CDs/DVDs
peter.quinn
Impressively old sea shanties with stacked up vocal harmonies and sing-along choruses. Check. Captivating explorations of desire, drink and death. Check. Luxuriant, high spec arrangements presenting an ear-catching crazy quilt of influences. Check. Newly signed to Island Records, in this fifth studio album the award-winning 11-piece folk band sprinkle their usual magic over a bracingly fresh and brilliantly constructed collection of songs.While some albums drift benignly into your consciousness, others begin with a figurative grabbing of your lapel. Revival falls very much into the latter Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Klaxons are a great band. They’re also a brutal example of how a great band can make the wrong decisions and scupper themselves. Their Mercury-winning debut album Myths of the Near Future not only captures a moment when dance, rock and pop collided to offer colourful reinvigoration for all parties, it’s also a stand-alone classic. After it they went off the rails and made a drug-addled psychedelic experiment. That is what great bands do, right? Instead of realising this, and releasing the results to intrigued bemusement – the key word being “intrigued” – they dumped it and, instead, recorded Read more ...
Graham Fuller
With Unrelated (2007) and Archipelago (2010), the filmmaker Joanna Hogg staked out unfashionable territory: the anxieties and frustrations that stem from communication failures and deep-seated resentments among the insular English bourgeoisie. Exhibition, her latest, is as coolly observed and as exquisitely acted, visualized, and sound-designed as its predecessors, but it's more opaque.A series of mostly low-key vignettes, it depicts the secure but uneasy marriage of the contemporary artists D (Viv Albertine, the musician) and H (Liam Gillick, the conceptual artist) at a moment of crisis. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
You’d have to go back to 1996’s Spirit to name a Willie Nelson album with more than one or two original new songs, so the nine for Band of Brothers is something like headline news. Produced by Buddy Cannon – their previous collaboration, To All the Girls, took Willie back into the Top 10 for the first time since the 1980s – it features a deft band of guitar, steel, piano, bass and drums, with Mickey Raphael’s harmonica roaming around Nelson’s wandering way with a vocal and his totemic guitar, Trigger. This isn’t music that goes over the top; it gets under the skin. There’s no melodrama or Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Lana Del Rey can be a polarising figure among music lovers. This seems to be largely due to media claims of “inauthenticity”, whatever that means these days. This viewpoint, of course, totally ignores that she has produced plenty of great tunes from breakthrough single “Video Games” onwards.Ultraviolence does take more than a slight stylistic lead from Del Rey’s previous album, 2012’s Born to Die. The cigarette-husky voice still characterises her singing, which is very much to the fore at all times. Her lyrics will ensure that she’s unlikely to be covered by Taylor Swift any time soon, though Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dead Moon: In the Graveyard, Unknown Passage, DefianceAfter a few notes of barbed-wire, bent-string guitar, a descending riff kicks in. It’s a relative of the uptempo version of “Hey Joe”. The voice starts. It’s high-pitched, as if Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant had only Love’s Arthur Lee and The 13th Floor Elevator’s Roky Erickson as an influence. The lyrics are hard to make out but touch on mean days and a girl who turns the singer cold. He might as well be dead and in a graveyard. The momentum is tempered by a break borrowed from The Elevators' “You’re Gonna Miss me”. The production is Read more ...
joe.muggs
OK... a dozen and a half fine trout... a large barrel... and one 12-gauge shotgun – let's blast away! I mean, one tries to be charitable but let's face it, this is the lowest common denominator right here. Tijs “Tiësto” Verwest is by many measures the most popular DJ in the world, regularly playing to crowds of several trillion, often from a helicopter made of diamonds and unicorn skin, and sending them into religious ecstasies with trance music that is so relentlessly dumb and predictable it makes most house and techno sound like Stockhausen in comparison.There are 18 tracks here, and every Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
What an astonishing rediscovery Juraj Jakubisko’s Birds, Orphans and Fools is! The 1969 Slovak film stans both outside history, and yet firmly within the context of its time, the year after Soviet troops quelled the Prague Spring. But its dating is eternal: the title’s inspired by the folk saying, “God takes care of birds, orphans and fools.”Put simply, Birds… is a loosely romantic threesome, centred around Andrej (Phillippe Avron), his best friend Yorick (yes, the Shakespearean references are there: Jirí Sýkora), and their street waif discovery, Marta (Magda Vásáryová, pictured below right Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Plastikman's return filled many a techno geek with trepidation. DJ Richie Hawtin’s alter-person toured a spectacular live show in 2010, successfully proving he could hold his own in a world ruled by Skrillex, Tiesto et al, but there hasn’t been a new album since the wonky, pitched down, vocoder’n’cyborg grind of Closer in 2003. Since then Hawtin has gone from being a boys’ own techno totem to a bona fide superstar DJ. In holier-than-thou “underground” clubland his ambivalence about EDM, his working with Deadmau5, his audaciously huge Ibizan ENTER extravaganza, all apparently added up to “ Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Gilles Peterson has been a fan of Brazilian music since a furtive teenage liaison with pirate radio. Now, very much at the other end of the radio wave, and after many decades’ advocacy of Brazilian music, he’s created Sonzeira, a collaborative band featuring his pick of the contemporary scene. This is no bossa nostalgia: the concept’s serious and football-free; the artists are little known outside Brazil; and the recording is cleanly, neutrally rendered. Even the traditional repertoire sounds new. Vasconcelos’ opening, a solo drum track, celebrates the centrality of rhythm to the Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
In 1921, Anton Phibes was killed in a fiery car crash. Horribly disfigured, he returns to avenge the death of his beautiful wife. So goes the set-up for The Abominable Dr Phibes, one of the UK’s finest cult horror films and very clearly a precursor to the Saw franchise, among others. Originally released in 1971, it has lost none of its camp splendour. This is a film like no other – except, of course, its sequel Dr Phibes Rises Again. Vincent Price is the eccentric and cruel Phibes, Caroline Munro (uncredited) is his wife. Terry-Thomas and Joseph Cotton are among his victims.Presented as the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Bob Mould is one of the patron saints of that uplifting punk-pop sound married to angsty lyrics which has gone down so well with the alt-rock crowd since the first wave of hardcore punk ran out of steam in the mid-Eighties. First with the mighty Hüsker Dü and then the more straight ahead Sugar, his fuzzy guitar sound was instantly recognisable and clearly made some impression on the likes of Pixies and Nirvana.It is a sound that he has kept at arm's length for much of his solo career though, opting instead for stabs at reflective, acoustic maturity and even electronica. 2012’s Silver Age, Read more ...