them starting now.Taking a little of the fire of 2002’s politically charged One Beat, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If coming to Ganja & Hess under the impression it’s Seventies’ Blaxploitation along the lines of Blacula, beware. It does feature an immortal character as its lead. And there is the drinking of blood as well as violence. Instead of doing what he was commissioned to do, director Bill Gunn’s 1973 film is an art-house oddity.When the film was completed, Gunn’s backers cut 35 minutes and gave it the horror-friendly title Blood Couple. After that, it went out as Black Evil, Blackout: The Moment of Terror, Black Vampire and Vampires of Harlem. This release is from an original, uncut print which Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Decamping to Manchester from Philadelphia after a personal crisis seems an unlikely move. But this is what Brian Christinzio – who is BC Camplight – did in 2012. How to Die in the North was recorded in Bredbury, near Stockport.As cross-continental relocations go, Christinzio’s is improbable but – whatever the the demons he was escaping – it has proved a tonic for his music. The first two BC Camplight albums, 2005’s Run, Hide Away and 2007’s Blink of a Nihilist, were good but not remarkable, piano-borne, singer-songwriter efforts that posited Christinzio as a quirky Ben Folds or Sufjan Stevens Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Waterboys’ lynchpin, singer, guitarist and main song-writer, Mike Scott clearly has no interest in pretending that he’s still a young man. Modern Blues, the band’s first set of new material following 2013’s 25th anniversary celebration of Fisherman’s Blues, is a mature album of tunes that contemplate the world from a distinctly middle-aged perspective with all its attendant regret, nostalgia and more than a dash of hope for the future. Scott’s singing freely references the likes of Sun Ra, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Elvis. There’s even a sample of a Jack Kerouac monologue from On the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
No one could have known it would be one of his final screen appearances – there’s another still to come in a further installment of Hunger Games – but Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role in Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man proved, with hindsight, a fitting farewell. This was Hoffman living the part, as on-the-edge, largely off-the-radar Hamburg spymaster Gunter Bachman, whose life and professional energy seems fuelled by cigarettes and whisky.Adapted from John Le Carré’s 2008 novel, it can’t but help bring back memories of that writer’s other spy-supremos, though control – to appropriate the title Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Certain bands pre-empt dramatic sea-changes in popular music. The ones that almost get there first. These outfits arrive a smidgeon too early and create sounds that are nearly – but not quite – what's just round the corner. Think of the pub-rockers presaging punk, or Sigue Sigue Spuktnik's sample-centric electronic pulse three years before rave arrived, only on the wrong drugs and with the wrong haircuts. Similarly, the second album from French electro outfit Justice, 2011's Audio, Video, Disco, predicted US-conquering EDM, but drew too much from The Who and too little from dubstep. Even Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Magma: Köhntarkösz, Köhntarkösz Anteria, Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré“They were a Seventies phenomenon,” said snooker ace Steve Davies of Magma. “But they were a bit too far out there for most people, even if you liked progressive music. I didn't dare put them on the communal record player at sixth-form because they would have been booed off. Maybe it's because they were French.”Magma – the band Davies declared his “true obsession” – are still going strong under the guidance of their visionary drummer Christian Vander. John Lydon was another fan. The vinyl-only reissue of three of their albums, 1974’s Read more ...
Matthew Wright
With this likeable and quietly adventurous release, fears that Belle and Sebastian were losing momentum, amid the distractions of Stuart Murdoch’s God Help the Girl project, and the appearance of only two albums in nine years, can now be allayed. If they haven’t broken through in quite the way that the successes of their 1990s albums might have predicted, after nearly 20 years the band hasn’t broken up either, and the creative fecundity of this collection suggests a rejuvenation in progress.These songs combine a subtly modern sense of generic blending, combined with an old-fashioned Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Walter Summers (1892-1973), formerly Lt. Summers of the East Surreys and a highly decorated veteran of the Western Front, had already directed the Great War reconstruction films Ypres (1925) and Mons (1926) for Harry Bruce Woolf’s British Instructional Films when he embarked on BIF’s docudrama The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927). This silent but thunderous war film, galvanized by Simon Dobson’s tense new score, is remarkable for its impartiality.Though it centres on the two devastating naval confrontations off South America in late 1914, convincingly recreating what happens Read more ...