CDs/DVDs
Guy Oddy
About 25 years ago, the Cult decided that they were going to turn the punk/alternative crowd onto “classic rock”. While they were widely derided by most of the music press of the time, they did manage to increase their record sales immeasurably. The Afghan Whigs are also admirers of seventies’ guitar music, with band leader Greg Dulli previously stating that he wanted them to sound like a mix of the Band, the Temptations and Neil Young in Crazy Horse mode. While the Afghan Whigs may have achieved their artistic aim on Do to the Beast, the band’s first album since 1998’s 1965, it seems an Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Norwegian saxophonist Marius Neset is not yet 30, and he already has several acclaimed albums with smaller forces to his increasingly neon-lit name. With this release of new and adapted work for 12-piece big band, he sets out to work on a larger (and notoriously complex) canvas. It’s intense, dramatic and finely wrought, with numerous changes of style and direction.Some tracks are adapted from two previous albums, Birds and Golden Xplosion; others are original. The lion theme is everywhere: the Nordic blonde Neset himself, his gleaming sax over one shoulder; the Read more ...
joe.muggs
It seems that the gradual leakage of avant-garde-post-classical-call-it-what-you-will music from the rarefied environment of concert halls and into the spaces traditionally inhabited by alternative and club music is now inexorable. And violinist Aisha Orazbayeva is one of the instrumental (pun intended) figures in this move from trickle to flood. As one quarter of the organising team for the London Contemporary Music Festival (along with erstwhile classical editor for theartsdesk, Igor Toronyi-Lalic), she has helped bring Parmegianni, Schwitters, Radigue and other 20th/21st century composers Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Social mores and the nature of what’s taboo change as time passes. The once acceptable or abhorred can become the opposite. The psychedelic-era British film Wonderwall is a case in point. Its storyline is built around a man who finds a hole in the wall between his and his neighbour’s flat. The wall becomes the wonderwall of the title as he looks through it to a naked, or near-naked, woman.And yet this was not a film about the unpleasantness of a peeping tom. It was a fantasy, a whimsy from an era when free love was a bandwagon for jumping on. It had an unexpected afterlife as Oasis’s Noel Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
By the time I reached “Coming Home” - the second track on Kaiser Chiefs’ fifth album, and the band’s "comeback" single - I was predicting not a riot exactly, but certainly a few snide comments below re: my knowledge of the Leeds lads’ back catalogue. While not wholly unpleasant, its drivetime radio-friendly smoothness seemed an odd choice for a band best known for anthemic, stadium-filling indie swagger - particularly as it was always going to be seen as something of a mission statement for their first album without chief songwriter and drummer Nick Hodgson.But then Education, Education, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Elton John: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road box set“Elton John plays cricket as he plays piano; dressed to kill and as if his life depends on it.” The commentary on the film included in the box-set version of this reissue of 1973’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is hugely over the top and rococo, and treats its subject as a form of showbiz Moses. Brian Forbes’s 45-minute Elton John and Bernie Taupin say Goodbye to Norma Jean is crammed with eyebrow-raising moments, but none more so than when John declares he writes songs in just 30 minutes. “It takes me on average about half-an-hour per song,” he Read more ...
David Nice
Hands Over the City is to Naples at a crucial point in its 20th-century history what Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta is to the Italian capital and Visconti’s La terra trema to the Sicilian coast. Francesco Rosi’s decision to capture the only boom that Italy has ever really known in the early 1960s is an uncompromising film about the energy that directs itself to bad ends.Its embodiment is Rod Steiger’s Eduardo Nottola, a councillor who embroils city housing plans in his own profiteering property development. "So what’s new, or rather old?" you might ask. And indeed the film remains pertinent Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Anyone who came across Band of Skulls' sophomore album, Sweet Sour, in 2012 would have heard the sound of a band that was more than conversant with the Led Zeppelin songbook but who had no intention of staying put in the early Seventies. The chugging guitar was there alright, but there was plenty more than that going on in the likes of “Bruises” and “You’re Not Pretty but You’ve Got It Going On”. Follow-up, Himalayan, breaks still further from the strict blues-rock template with the introduction of a bucketful of other textures. That said, the echo of Jimmy Page’s crunching riffs and Robert Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The other day I woke up with Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” fracking my mind. Round and round it juddered, wouldn’t leave me alone - horrid production, killer chorus - and much too much of that bloke whose career used to be endlessly repeating, “One time, one time” on Fugees tunes. Turns out it’s not just me. “Hips Don’t Lie” is globally the best-selling song of this century. When I discovered that fact, it fried my head.Then again, it’s possible for Europeans to forget what a massive deal Shakira is, one of the top-earning female entertainers of all time. The petite Colombian burst out of the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
It’s strange that probably most of the best-known Brazilian artists here are over 60 and from one state, Bahia - those being Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Maria Bethania and Tom Zé. Brazil is the size of Europe, though, and of course there are younger generations from other states. One of the leading new voices is Karol Conka, whose Brazilian electronica is as fresh as anything you are likely to hear this year. Her breakthrough hit “Boa Noite” kicks off and ends the album (see video, overleaf) in which she raps that she is “totalmente livre e leve ao mesmo tempo que ferve” (“totally free and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Donald Cammell made two films that were close to his intentions: Performance and this. There were only four films altogether, in almost 30 years of trying. Wild Side, studio-savaged as Demon Seed had been, was restored to something like his wishes after he shot himself in 1996, defeated.White of the Eye is, then, the only untarnished testament to Cammell’s talent away from his Performance co-director Nic Roeg. It’s a 1986 film about a possible serial killer, Paul White (David Keith), and his wife Joan (Cathy Moriarty, pictured below). Each anonymous murder is highly stylised: a meat cleaver Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Thinking back, it was with 2010’s Heaven is Whenever that I stopped recommending my favourite band to the people who didn’t already get it. It wasn’t that it was a bad album – in capturing the world-weariness of the party band once the world moves on it was almost exactly the one that they needed to make – but by that stage you probably knew yourself whether you were the type of hopeless barroom romantic likely to learn lessons from the one who’d seen it all in the corner. On first listen Teeth Dreams comes across as more of the same, but there are so many moments of magic here I’m half Read more ...