CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
The Minstrel of Misery or the Poet Laureate of Bedsitland: Morrissey has been musical marmite since he first entered the public consciousness with The Smiths’ debut single, “Hand in Glove”, over thirty years ago. World Peace Is None Of Your Business may be a return to form, but it is unlikely to change his public image. No doubt he will be fine with that.The lyrics, predictably enough, are from the Morrissey that we have all come to recognise and the music is still mostly dominated by the white boy, indie sound that he has long made his own – albeit with occasional trumpet and acoustic guitar Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Right from their lo-fi beginnings, Glasgow’s Honeyblood have always been able to deliver the perfect kiss-off. It’s why it’s a relief to see that the duo’s self-titled debut album retains a fair slice of that crackle and hiss, Stina Tweeddale’s candy-coated vocals still providing a deceptive delivery method for her often venomous lyrics.It’s not always big and it’s certainly not always clever - new single “Super Rat”, for example, combines three minutes of likening a cheating ex-boyfriend to the titular rodent with a playground chant of “scumbag, sleaze, slimeball, grease” - but Honeyblood Read more ...
joe.muggs
As dance music once more sweeps the mainstream, we're returned to the situation of the 1990s where singer and song can seem to become a little detached. Parades of “featured vocalists” deliver refrains for the producer teams who are queueing up to repeat the success of Route 94, Clean Bandit, Duke Dumont and above all Disclosure. And as the field gets more crowded, so the requirements for the singers to sit back, know their place and deliver the simplest hooks become more pressing.Some new generation singers do manage to step into the spotlight of course. Rita Ora parlayed her big hit with DJ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After the initial wave of exhilaration which comes with experiencing the latest of director Wes Anderson’s fanciful creations wears off, the most striking aspect of The Grand Budapest Hotel is its formal compositions. The framing and centring are as strictly regimented as Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad and the palette is as impressive as Nicolas Winding Refn's more recent Only God Forgives.Anderson must have approached each scene with a ruler in hand, a protractor to ensure symmetry and a swatch of colour samples to ensure one tone complements another. Once that's become familiar, it Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Sia Tolno was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, had a violent father, was forced to leave the country due to the civil war and ended up in the harsh world of Conakry nightclubs. Life was no bed of roses, in other words. The inspiring thing about this album is how she now stands loud and proud in the tradition of powerful African women like Angelique Kidjo and Miriam Makeba. This, her fourth and most ambitious album is her take on Afro-beat. Her collaborator is Tony Allen, Fela Kuti’s legendary drummer and co-architect of Afro-beat 40-plus years on from the original sound when Allen was the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: CSNY 1974Considering that their 1974 tour was the world’s first series of dates limited to outdoor stadia since the Beatles in 1966, it’s appropriate the long-gestating collection chronicling Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s mammoth jaunt is an all-encompassing three-CD box set which also includes a DVD and a hefty, copiously illustrated booklet with a definitive in-depth essay on the tour.Although previously bootlegged and not hard to find, the dates did not – curiously, since it was a landmark tour designed to rake in cash – spawn a live album Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If you're not familiar with Jon Allen, here's a few facts: he possesses a fine gravelly voice, and nimble fingers. More than anything, though, Allen has an uncanny knack for penning a good tune. He learnt his craft while sequestered up in a woodland shack. Actually no, that’s Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. The truth is Allen’s back-story is a little prosaic by today’s standards – he studied song-writing at a performing arts college in Liverpool. Still, what he lacks in romance he makes up for with sweat and perseverance. In keeping with its cover, Deep River, Allen's third LP, mainly flows at Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Sir John Betjeman was made to explore the polite suburban sprawl of Metro-land, and this 1973 BBC film is the much-loved peak of his TV career. The marketing term Metro-land justified the Metropolitan Railway’s Tesco-style land-grab along its route north of Baker Street into the countryside of Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Annual booklets of the same name idealised its suburban estates’ swamping of rail-side villages as rustic oases linked to urban work by train. 1910 footage shot along the then-rural line from a carriage contrasts with Betjeman’s leisurely journey through Read more ...
Matthew Wright
French band Pulcinella is little known over here, but the release of their third album Bestiole (meaning nothing more ribald than “tiny creatures”, apparently), coincides with a brief UK tour, and is looking like the beginnings of a breakthrough. A quartet of sax, accordion, percussion and bass, with an exotic array of guest instruments, they’re self-consciously experimental, but melodic and humorous with it. Their swirling sound-world of whimsical, gothic circus noir draws on jazz, tango and alt rock, but balances the mixture with feisty originality in independent territory in between.The Read more ...
joe.muggs
Sia Furler is a fascinating phenomenon – after all, you don't really expect Australian sidepersons for midranking trip-hop acts to go on to be multi-trillionaire pop overlords, on the whole. But yes, the former Zero 7 singer has, via a quietly successful solo career, become one of the biggest songwriters on the planet. We're talking (deep breath) Christina Aguilera, Eminem, Flo Rida, Afrojack, Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, Lea Michele, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Kylie Minogue, Leona Lewis, Hilltop Hoods, Katy Perry, Kesha, Rita Ora, Britney Spears, Jessie J, Oh Land, Celine Dion, Maroon 5 and David Guetta Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Much has been said before about these two Leos Carax greats, but the beauty of these surrealist French films is that you can enjoy them again and again, each time finding something new to appreciate. It's been a while since Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang (The Night Is Young) were first released, but that only makes them that little bit more iconic.Like blowing the dust off an old painting, we are re-introduced to the blanched faces and melancholic characters that remind us of a love that burns fast but lasts forever. With Carax, everyone is either in love, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It feels as if the life-on-the-road song has become a rite of passage for those rock bands that manage to clock up enough years together, but after 20 years in the business Texan alt-country rockers Old 97’s probably have more of a claim to it than most. Clocking in at just under six minutes, “Longer Than You’ve Been Alive” is one of the best examples of the genre, regardless of its titular accuracy. It’s a meandering, tongue-in-cheek portrait of the rock star excesses, but also the tedium, that comes with life in a moderately successful touring band. As frontman Rhett Miller reminisces, most Read more ...