CDs/DVDs
Thomas H. Green
It’s stockbroker Goodfellas, basically. If you enjoyed Martin Scorsese’s pacey, flashy, beautifully shot ensemble gangster flicks, Goodfellas and Casino, there’s little doubt you’ll enjoy this. Here the master director, absolutely on fire, has his cake and eats it with the “based-on-a-true-story” saga of corrupt stockbroker Jordan Belfort’s rise and fall. The central character, played with audacious, astounding flare by Leonardo DiCaprio, exudes charisma from every pore and guzzles pleasure by the raw ton, taking no prisoners. While Belfort is a ruthless, unpleasant protagonist, the sort of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone with more than a passing interest in the Radio One playlist will have been aware that 2013 was, without doubt, the year of Rudimental on Planet Pop. Hit singles, a massive album in Home and plenty of well-received festival and live performances followed and the accolades rolled in. In 2014, it looks like it is going to be Clean Bandit’s turn. January’s monster hit single, “Rather Be”, topped the UK charts for four weeks, they have just finished a hugely successful UK tour and it’s not even festival season yet, with its wall-to-wall TV coverage.Clean Bandit have already made significant Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Good Morning, Midnight is the 1939 Jean Rhys novel portraying an alienated woman moving through the present while being confronted with, but not necessarily recognising, her own past. In the book, Sasha Jensen wanted to be acknowledged but also unseen. Good Morning, Midnight the album is the first by Becky Becky, the new persona of Gemma L Williams, who previously recorded as Woodpecker Wooliams. She said goodbye to that guise at a show where she performed naked. The novel's alienation reverberates throughout the album.On Good Morning, Midnight, she is joined by Peter Mason, formerly of Fence Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The first thing you’ll notice about Sharon Van Etten’s Are We There is how crystal-clear and clean it sounds. “Afraid of Nothing”, the album’s opening track, fizzes with hope and expectation like the long tail of a firework from its giddy opening lines: “you told me the day that you showed me your face we’d be in trouble for a long time - I can’t wait”. Listen to it on headphones, though, and the component parts of that giddiness will stun you: the interplay between simple piano chords and guitar; the soaring strings that fill the chorus line with anticipation; the booming bass drum you can Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Oasis: Definitely Maybe“His onstage presence is supernatural, a good looking boy exuding primal sexual allure while standing stock still, hands behind his back, all effort going into his big chested, raw throated pure and essential singing.” The beyond-hyperbolic liner notes to Deluxe Box Set edition of the 20th-anniversy reissue of Definitely Maybe, the first Oasis album, read like a parody. Liam Gallagher may be many things. But supernatural?Elsewhere, they gush that “the holy grail of British pop music is surely a bunch of longhaired boys with guitars playing swaggering, melodic rock Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Blood is thicker than water. Or is it? For anyone who’s struggled with this proverb, August: Osage County is a fascinating exploration of the ties that bind us. Examining an extended, quintessentially American family in the sticky summer heat of small town Oklahoma, Meryl Streep leads the film as Violet, a volatile matriarch addicted to pills, suffering from “a touch of” mouth cancer and awaiting news of her alcoholic husband’s disappearance. The aftermath of this dysfunctional family’s crisis allows deep insight into their darkest secrets and biggest fears. The cast, which includes Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Miss this “gay” film at your peril - a thriller with a stronger story than most. Directed and written by Alain Guiraudie (King of Escape), Stranger at the Lake’s a stealthy ineluctable drama that draws the audience in as few other films can, with explicit nudity and sex integral to its unfolding.A gay cruising lake is the solo setting where Franck (Pierre Dalndonchamps) goes to socialise and have casual sex. Out of shape, older bloke Henri (Patrick D'Assumçao) becomes his friend and a kind of Greek chorus, outlining the film’s subtext. It is Michel (Christophe Paou) who attracts attention as Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Neil Young has been pretty much making albums of two types for most of his 45 year solo career. There have been the proto-grunge rockers like 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps and 1990’s Ragged Glory and the more subtle, acoustic folk-rockers like 1970’s After the Goldrush and 1972’s Harvest. All these four albums are titans of their genre but Young has never been the most consistent of artists and his career has not been without its misfires, like 1983’s Everybody’s Rockin’ and 1987’s Life.A Letter Home sits firmly in the folk-blues end of the Young spectrum and sees him accompany his own soft and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Declaring that your new album can help conquer insomnia seems, initially, self-defeating. If it induces such a calmness that potential listeners drift off to sleep, then there’s the potential it may never be heard in full. Yet this is what lies behind Matt Berry’s fifth album. It was written and recorded at his home studio in the small hours while he was suffering from insomnia. He wanted to create a music which would still his mind so set to devising his own therapeutic soundtrack. Music for Insomniacs is the result.Music for Insomniacs is neither the expected single drone or blandly Read more ...
David Nice
Nearly everything may have been said or written about the relationship of artist-filmmaker Steve McQueen’s masterpiece to Solomon Northup’s 1853 book relating how he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. But there can be no end to observations on how the true story is unfolded. We know from the title that the protagonist begins, and will end, as a free man, so it’s a question of pacing the narrative. Which McQueen does with absolute mastery, binding the visual beauty or horror of every frame to a genius art of storytelling in film.There are countless examples of dramatic juxtaposition which Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Nobody ever accused, say, Dylan of having a voice that didn't mature with his songwriting. It’s something that springs to mind every time I try to put my finger on exactly why I’ve never warmed to the country-folk sounds of Conor Oberst’s latter work. Stylistically, the music is beautiful and while the lyrics may not be steeped in the same visceral poetry of Oberst’s Bright Eyes days they’re still a cut above most contemporary songwriting. But the quivering timbre of the voice that gave that band its visceral, emotional core or that wrung itself raw fronting early 00s emo act Desaparecidos is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The literal miracle in this earthily comic 1956 romance happens at the end. The deeper magic for producer-screenwriter Emeric Pressburger was the “small daily miracles” he found in its “extraordinary” Soho setting. He wrote the script in 1934, at the start of life in England as a Hungarian Jewish refugee, via France, from Germany’s newly Nazi film industry. In the two decades it took to make it, Pressburger wrote, produced and edited one of the greatest sequences in British cinema with director Michael Powell - A Matter of Life and Death, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes, Read more ...