CDs/DVDs
Tim Cumming
At the end of last year, The Fall released an EP, The Remainderer, one of their more refreshing studio tonics of recent years, a madly diverse range of songs and sonic attacks with Mark E. Smith’s vocals thick with phlegm and gleeful, gristly exuberance. Among the EP’s tracks was "Amorator", a spindly, crooked 3 and a half minutes of intense weirdness, which reappears in even wilder, woolier form here alongside a second studio track, "Auto (1914) Chip Replace", a fantastically bonkers, multilayered fixture of this year’s live sets, with the line-up expanded to accommodate a second drummer Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Minny Pops: Drastic Measures, Drastic Movement The Pop Group: Cabinet of Curiosities, We are TimeTwo groups with tangential relationships to the pop in their names. One from Bristol, the other from Amsterdam. Each attracted attention in the punk's slipstream yet most certainly weren’t punk. In time, both would be pigeonholed as post-punk, despite The Pop Group having formed in 1977 and Minny Pops getting off the ground in 1978 – successive years when punk was still vital, common currency and commercially viable.The term post-punk, like most after-the-fact categorisations, doesn’t neatly Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Every rock fan knows Cat Stevens' story: how, during the early Seventies, the son of a Greek café owner conquered the world’s charts with classics like “Wild World” and “Father and Son” but eventually tired of the music business, found Allah, and packed his guitar away. Since 2006, though, the artist currently known as Yusuf Islam has been slowly returning to his old day job. So far, most agree, the results have been pleasant rather than stellar. Tell ‘Em I’m Gone, however, is in a different league. Teaming up with production guru Rick Rubin (of Johnny Cash’s American Recordings) Cat Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Angelina Jolie carries this re-visited Disney classic. She is the flying buttress that supports the old story told anew, as commanding as the nuclear green energy she emits into the stratosphere and as striking as any original drawing may have been.While the famous curse scene is as honest an homage as it could be to the original animation, Maleficent draws upon the backstory of the supposedly evil villain from Sleeping Beauty. A woman mistreated and exacting her revenge, Jolie's powerfully haunting portrayal complete with clipped British accent sees her excel as both villain and Read more ...
Guy Oddy
To the uninitiated, Black Veil Brides are five young men who look and sound pretty much like ‘80s hair metal horrors Motley Crűe – but with a hefty dollop of emo attitude on top. They may be the kings of hard rock cliché but it hasn’t stopped them from selling ridiculous amounts of albums right from their 2010 debut, We Stitch These Wounds.Black Veil Brides IV is, unsurprisingly, the band’s fourth album and sees them taking on the woes of the world with a bagful of jolly ditties going under titles such as “Drag Me To The Grave” and “World Of Sacrifice”. “You want a fight. I’ll bring the war” Read more ...
Matthew Wright
You wonder what gets them out of bed. After more than a decade together, and with this, their fourth album, just released, The Twilight Sad must be feeling very miserable. The odd thing is, they seem to revel in their misery. “Scottish band who enjoy drinking & making miserable music,” says The Twilight Sad’s Twitter profile. “Enjoy” and “miserable” are key. They have taken shoe-gazing mournfulness to a new level of craftsmanship. This time, it’s more enjoyable than ever, but you can’t help feeling it’s a bit less spontaneous. There’s just a hint that this is not ordinary misery, but Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Blaxploitation, like Krautrock, is an early Seventies term that sounds faintly uneasy now. Begun by Hollywood studio hits such as Shaft, the craze for films with mostly black casts and often black creators made expressly for black audiences was basically positive, though. Blacula (1972) gave the vampire flick its makeover, as an 18th-century African prince hoping Count Dracula will help him end the slave trade is instead cursed to be undead, and left entombed till two gay interior designers, distracted by what a feature his coffin will be, unwittingly unleash him on Seventies LA.Neither Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As tough-going as expected, the eagerly anticipated collaboration between Scott Walker and deconstructed metallers Sunn O))) is 48 minutes of deliberately ugly darkness. On the opening track “Brando”, in his now-familiar strangulated tenor, Walker wails “a beating would do me a world of good.” He’s already punned “whip-poor-will” which was, with crushing inevitability, followed by the sound of an actual bullwhip. All the while, Sunn O))) grind away, producing elongated slabs of unyielding noise.Like Walker's last album, 2012’s Bish Bosch, Soused (as in saturated or drunk) is, sonically, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In a week packed with releases from music industry veterans including Neil Diamond, Chris De Burgh and Status Quo, it’s actually the new one from Slipknot that’s the most interesting. .5: The Gray Chapter is the mask-wearing Iowan metallers’ first album in six years, and their first since the 2010 death of founding member and bassist Paul Gray from an accidental overdose. As its title suggests, much of this album is a tribute to friend and colleague – and, as the genre suggests, it’s one that is brutal, honest and raw.Musical tributes to absent friends are not rare – “Silver Bridge”, from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Madness: One Step Beyond - 35th Anniversary EditionLast time One Step Beyond was reissued on CD, for its 30th Anniversary, the album was expanded to cover two discs with added B-sides, tracks from EPs and a flexi-disc, a John Peel session as well some live cuts. The package was rounded out with five promo videos and liner notes by author Irvine Welsh.Now, five years on and 35 from its original October 1979 release, Madness’s debut long player resurfaces again in a multi-foldout digi-pack as a double-disc set. Disc Two is a DVD with four of the videos from last time (“The Prince” is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Circuses were a regular touchstone for Fellini, and clowns, as this 1970 TV movie confirms, their troubling core. I Clowns’ first 25 minutes are a dry run for Amarcord’s raucous flashback to Fascist Rimini. Beginning with the boy Fellini woken in the night by a circus's arrival, his camera takes a ringside view of the hoarse bluster and escalating mania of a Twenties show, orchestrated by clowns who frighten Fellini. His observation that their grotesquery was in those days common in Italian small towns allows an aside into sketches of such characters: a horse-drawn carriage driver, huge like Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Online comments for the preview stream of Kings and Queens of the Underground have been disappointing. So poor, in fact, they could have you checking Mr Idol’s new autobiography, Dancing With Myself, to see if Billy had insulted the authors personally. But, c'mon guys, the album really isn’t that bad! Ok, it’s overproduced and patchy, but once you ignore the worst three or four tracks, surely there's something rather loveable about this 58-year-old from Bromley still hung up on being a 20-year-old American punk.Inspired by writing his life story, this new album looks back on William Broad’s Read more ...