CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
Some say the albums that endure the longest are those that comfort us in our dark nights of the soul: LPs such as Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Joni Mitchell’s Blue. So what’s an artist to do when he’s outgrown the intensity of youth and the peaks and troughs have flattened out? Does life become less interesting? Or, necessarily, more predictable? Beck wrote Morning Phase while recovering from a back injury. More generally, though, it expresses a fine range of sentiments to meditate on as you grow older – melancholy, experience and cautious optimism.The “morning” referred to in the title is Read more ...
Tim Cumming
You’d have to go back almost 20 years, and to 1996's Spirit, to name a Willie Nelson album with more than one or two original new songs. The nine for Band of Brothers was a real cause for celebration. He may be 81, he may not fly over to perform in the UK again (I hope to be proved wrong) but he's not lost form.These new songs sound like they had to be written, and from the inside. They’re co-written with producer Buddy Cannon, and the working method was for Nelson to send Cannon demos of the songs, around which Cannon arranged a sympathetic acoustic band line–up of seasoned sessioneers – a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Finland’s album of the year, the number one, gold-selling and best-of-2014 poll-topper Pepe & Saimaa, has barely registered elsewhere. Probably not a crime but a damn shame nonetheless as the album, released in May, is undoubtedly an all-time great. Despite being entirely in Finnish, Pepe & Saimaa is crammed with beatific melodies carried by an emotive, warm voice evoking pre-falsetto Bee Gees, David Bowie, Scott Walker and Brian Wilson. The voice seamlessly meshes with music nodding to mid-Seventies Kraftwerk, similarly dated Isley Brothers and The Beach Boys. With full orchestration Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This has been Scarlett Johansson’s defining year. Previously seeming a slightly dazed, limited beauty, she bravely abandoned her comfort zone in Jonathan Glazer’s gruelling and strange Scottish s.f. vision Under the Skin, then had her biggest hit with Luc Besson’s Lucy.Lucy is a fun-loving student whose time in Taiwan takes a turn for the worse when she is handcuffed and flung into the clutches of Korean gangster Mr. Jang (Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik). A bag of CBH4, a drug accelerating our brains’ supposed 10 percent usage is sewn inside her, bursts when she’s kicked, and floods her system. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Far too many years ago, Roddy Frame – masquerading as Aztec Camera – took his first bow with an album of wonderfully vital pop songs. High Land, Hard Rain was jaunty with youth but somehow freighted with musical wisdom, the fruit of ingesting a smorgasbord of influences. More than three decades on, the face that stares out of the cover of his fourth solo album - his first since 2006 - wears the marks of middle age, but the thread connecting that first utterance with the voice on Seven Dials is remarkably strong.What's clear on Seven Dials, which was released in May, is that Frame has lost Read more ...
mark.kidel
Leonard Cohen, grand rabbi of poetry and the blues, turned 80 this year, and like a perfectly matured brandy, he only gets better and better. On his most recent European tour, he managed to combine an atmosphere of deep and communal spiritual devotion with consummate entertainment. Many artists cannot always make the leap between live magic and studio precision, but he has succeeded with a new album that shines in a way no other did for me in 2014.Following hot on the footsteps of the excellent Old Ideas (2012), in which the Canadian singer and songwriter trawled the abyss with a mixture of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Sin City comics were where their once brilliant creator Frank Miller’s development stopped. The high style of his graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns (1986), which inspired the Batman films’ noir grimness and the whole superhero movie boom, was applied to insubstantial, immature tributes to pulp clichés, in black-and-white pages splashed with the red lipstick and blue dresses of its femme fatales. Miller’s co-directing credit with Robert Rodriguez for 2005’s Sin City film is repeated for this belated sequel, which squanders both men’s talents.Miller’s script, sometimes lifted direct Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There are, probably, two things standing in the way of Against Me! topping as many best-of lists as they deserve to this year: firstly, the January release date, which tends to lead to many fine records being abandoned for the newest and shiniest; and secondly, the tortuous route it found to release at all. Label issues, intra-band politics and the small matter of the additional attention paid to the band's songwriter and frontwoman Laura Jane Grace's first album since coming out as transgender in 2012. However, right from the thudding, drums-only beginnings of the album's opening salvo (" Read more ...
peter.quinn
Pianist Jason Moran's Grammy-nominated tribute to the legendary pianist, singer and composer, Fats Waller, effortlessly captures the joyousness and melodic beauty of the Harlem stride master's music. Joining Moran is vocalist Meshell Ndegeocello, and from the über-slow jam of “Ain't Nobody's Business” to the utterly seductive grooves of “The Joint Is Jumpin” and “Honeysuckle Rose”, the kind of galvanic presence that she brings to the project takes the material to entirely new emotional places. There are coruscating instrumentals, too, including a barnstorming solo spot for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Millions Like Us - The Story of the Mod Revival 1977–1989A “testosterone-fuelled youth movement” is how the opening paragraph of the introductory essay of this box set tags the mod revival. Aficionados of the “clean-cut, neatly dressed younger sibling of punk” were members of “an often violently defined tribe”. Concerts are described as battlegrounds: “punches were thrown” at “live appearances by The Chords.” In the individual commentaries on the 100 tracks collected, there is talk of “boot boys in parkas” and, for the band Small Hours, “live appearances sometimes Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a wonderful drollery to Guillaume Nicloux’s wry and eccentric comedy The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (L‘Enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq) which is quintessentially Gallic. Three years ago the enfant terrible of French literature disappeared for some days from a book tour, giving rise to rumours as extreme as that he had been kidnapped by Al-Qaida. The truth – though “truth” is a very relative word in this world – as shown in the film is that Houellebecq was vanished to the suburbs of Paris where he was held in circumstances that couldn’t be friendlier.Houellebecq plays gamely Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jack White (the former John Anthony Gillis) was born in Detroit and now lives in Nashville, a geographical progression you can hear in his music. He loves rude, dirty rock'n'roll but also has a fine instinct for country music, both of which tendencies are splurged all over this consistently inspired album (his second solo venture and the follow-up to 2012's Blunderbuss). You won't hear any country music played sweeter than "Entitlement" (not that the lyric's particularly sweet, mind), yet White can also create a rockin' wall of chaos like "Three Women", which sounds like Jerry Lee Lewis and Read more ...