CDs/DVDs
David Nice
Only the most antagonistic of diva fanciers, opera queens, call them what you will, would deny coloratura soprano Natalie Dessay her place as one of the great singing actresses of our time. The size and range of the voice are rather more limited for the role of giant-hearted Violetta, Verdi’s Parisian courtesan who sacrifices true love on the altar of convention and dies of consumption.Not that it matters too much in film-maker Philippe Béziat’s take on the opera, originally Traviata et nous, in which he guides us through the drama chronologically but very selectively from rehearsal room to Read more ...
Russ Coffey
After years of similar-sounding instrumental albums many Oldfield fans may have been expecting Tubular Bells 4. But his return to the Virgin label starts with a more intriguing proposition: Oldfield has teamed up with vocalist and Freddie Mercury lookalike, Luke Spiller from The Struts to record his first rock album for decades. So, then, could the presence of this Young Turk herald a new chapter for the old progger? It seems not. What might have been rather eccentric and charming, in the end, turns out to be mostly throwaway.At least the videos offer fans a genuine treat - even if mainly Read more ...
joe.muggs
Trip-hop is much maligned as a genre, and understandably so. One of the worst names for a style this side of “folktronica”, it rapidly came to mean anything downtempo that wasn't a standard indie rock format – including plenty of the blandest music ever made. As the late Nineties drew on, it and other experimental electronica faded together into the even vaguer audio Prozac of the “chillout” section, all holiday show sound-beds and CDs on supermarket checkout displays for stressed shoppers to impulse-buy as their children pestered them for sweets.Think back, though, to the glories of Massive Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Basil Barrow (John Mills) is a proud, repressed, upper-class lieutenant colonel who was traumatized by his experiences in a Japanese POW camp. Shortly after the war, he fulfils his ambition by taking command of the Scottish battalion once led by his grandfather. When his by-the-book methods are ignored, his stiff upper lip doesn't quiver, but one of his eyes twitches dementedly and his head looks as if it it might burst, like a plum. Mills was able to twitch that eye at will.The cause of Barrow's apoplexy is the acting colonel he has replaced, Major Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness), a coarse, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In a fairly dry climate for original new music Wild Beasts have for the past six years been an oasis of fascination. With this, the Kendal schoolmates’ fourth album, their impeccable indie credentials, including an eclectic musical palette, gnomically allusive lyrics, an authentic quirky northernness, and Pulpishly progressive social attitudes, have drawn such an audience that a mainstream breakthrough threatens. The songs’ subject matter, including wrestling and dogs, is endearingly left-field. Any indie band worth the name has to have an odd-sounding singer, but Wild Beasts have two. Hayden Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“Good things come to those who wait” sings Neneh Cherry on “Everything”, from her new album, and the 17 years since her last solo album certainly has been a long wait. She’s right though - Blank Project has good things in abundance.RocketNumberNine provide industrial beats and a backing that is sparse and frequently conveys paranoia and feelings of pressure and claustrophobia. This has been shaped further by producer Kieran Hebden, of Four Tet fame, into sounds that often suggest Massive Attack or ambient dubstepper Burial. At times Blank Project also recalls the arrangements of Neneh’s 2012 Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Howie B’s new album, Down with the Dawn, is his first solo record since 2010’s Good Morning Scalene but it sounds as if it could have been put out by him at any time since the release of his debut album, Music for Babies, in 1996. This is primarily because nothing meaningful has changed or developed in his sound since he first made his name as the producer of the musical accompaniment to many an after-club spliff session in the early nineties.In a normal world that would be the full story and the full review of Down with the Dawn. However, in 1997, he was fortunate enough to be co-opted by U2 Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's hard to countenance sometimes that there was an era where Marc Almond could have been a bona fide, chart-smashing pop star. His ability to parlay the archest of high camp and the most grotesque of low life into something digestible by genuine mass culture was, from the very beginning, quite uncanny.There was always a sulphurous whiff of something downright Luciferian about him, yet enough fragility to make the act seem all too real – an infinitely more convincing and intriguing character than more recent more self-conscious attempts at “transgressive” pop like the gallumphing vaudeville Read more ...
mark.kidel
Claude Sautet’s gripping noir thriller “Classe Tous Risques”, originally released in 1960, was an inspiration for Jean-Pierre Melville’s collection of peerless films set in the French underworld. Not surprising, as the script was written by the novelist and ex-cop José Giovanni, who also supplied the story for Melville’s classic “Le Deuxième Souffle”. As the excellent TV series "Braquo", written by another ex-policeman, Olivier Marchal, has shown, experience of a profession in which the boundaries between good and evil are blurred makes for convincing and emotionally engaging stories. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Perhaps the most effective way to sum up St Vincent - the self-titled fourth album from the one-woman avant garde powerhouse known to her friends as Annie Clark - is that it’s the closest she has come on record to the visceral, engrossing experience that is seeing her live. Clark’s albums before 2012’s collaboration with David Byrne were beautifully crafted things, in turns both gorgeous and surreal, but with a certain under-glass quality. St Vincent, by contrast, is an album that revels in its strangeness, interspersing some of its more curious stories with cobweb-blasting bursts of sheer Read more ...
Russ Coffey
One of the unwritten rules of pop music is that a surfeit of talent doesn’t necessarily lead to the most affecting tracks. The rhythmic complexity of Beck’s 2008 opus Modern Guilt, was, for instance, undeniably unemotional. And then there was his 2012 release, simply a book of sheet music called Song Reader. Morning Phase, however, is a different matter. As the hype and press releases rightly claim, it really does hark back to his most lovely work, 2002’s Sea Change.Like its predecessor this is not a record of exceptional moments, rather one of sustained ethereal meditation. Now, however, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The primary DVD extra with Captain Phillips is an hour-long behind-the-scenes featurette. Most heavyweight Hollywood films have these but they’re often backslap-fests with little true revelation. The Captain Phillips featurette bucks the trend with genuine insight into the film-making methods of Paul Greengrass.Captain Phillips is classic Greengrass, close in flavour to his shockingly powerful United 93. He combines earnest attention-to-detail coverage of the minutiae of extreme situations with a fat-free forward-driving narrative and enough glimpses of real humanity to keep the emotions Read more ...