CDs/DVDs
Katherine McLaughlin
It’s been five years since British duo Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe released their last studio album after deciding to take a few years out in a bid to not get jaded. In the interim they worked alongside Steven Price to produce a pulsating score for Joe Cornish’s debut feature film Attack the Block. Their return, Junto (which means to join for a common purpose) marks a laidback, reflective mix of music which embraces both their Nineties roots and eclectic influences.Zooming through a range of sounds and moods via jungle beats, steel drums and robotic voice effects makes for breezy summer Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The sheer joy of making theatre provides the central attraction of Cycling with Moliere (Alceste à bicyclette), but Philippe Le Guay’s film is also rich in the comedy of fractious interaction between old friends whose worlds have moved apart. It’s the story of two actors: Gauthier (Lambert Wilson) has become famous for his television roles (the different circumstances in which he’s recognised become memorable vignettes in the film); Serge (Fabrice Luchini) has left the profession after a breakdown, retreating to a run-down house on the windblown Ile de Ré and a life of virtual solitude. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bristolian Roni Size was a leading light among Nineties drum & bass originals. By 1997, like many of his contemporaries, he was feted by the media as an artist about to supernova, to lead pop in wild new directions. It was all very exciting and when New Forms, the debut album by his band Reprazent, won the Mercury Music Prize, it marked a moment when drum & bass seemed about to take over. It never did. That was it. The breakthrough that dubstep eventually made the following decade was not to be. Outside his scene, then, Size has been relatively quiet for nigh on fifteen years. He Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Royal Blood are Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher: the latest in a long line of rock two-pieces that have been assaulting the senses since the first appearance of White Stripes a decade and a half ago or so. This pair of guys from Brighton make muscular blues-rock that suggests the sound of the Black Keys’ younger, feral cousins or perhaps Drenge’s older brothers. Huge riffs, a bone-crushing beat and a volume that is permanently set at “11” back up Kerr’s suitably desperate howl that neither aims for heavy metal falsetto nor punk rock bark. This is music that would be just at home at Download as it Read more ...
David Nice
Lukas Moodysson caught the miseries and splendours of kids on the cusp of teendom in an early gem, Together (Tillsammans), but there they made up only one strand in the general trajectory of trouble to triumph. That difficult theme of very early adolescence, so easy to parody, so hard to keep truly affectionate, is the entire domain of We Are the Best!Maybe it partly rings true because the tale of first two, then three spirited girls embracing punk at the end of its natural life in 1982 is also the true story of Moodyson’s wife Coco, who novelized her early angsts and exuberance. But it Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Wire: Document and EyewitnessEven when taking account of the elasticity brought by punk splintering into the myriads of left turns, new directions and dead ends of what became post-punk, the trajectory of Wire was eccentric. Document and Eyewitness was the final and fourth album they issued before their reformation in 1985, having first split up in 1980. Ostensibly a live album, Document and Eyewitness captures Wire’s final show, on 29 February 1980, at Camden’s Electric Ballroom. It was an evening which continued what they had begun during a residency at The Jeannetta Cochrane Theatre Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Fence Collective – originally a group of mates coming together to sing in a pub in Fife – has given the world an extraordinary roll-call of exceedingly durable singer-songwriter talent. The likes of the Anderson brothers Kenny, Ian and Gordon (aka King Creosote, Pip Dylan and Beta Band / Aliens member Lone Pigeon respectively), Johnny “The Pictish Trail” Lynch and a host of others have released such a vast catalogue of albums laced with intelligent eccentricity, intense emotion and gentle Scots vernacular that it's hard to know where to start with them.One excellent starting point for the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
She's never liked labels, but this time round Anja McCloskey’s categorisation as “alternative folk” really seems misleading. Sure, there may still be the prominent use of accordion and her unusual voice, but now the 22-year-old seems only incidentally eccentric. Indeed, the overriding sense from Quincy Who Waits – a dreamy, phantasmagoria of sound – is that the singer from Iowa really just wants to entertain.The album builds on the her debut, An Estimation, whose 19th century central European feel delighted many critics and invited comparisons to The Mummers Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fantastic is the only word for The Changes. Fantastic as in fantasy, and fantastic because it's a television drama that's brilliantly conceived and impeccably executed – and also because it tackles issues of social cohesion and fragmentation head-on without using a sledgehammer. Broadcast by the BBC in 1975, The Changes was a ten-part series adapting Peter Dickinson's trilogy of novels The Weathermonger, Heartsease and The Devil's Children.The series tells how a sudden, inexplicable change transforms British society. Made with serious intent, it was for children and broadcast in a tea- Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I feel as though most recording artists are missing a trick when it comes to seasonal albums. Although the market for Christmas albums is - as we demonstrate here on theartsdesk annually - a growth one, there are thousands of themes out there waiting to be explored. Easter. Eid. That one Wednesday in July when the weather in Glasgow rivals that of the Med and you can only watch in envy from your office window. For her second album, Finnish singer-songwriter Mirel Wagner has produced something not unlike a Halloween album. Not the Halloween of popular culture, cutesy with cartoon ghouls and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Morton Valence are a band that have “cult” written all over them, one to be adored by literate sorts and bedsit weirdos (and Plan B, apparently). They’re a five-piece from London who write story-songs that are as poetic as they are mordant and spiced with detail and humour. Their third album is a treat, once again, dealing out tunes with novelistic detail and authorial pith, but since we appear to currently value singer-songwriters who lyrically major in lame mood verbage, who knows whether Morton Valence will gain any more commercial purchase.The album opens with the near eight-minute “The Read more ...
graham.rickson
Director David Mackenzie tells us in this disc’s extras that Starred Up is his first genre film, and Fox’s low-rent sleeve art suggests that this could be another dreary, thuggish Britflick. The prison drama clichés come thick and fast, from the hard-nosed governor to the attack in the shower block. There’s a well-meaning outsider helping prisoners deal with anger issues, copious, bloody violence and a sweaty gym scene.So it's good to report that Starred Up is a remarkable film, superbly acted and cannily scripted by Jonathan Asser, basing the screenplay on his own stint teaching prisoners. Read more ...