CDs/DVDs
Russ Coffey
Talk about not going gentle into that good night. In the year or so since Wilko Johnson announced he had terminal cancer, he has stunned doctors and fans alike by giving a string of blistering concerts and candid interviews. But Going Back Home - a retrospective LP featuring Roger Daltrey on vocals – is, surely, his final parting shot. It's also an ambition fulfilled. For the two men have long admired each other and Daltrey remarked in a recent interview how they were inspired by the same American R’n’B.Johnson then chipped in, “Don’t matter how hard you try, you can’t sound like you’re from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Lou Adler – A Musical HistoryLou Adler is more than a stitch in rock’s rich tapestry. Akin to a whole spool of yarn, he helped Carole King realise the monumental Tapestry, was integral to making 1967’s epochal Monterey Festival happen, brought The Mamas & The Papas to the world and co-wrote Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World”. Adler is a towering figure in music. Lou Adler – A Musical History is an overview, collecting records he masterminded. A reminder that the achievements did not spring from nowhere, the disc frames this man within the world he operated in.Many names Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Out on the fringes of rock there ain’t half some noisy bastards. It’s not just Wire magazine-friendly, supposedly cerebral sorts who push the boundaries, not just avant-garde industrialists, Finns making “tone music” and Japanese gentlemen with vast arrays of effects pedals, every one bearing a manifesto quoting Deleuze, Nietsche et al. Nope, sometimes there’s just a visceral joy in pushing music far over the edge, and it can be done on the cheap after a few pints, just for kicks.Gabber does it, or used to, and certain varieties of puerile yet enjoyable drill’n’bass too, but there are more Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The big screen is no country for old women. The exception who proves the rule over and over again is of course Judi Dench. Of no actress is it more frequently said that you’d happily listen to her reading out the phone book. Her most recent masterclass in the tiny brushstrokes of screen acting is in Philomena, adapted from Martin Sixsmith’s book about helping an Irish woman to find the son she bore out of wedlock in 1952. Dench is very largely the reason it’s worth making an appointment to view.She plays Philomena Lee, a devout old woman with love and sadness in her heart leavened by a Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Liars are well known for trying different musical styles. In times past, we’ve had the punk funk of 2010’s "Proud Evolution", the industrial noise of 2007’s “Dear God”, 2006’s freak folk “The Other Side of Mt Heart Attack” and the psychedelic garage rock of 2008’s “Freak Out”, to name a few. On their last album, 2012’s WIXIW, Liars tentatively dipped their collective toe into the world of electronica. Mess sees the band expand on this by giving their keyboards a good kicking, dropping their guitars and coming out with some seriously dark electronic sounds, reminiscent of Black Strobe’s Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Seb Rochford’s five-piece Polar Bear is now ten years old, and the band's post-jazz amalgam of lugubrious saxophone phrases and scratchy riffs, scarified electronic soundscapes, and mesmeric, crackling drum and bass rhythms has matured. The giddy thrills of nearly winning the Mercury Prize (with Held on the Tips of Fingers in 2005) are long past, and they seem content with the trappings of the alternative scene, releasing limited edition vinyl and selling inscrutable T-shirts. That stability of identity has, perhaps, contributed to a subtler, slower-burning sound that lets the details breathe Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Once in his stride as a director, Samuel Fuller never shied away from the controversial. The mental-hospital set Shock Corridor, from 1963, prefigured One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and touched on the arms race, incest, racism and the Korean War. A year later, his Naked Kiss sympathetically portrayed a prostitute. The final film he made in America, 1982’s White Dog, also pulled no punches and met the nature of racism head on. In some quarters of the press it was trailed as itself being racist. It was not released in America. Fuller then upped and offed to France where he had long been hailed Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lost in the Dream takes a while to make its presence felt. Four tracks in, with “An Ocean in Between the Waves”, it all falls into place. A frosted-glass take on the Bruce Springsteen of “I’m on Fire” washes out from the speakers and submerges the ears in a warm bath. Familiar-sounding yet just alien enough to attract attention, the song builds upon itself to climax with a crescendo which could easily win a stadium audience over.Although an early home for the pre-solo Kurt Vile, until Lost in the Dream The War on Drugs has largely been the one-man band of Philadelphia’s Adam Granduciel. He Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Jane Birkin: Mes Images Privées de Serge / Françoise Hardy: Message PersonnelThe bond between Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin still resonates. They met while on the set of the film Slogan in 1969 and were soon a headline-grabbing couple. Although they separated in 1980 and he died in 1991, Birkin still recorded his songs and continues to do so. Françoise Hardy’s public profile was more measured, but she was and is central to the fabric of French culture. The coincidence of these two releases being issued in the UK at the same time is about more than each being French. Gainsbourg also wrote Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Lily Allen, which you can call a victory for the omnipresent don’t-call-it-a-comeback PR campaign surrounding her forthcoming album. Specifically I’ve been thinking about how I was far less cynical in my early 20s, when I honestly believed that this girl with the trainers and the attitude had created something new: pop music that sounded like the sort of loud-mouthed, heart-on-sleeve, imperfect person that I was. Lately I’ve been rolling my eyes at the calculated controversy of the week, clicking quickly past the mediocre new songs those controversies Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Reinvention is the way of the 21st-century diva, cloaking in the latest bright sonic colours. Kylie, the Australian girl-next-door and occasional British national treasure, has a track record of trying on new styles to see if they fit and her career is sprinkled with a few diamonds as a result. This latest incarnation, however, her twelfth album, is a stylistic (if not actual) return to where she started, the vapid, candy-coated monstrosities of Stock, Aitken & Waterman, albeit updated to blank-eyed, uber-compressed, post-Rihanna EDM-pop du jour. In other words, it mostly sounds like Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The BFI this month posted a list of 10 great lesbian films. Recently released titles included wereThe Kids Are Alright, Tomboy and Break My Fall, but there was no place for Blue is the Warmest Colour. Time will tell whether Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme d’Or winner will still be celebrated in a couple of decades, but for now it feels like a Trojan horse for same-sex cinema.Yes there’s more lashings of fleshy, slap-up sex than in anything not by Lars Von Trier. But there is also something radically new for a portrait of young lovers flouting social orthodoxies: the film is blessedly light on Read more ...