CDs/DVDs
Jasper Rees
It’s not quite true to say no one would have heard of JJ Cale without Eric Clapton. Clapton’s cover of “After Midnight”, released in 1970 as the first single on his debut solo album, put Cale on the map as a songwriter and paved for his own inimitable recording career. But Clapton didn’t actually record “Cocaine” until Slowhand in 1977. In between Lynyrd Skynyrd slipped in with their account of “Call Me the Breeze”, the song which lends its name to this Clapton-led tribute a year on from Cale’s death.Cale was a reticent inspiration to more than Clapton. The major singer-songwriters of a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Context is everything. It’s the difference between that “lady without a baby” line that’s got everybody talking delivered straight up, and the knowing smile and cross-dressing Hollywood actresses that come with it in the song’s accompanying video. It’s why Jenny Lewis, child starlet turned indie rock frontwoman turned accomplished alt-country singer-songwriter, is that rare artist who has made not only the best album for herself at every stage of her career, but also the one that her fans needed to hear.Depending on your reading of “Just One of the Guys”, it’s a song about confounding Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Action film fans should stay away from this Roman Polanski duet. But those who like their sexual politics served in symbolic form will be delighted. Polanski's wife Emmanuelle Seigner stars as an actress, Vanda, and Polanski-lookalike Mathieu Amalric as the writer-director Thomas.It's not entirely an adaptation of the 1870 novella by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (from whom the word masochism derives), but a version of the David Ives play about the link between sexual obsession, pleasure and pain. Venus in Fur is like a play: the entire 95 minute duration is set within the confines of a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“A theatrical pop song-cycle of musical postcards from the hotspots of memory from a semi-immortal polysexual sensualist’s life” is how the fourth solo album from Erasure's Andy Bell describes itself. The story and album begin with “Freshly Buggered”, where Torsten, born 1906, arrives at school to tell all that he is gay. “He had found a love so real, so pure” declare the lyrics.The extraordinary Torsten the Bareback Saint can't fail to provoke, raise a smile and carry anyone along with its sheer verve. Torsten’s itinerant life is evoked in 22 songs portraying encounters, frustration, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Loudon Wainwright III is the closest the Americana tradition gets to a stand-up comedian. It’s there in the punctilious insistence on his place in the dynasty (a dynasty which has spawned a couple of singer-songwriters of a less humorous bent). One of the gags in Wainwright’s 25th studio album in a recording career that began in 1970 is the indignity of old age, and naturally he tells it well: “Brand New Dance” is a hymn to the failing body (“Here comes the hard part here’s the bad news/You go to bend over and put on your shoes”). The observational wit is also on the prowl for life’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Troubadours - Folk and the Roots of American Music Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4This is one of the most important reissues of the year. As the year ends, it may become the most important. Troubadours - Folk and the Roots of American Music is a set of four, individual three-CD sets charting the evolution of the American folk-based singer-songwriter style from its roots and influences to when it became a default mode of expression in the mid-Sixties and later.All-encompassing are words underselling Troubadours. Everything which should be, and everyone who needs to be, is here Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Neon Jungle are a manufactured band consisting of four visually striking young women aged between 17 and 21. They have supported Jessie J in concert and, according to their press release were "were handpicked by iconic lingerie brand Victoria's Secret to perform at their legendary fashion show in New York". We can, then, discount the likelihood of them sounding musically groundbreaking, and instead start from a baseline judgement level that’s the musical equivalent McDonald's.On that basis, some of this debut album is a momentary giggle. Produced by Australian-American rapper Snob Scrilla ( Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Raya Martin's Independencia (2009) begins during the brutal Philippine-American War of 1899-1902, the prelude to four decades of US occupation. When distant gunfire interrupts a joyful Filipino national holiday, a tough middle-aged woman (Tetchie Agbayani) and her grown-up son (Sid Lucero) flee to the rainforest and set up home in a cabin abandoned by Spanish colonists.
They adapt well, breeding chickens and living off the land, though the mother is perturbed when the son finds and tends a young woman (Alessandra De Rossi) who had been raped by an American soldier. Much later, it is the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Tom Petty is one of rock’s best-selling artists of all time. However, with the exception of a couple of minor hits, his West Coast Bruce Springsteen with a Byrds fixation schtick has never really gained much traction in the UK. In 2010 his album Mojo saw Tom and his long-time backing band, the Heartbreakers, rediscover their Seventies roots with lots of blues flavours and even a hint of Allman Brothers’ extended jamming. Hypnotic Eye finds the band in similar territory, in what often feels like an homage to Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere-era Neil Young & Crazy Horse.Kicking off with the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Initiated in the latter part of 2011 by Jazz Warrior and multi-instrumentalist Orphy Robinson and pianist/sound sculptor Pat Thomas, I saw the shape-shifting ensemble Black Top play an incredible gig as a sextet at its spiritual home, Café Oto, as part of the 2012 London Jazz Festival. It was my favourite performance of that year's edition, by a country mile.The elements that so impressed that night - the mercurial interplay, the constant textural shifts, the brilliant musicianship and the playfulness with which the ensemble deconstructed and reassembled their chosen material - are all heard Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Too Late Blues has many individual aspects which, on their own, would make it notable. Released in 1961, it was John Cassavetes’ second film as a director following the ground-breaking Shadows, one of America’s first full-length expressionist art films. As Shadows had, it centres on jazz and depicts a world which was then thriving, showing it from the inside. It stars Bobby Darin, one of America’s most important and multi-faceted musical figures. When taken together, with the added impact of its female star Stella Stevens, its inclusion of black cast members and disabled children, Too Late Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The danger of working successfully in many genres is that fans come to expect something revolutionary with each release. A secondary threat is that you succumb to generic schizophrenia, and thus are never quite sure which voice to speak with. Fin Greenall, founder/leader of the folk-blues trio Fink, has a touch of both of these in this latest release, in which songs of menacing Americana sit somewhat uneasily alongside pieces of lugubrious personal reflection. He may be feted for his eclecticism; he’s more likely to suffer for failing to please all his fans. The title track and “Pilgrim Read more ...